What You Might Not Know About Pebble Beach

Championship golf courses aren't born that way, they evolve. Every major venue was a minor in the beginning, and each suffers through growing pains. Still, the evolution of Pebble Beach Golf Links has been messier than most, mainly because it has been incessantly poked and prodded by well-meaning amateurs, professionals, architects, engineers, artists and committees, committees, committees. Ultimately it turned out great, of course, and June 17-20 Pebble will be the site of its fifth U.S. Open (to go with four U.S. Amateurs).

But for a lot of years, Pebble Beach, ranked No. 6 on Golf Digest's latest list of America's 100 Greatest Golf Courses, looked a lot more like a platypus than a barracuda. Therein lies a story -- many stories, actually -- on how a pile of rocks was transformed, by accident and by intent, into the most breathtaking, thrilling and fearsome intersection of golf and shoreline in the universe.

The Spot Where Tom Watson Chipped In Is No Longer There

Jack nicklaus, the victim of Watson's heroics, later called it "one of the great shots in the history of the game." Watson was tied with Nicklaus for the lead in the final round of the 1982 U.S. Open when his tee shot at the par-3 17th went left and landed in deep rough between the green and the sea. With the ball above the hole, it looked like an extremely difficult up-and-down. But after Watson's caddie, Bruce Edwards, told him to knock it close, Watson famously responded, "Close? Hell, I'm going to sink it."

Watson's chip hit the flagstick and dropped for a birdie, and he followed with another birdie at the par-5 18th for a two-stroke victory. Ten years later, Nicklaus told us that losing to Watson's chip-in was the biggest disappointment of his Open career: "If it didn't hit," Nicklaus said, "the ball was going eight or 10 feet by."

A new pot bunker tightens the fairway on the 331-yard fourth hole.

The sea wall was quickly patched and the 17th green and surrounds were soon backfilled and re-sodded, although the precise elevation of Watson's spot could not be duplicated. Not until a new seawall was constructed in 1997 was the back tee box of the 18th re-established.

History Can't Be Repeated

Not long after Watson's chip-in, he organized a group that tried to replicate the shot.

It happened prior to the 1983 Bing Crosby National Pro-Am. Watson was having dinner at the Lodge with friends, including former USGA president Frank (Sandy) Tatum, and they were later joined by cartoonist Hank Ketcham, creator of the "Dennis the Menace" cartoon character. After a bottle or two of champagne, Watson blurted, "Hey, let's go play the shot!" He left the dining room, then returned, as Tatum says, with three balls and the club used to perform the deed. It didn't matter that it was after 10:30 at night. Six men traipsed out to the 17th green.

After some fussing about the exact location -- "Everyone had an opinion, and Tom's was the one listened to the least," Tatum recalled -- they placed a ball to represent the hole, then retreated to the rough and took turns trying to "hole it."

As Nicklaus might have predicted, no one came close. Watson, according to informed sources, finished only third or fourth in the competition.

Tatum's Tinkering Nearly Cost His Buddy (Watson) That '82 Open

Prior to pebble's first Open, in 1972, Tatum headed a committee that revamped the course. When the Open returned in 1982, Tatum urged officials to implement a couple of renovations that didn't get done 10 years before. One was the deepening of a fairway bunker on the right side of the par-4 16th. He got it rebuilt, complete with a three-foot vertical front wall of stacked sod. In the final round, his good friend Watson, leading Nicklaus by one with three to play, drove into that bunker, right up against that face. Watson had to pitch out sideways and bogeyed the hole to drop into a share of the lead before his miraculous finish.

If Tatum, who was in the gallery on 16 when Watson drove into the bunker, felt any remorse over its severity, he didn't express it. Instead, he turned to friends and said, "That's what this bunker was meant to do."

The Par-5 18th Was An Afterthought

When pebble Beach opened in 1919, its 18th hole was a short, straight par 4. In defense of the original designers, Jack Neville and Douglas Grant, it was the best they could do. Their topographic map shows they positioned the green just in front of a deep ravine, with the Pacific on the left and a 75-cent toll road called 17 Mile Drive, soon relocated, close on the right. It wasn't their fault the green was only 325 yards from the tee. They'd proposed an ocean-side tee box to stretch the hole to 379 yards, but it wasn't built. Funds were limited.

In April 1920, Pebble's owner, Samuel Finley Brown Morse, invited British golf architect W. Herbert Fowler to inspect Pebble Beach. Sure enough, Fowler suggested an ocean-side tee for 18, and this time, Morse had it built.

In October 1921, stung by the criticism of the California Golf Association that Pebble still had "a woefully poor finishing hole," Morse brought Fowler back. This time Fowler proposed filling in the ravine, building a sea wall and backfilling a new green location some 170 yards farther up the shoreline, turning the hole into a boomerang-shape par 5.

Thus was created what many consider the finest finishing hole in golf -- certainly the most photogenic. Over the years, bunkers have been added and shifted, trees removed and transplanted, and the tee box and sea walls reconstructed from bedrock up, but the 18th remains as Fowler suggested 90 years ago. (The 18th will play at 543 yards for this year's Open.)

By the way, photos show that Fowler also ran a creek through a pipe buried in a smaller ravine to create the base for his new green. The remainder of that ravine was filled in during the 1950s. If, some day, Pebble's 18th green suddenly collapses into a trench, it won't be because of an earthquake. It will be because that buried culvert -- made of wood, rock or concrete? -- finally gave way.

Taking it all in: A full dose of Pebble Beach.

S.F.B. Morse Was A Tightwad

Morse was only 30 when he began disposing of the heavily taxed property on the Monterey Peninsula. At first he started selling the land off as housing lots, but then he changed his mind. He was convinced he could build and maintain 18 holes on the cheap. The place for the course was ocean frontage called Pebble Beach.

Given the go-ahead, he solicited routings from six designers (most of whose names, sadly, are long forgotten). He ended up choosing Neville and Grant, two top golfers who worked for free to preserve their amateur status. (In those days, the USGA decreed that all architects were pros.)

Among Morse's money-saving ideas were the use of sheep to clip the grass (they damaged greens and soon ended up on the menu) and the use of pelican droppings scraped from rocks as fertilizer (which killed the grass). He had to be persuaded to hire a real superintendent.

Neville and Grant produced a mixed bag. Pebble opened with mostly square greens and bunkers shaped like cigars and crescents. The course measured barely 6,000 yards.

The routing was basically as it exists today, with several notable exceptions. The ninth was a short par 4, the 10th a sharp-dogleg par 5 over a corner of the Pacific coast; today they're par 4s totaling 1,000 yards. The par-4 16th was just 277 yards to a green short of a deep ravine; now it plays at 403 yards over the ravine.

Neville and Grant got some key decisions right. They chose the spot for the short, downhill seventh -- 109 yards for this year's Open -- with its green on a point surrounded by Carmel Bay. Architect Pete Dye has said that if he'd been walking the property before the routing was done, he probably would have walked right by the seventh hole. Nicklaus agrees. "I probably would have walked right by it, too," Jack says, "because it wouldn't look like there's room enough for a hole."