History and Beauty Await the Best In The Game at Pebble Beach

The area has been famous for as long as man has roamed the American continent. No one is sure what the Ohlone Native Americans called what is now Pebble Beach, Carmel, Monterey and the other cliffside enclaves around one of the most spectacular stretches of coastline in the world – if they called it anything at all – but in 1542, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, who “discovered” the region for Spain, named it La Bahina de los Pinos, the Bay of the Pines.

Four centuries later, the nearby town of Monterey, about 10 minutes by car with no traffic from the Inn at Pebble Beach, was described by native son John Steinbeck in his novel “Cannery Row” as “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”

But travel round the bend, by car or on foot, due south past Jack’s Peak and Carmel-by-the-Sea, or the more scenic route through Spanish Bay and the Del Monte Forest and you will find Pebble Beach, a place that same man would have described as a painting, a whisper, an awakening, a fear; stone cliffs sculpted by the timeless sea with gnarled cypress tapped down by the ceaseless whispers of an Almighty God.

It seems amazing that in 1916 Samuel Finley Brown Morse – a Yale All-American football star as well as cousin and namesake of the man who invented the telegraph and Morse Code – found it challenging to make the area an attractive real-estate investment. Morse, who managed the assets of several railroad tycoons, formed Del Monte Properties. Despite a deep depression gripping the country, he found a financial backer, and bought 7,000 acres for $1.3 million on and around what is now known as the Monterey Peninsula.

It’s not a “links” course in the Scottish sense. The land was almost certainly once underwater when dinosaurs roamed the earth, but it has been home to towering pines and rich, land-borne wildlife since long before the Roman Empire. The course does, however, link the forest to the sea. And it does so in a spellbinding way that anyone who has played there finds hard to describe.

Walk from the 6th green to the 7th tee, for example, and you have trouble finding your breath. At only 100- to 140 yards downhill, the 7th is the most photographed, illustrated and artistically rendered landscape in the game. But until you see it in 3D, until you taste and smell the cold mist climbing up from the rocks, around your chin and into your mouth and nose, until you see the whipping flagstick and the contrast of white and green, sand and grass, you cannot fully appreciate the setting and all the senses it awakens.

Imagine how Harry “Light Horse” Cooper felt when he stepped onto the 7th tee in 1926 at the Monterey Peninsula Open, the first big event ever hosted by Pebble Beach. Cooper was the original best-player-never-to-win-a-major. He captured 31 PGA Tour events in his pre-World War II career. And he won the first event at Pebble Beach with a 5-over 293 total.

The first major at the course would come three years later when the U.S. Amateur was contested at Pebble. Bobby Jones was the big draw. Nobody beat Jones during that time. In a casual challenge match in 1929, Tommy Armour took one shot a side as a handicap against Jones despite Armour being the reigning U.S. Open champion. “That’s how damn good he is,” Armour said at the time. At that year’s U.S. Open, Jones sold in a local Calcutta (a gambling outlet where athletes are auctioned like racehorses) for $23,000, the largest sum ever bet on a golfer at that time.

But at Pebble Beach in the 1929 Amateur, despite finishing medalist in the 36-hole qualifier, Jones was upset in the opening match by a gritty 19-year-old from Omaha named Johnny Goodman. Rather than take a train back to Atlanta, Jones decided to stay in the Del Monte area for the rest of the week. He would sup at the eateries of Carmel-by-the-sea, take his traditional bourbon at the Pebble Links Lodge and enjoy watching golf rather than playing.

Marion Hollins had been instrumental in bringing Scottish architect Alister Mackenzie down to craft a masterpiece that would be called Cypress Point. Jones got an invitation to play a “sneak-peek” round before the course opened. Of course, word leaked out and 300 spectators showed up. When asked afterward to describe Cypress, Jones simply said, “Perfect.”

That day, Jones decided to hire Mackenzie for what would turn out to be the good doctor’s last design: Augusta National Golf Club.

The next major at Pebble Beach would be its first for women: the 1940 U.S. Women’s Amateur, won by Betty Jameson. It was Jameson’s second consecutive Amateur title. A decade later, Jameson would become one of the 13 original Founders of the LPGA. She would win 13 LPGA Tour titles and three majors in her career, passing away peacefully in Boynton Beach, Florida at age 89.

Most people have no idea that Pebble Beach hosted an LPGA Tour event. Three years after Bing Crosby invited a few of his friends – including Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, Bob Hope and Dann Kaye – out to Pebble Beach for what he termed “a clambake” but would become the most iconic pro-am in the game, the newly-formed LPGA, with the help of Marion Hollins, went to Pebble Beach for the 1950 Weathervane Transcontinental Women’s Open.

One of the original Founders, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, won that inaugural women’s professional event at Pebble Beach. It was only 36 holes and she recorded a two-day total of 158. The winner’s check was $750.

A year later another Founder, Patty Berg, won the Weathervane at Pebble Beach, which would turn out to be the last year the event was contested.

“I came there in 1972, and I believe I had a two-shot lead,” Nicklaus said, recalling the moment. “I had 219 yards and the pin was on the left. If you hit it right, you were certain to make four. The front bunker was ok, you could get up and down from there, but if you hit it left, obviously, you were in the ocean. The wind was in my face. I wasn’t sure I could get a 1-iron there. But I flushed it. Carried the bunker and hit the pin.”

The ball stopped three inches from the hole. Nicklaus birdied and went on to win his third U.S. Open by three shots over Bruce Crampton.

The second-most iconic shot in the game also occurred at the 17th, this time at Nicklaus’ expense. With Jack in the scorer’s tent of the 1982 U.S. Open, having fired a closing 69 to end the week at 4-under, Tom Watson, tied with Nicklaus at the time, hit his tee shot over the 17th green and into ankle-deep rough. With the flag in the traditional back location, bogey or double looked probable.

Watson grabbed his wedge and his caddie, Bruce Edwards, said, “Get it close.” Watson replied, “Get it close, hell. I’m going to hole it.”

He did just that, hitting the flagstick for birdie.

Watson ran onto the green, arms in the air. Then he pointed back to Edwards and said, “Told you.”

Nicklaus, hearing the roar from more than a quarter of a mile away, looked up with a steely gaze. He knew what had happened.

Watson birdied 18 and won by two.

Given the length of the rough and the fact that a tree was in front of him with the ocean looming large on the right, most people assumed that Tiger would pitch back to the fairway and hit his third shot on. NBC’s Roger Maltbie, who was walking with Tiger, had to stand directly over the ball just to see it. “Eighty percent of the field would wedge it back to the fairway,” Maltbie told viewers.

Not Tiger. Staring at a tree and a cliff face with the green 208 yards up a hill and well out of sight, Tiger thrashed a 7-iron through the thick grass. The ball found the front portion of the green some 15 feet from the hole.

Then, in one sentence, Maltbie summed up that U.S. Open at Pebble, and the next decade of men’s professional golf. “Guys, this is just not a fair fight.”

He did, indeed, as did Gary Woodland with an incredible up-and-down par on 17 from the front portion of the green. Woodland’s victory in 2019 came the same year that he met Amy Bockerstette, the LPGA*USGA Girls Golf member with Down’s Syndrome who captured the fascination of the golf world by making a par while playing the famous 16th hole with Woodland in Phoenix.

Bockerstette went on to become the first woman with Down’s Syndrome to play college golf. She and her parents also formed the I GOT THIS Foundation to support others with special needs.

That’s what you get from Pebble Beach. It’s a place filled with history, ancient and current, and beauty beyond most people’s wildest dreams.

Expect more of both as the greatest players in the world once again take on Pebble Beach Golf Links, this time in the 2023 U.S. Women’s Open.