Paradise Lost

Cypress Point Club, gone from the Pebble Beach rota since Shoal Creek, retains its beauty -- and insular ways

Beast within a beauty: The famous 16th hole (center) is 218 yards over a chasm of ocean.

By John Sterge

Photos By Joann Dost

February 17, 2005

The dying last wish is a common tactic (and often a successful one) for those who consider a round at Cypress Point Club the final piece to completing a life. It speaks to Cypress Point's inherent majesty as a glimpse of heaven on earth -- no small consideration for those who have only 18 holes left -- but also to its mystery. Imagine, access requiring a terminal illness.

Or a tour card. The healthy are dying to play there, too, including PGA Tour players, whose tournament access ended after 44 years when the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am and the club severed ties in 1990 over the latter's absence of black members. Among the tour pros playing Cypress Point last week was Phil Mickelson, who considers his annual outing there on the eve of the AT&T among the best days of the year.

Everyone is required to play with a member, incidentally, even tour pros (investment brokerage magnate Charles Schwab is Mickelson's host), maybe as a hedge against their opening the wrong closet. Skeletons, at least, might begin to explain why the club is so famously and cryptically private, even as 17-Mile Drive in Pebble Beach bisects it.

An old newspaper clipping in a file in the California History Room at the Monterey Public Library notes a "[Cypress Point] member's cute wife" and her "flagrant flirtation with an outsider. Of course, it's a good idea not to say a word about any of this. The boys, as you know, like everything to be a deep secret."

They still do (though in fairness, Cypress' membership rolls have always included boys and girls). None of them is likely to confirm the fact Microsoft founder Bill Gates played there in a member-guest last year, piquing his interest in joining the club and its in accommodating him.

To suddenly open up would represent a change of protocol, and, well, the only change one is likely to encounter at Cypress Point is when marking a ball on a green. This is the beauty of the place, notwithstanding the dramatic land and seascapes that prompted long-time member and former USGA president Sandy Tatum to declare it the Sistine Chapel of golf. Time has stopped there.

Golfers are still afoot and are trailed by caddies bent beneath the weight of a bag, sometimes two. The artistic bunkering has been carefully restored to reflect architect Alister Mackenzie's original intent. Even erosion, nature's tool that formed the jagged edges providing Cypress Point's coastal holes their character, is forbidden to enact change. Faux rock blends seamlessly with natural stone to form a seawall capable of withstanding the pounding surf. And the onset of time.

Accordingly, a photo album on the large old provincial table that has stood as the centerpiece of the sitting room since the clubhouse was completed in 1930 does not chronicle the passage of time. Instead, it is there to bear witness to how virtually nothing has changed. The album features old photos juxtaposed with newer ones taken from the same angles.

Little would be gained by lengthening the 135-yard, par-3 15th

Even much of the club's lore is antique, as though nothing notable has occurred there in decades. In July 1960, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy nearly made a hole-in-one at Cypress Point's 15th hole, to his horror. President Eisenhower had often been criticized for his golf addiction, and Kennedy was concerned that had his 7-iron shot gone in the hole, "in less than an hour the word would be out to the nation that another golfer was trying to get into the White House."

Then there was the time when Babe Didrikson Zaharias was goaded into a $10,000 wager that she couldn't drive it over the distant tree in the first fairway, a 240-yard carry from a spot (now bricked over) directly in front of the clubhouse.She won. And what about the year (1953) that the wind blew so hard during the Crosby that Porky Oliver hit six straight into the ocean and required 16 strokes to complete the par-3 16th hole?

The club also has resisted the temptation of lengthening the course to accommodate the contemporary power game, even though "you could put a lot of length into it," Tatum says. Should it hold, it is a stance likely to preclude tour golf from ever returning to Cypress Point, which is No. 4 on Golf Digest's America's 100 Greatest ranking. The yardage from the back tees is listed as 6,509 yards, only three yards longer than its published distance in 1947, the first year the course was in the Bing Crosby Pro-Am rotation.