My Three Ideal Courses

By Herbert Warren Wind
Photo By Stephen Szurlej April 1980

This article originally appeared in the April 1984 issue of Golf Digest.

Herbert Warren Wind, the distinguished golf historian and authority on course architecture, begins a two part series in which he discusses three famous American courses that play the best for both the tour star and the average golfer. In this article he looks eloquently at Cypress Point and Seminole. Next month he writes about Merion, site of the 1981 U.S. Open, and comes to several challenging conclusions about the state of course's design.

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During the 1950s and 1960s, when we were enjoying an unprecedented Age of Affluence in this country. We threw away rare opportunities in many directions. We most certainly did in golf. With the game booming and entrepreneurs of all stripes eager to build courses mat at some later date might be mentioned in the same breath with St. Andrews or Pine Valley, something went terribly wrong. A few very good courses emerged but, by and large, the typical product was what has now come to be known as the fake championship course. The name derives from the fact that the men promoting them invariably referred to their babies as -- "7,OOO-yard championship courses" -- 7,OOO yards was the magic number, the awesome length of many of the courses on which the United States and British Opens and other major competitions were held.

However, the similarity ended there. On these rushed-through, artificial courses, there was no golf to speak of. It was just slog, slog, slog. As often as not, the fairways ran in a straight line from tee to green and were as flat as landing strips. The greens resembled each other as closely as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The bunkering was repetitious, and the water hazards bore no relationship to the terrain. The star of the show, once the bulldozer operator had departed, was the publicity man who often succeeded in selling gullible golfers on the idea that because they were playing a course almost as long as Carnoustie or Oakland Hills, they were dealing with the same challenges that confronted Hogan and Snead, Palmer and Nicklaus.

Today when the golf ball can be hit huge distances -- perhaps too far -- a course has to be fairly long to test the top players. Nevertheless, sheer length does not a superior golf course make. What does, essentially, is the character and the shotmaking values of the holes, and they are the result of good, sound design. The men who know golf have long understood this. For this reason, if you ask them what are the best courses in the United States, in their top half dozen they will usually include three relatively short courses: Cypress Point, Seminole and Merion. Cypress Point measures a little under 6,500 yards from the back tees, as does Merion. Seminole is a bit longer-about 6,500 yards from the standard tees but close to 6,800 from the backs. [Editor's note: In 1979, Cypress Point joined Seminole and Merion in the top 10 in Golf Digest's ranking of America's 100 Greatest Courses.]

The point is this: The average club golfer can play these three courses with enjoyment and with no sense of being overpowered, yet at one and the same time a professional or a crack amateur has to summon his best shots to equal par for his round. Since these three courses represent golf at its finest and most stimulating, it seems to me that by studying them attentively we can all learn-in this period when lengthy courses still tend to be overvalued-what golf and golf architecture are all about.

CYPRESS POINT
Let us begin with Cypress Point. Like Merion and Seminole, it has a special quality about it. To savor this it is necessary to know something of its genesis. Cypress Point occupies one of the westernmost projections of the Monterey Peninsula, which thrusts itself into the Pacific about 125 miles south of San Francisco. For years the bulk of the peninsula's acreage was owned by the Del Monte Properties Company (today, of course, it is owned by 20th Century Fox), which first made the area synonymous with superb golf when it built the Pebble Beach course in 1918-19.

In the mid-1920s Marion Hollins (the United States Women's Amateur champion in 1921, who had gone to work selling real estate for Del Monte Properties), Byington Ford (at one time the mayor of the neighboring village of Carmel), and Roger Lapham (a fourth-generation shipping magnate and a part-time administrator for the Federal government who is probably best remembered as an outstanding mayor of San Francisco in the 1940s) formed a syndicate that purchased 170 acres from Del Monte Properties for $150,000. The land, about four miles from Pebble Beach along the Seventeen Mile Drive, was worth much more, to be sure, but the company thought that another course would be a good thing for the duchy, and it liked the fact that many of the people involved came from prominent San Francisco families. Some of them would surely want to build homes near their club.

Seth Raynor, the golf course architect hired by the syndicate, died shortly after he had begun work on the project, and Marion Hollins selected Alister Mackenzie to succeed him. At that time Mackenzie, a Scot who had been a practicing physician before changing professions, was in the process of acquiring an international reputation. He came to California early in 1926 on his way back from Australia where, among his other commissions, he designed Royal Melbourne, one of the world's great courses. Mackenzie, you might say, was at this moment at the top of his game. (Augusta National, still a few years to come, would be his next big assignment.) From the outset Mackenzie recognized that the land he would be working with at Cypress Point was an extraordinary cornucopia of many kinds of natural beauty, and he did a masterly job of utilizing it with sensibility, imagination and audacity.