The thing to know about Pebble Beach Golf Links, before any conversation about the holes or the architects or the championships, is that the course is public. Anybody can walk on. The green fee is the green fee of an expensive private club, and the morning starting times go out months in advance, but the booking page does not ask whether the player is a member of anywhere. The course, on the Monterey peninsula where the 17-Mile Drive bends through the cypress and the Pacific takes the cliff in long slow bites, sits on the public side of a line most of the great courses in the world sit on the wrong side of. The player who walks the first tee at Pebble Beach with a borrowed driver and a half-set of irons is walking the same ground the 1972 US Open was won on, the 2000 US Open was destroyed on, and the 2010 US Open was held on. The course does not change between visits. The wind does. The handful of holes on the cliff edge do. The hole map does not.
The course Jack Neville drew
Pebble Beach was designed by Jack Neville, a four-time California amateur champion who had never designed a course before, and Douglas Grant, his fellow amateur, in 1916. Neville drew the routing on a piece of paper that no longer exists in any reliable photograph, and the routing he drew is the routing the course still uses. The shape of the holes from the tee onward has been refined four or five times since by the kind of architects you would expect, including HS Colt for some of the early modifications and the Open Doctor Rees Jones for the tournament-era work, but the routing is Neville’s. The course opened in February of 1919. The first US Open it hosted was in 1972, Jack Nicklaus winning at three over par on a course playing into the kind of June fog the peninsula generates as a matter of course.
The routing, more than the bunkering or the green complexes, is the reason the course is the course it is. The opening five holes are inland. The sixth tee starts the climb out toward the water. The seventh is the famous downhill par three. The eighth, ninth and tenth are the three par fours on the cliff that produce more single-hole anecdotes than any other stretch of public golf in the world. The eleventh through the sixteenth turn back inland. The seventeenth comes back to the water. The eighteenth, a long par five that bends along the curve of Stillwater Cove, finishes against the broadcast tower the AT&T Pro-Am has used since the days when Bing Crosby still ran the event. The sequence is the sequence the player remembers. It is not the sequence the scorecard would have produced if a more cautious architect had drawn it.
The greens, which are smaller than the cameras suggest
The first thing the player who has played Pebble Beach will say to the player who has not is that the greens are smaller than they look on the broadcast. The number, on the architects’ figures, is an average of about 3,500 square feet, which is around half the size of a typical PGA Tour green and roughly a third the size of the greens at Augusta National. The flag, on the average approach shot, is sitting on a putting surface the size of the green at the local muni’s chipping range. The miss, in any direction, is severe. The bunkering around the greens is small and deep. The chip from the rough on the wrong side is, on the firmness levels the course tends to produce by Saturday of a tournament week, the most difficult chip in tournament golf.
The number that always comes up, the one Tour caddies repeat to amateurs at the Pro-Am, is that the player must hit the iron approach to the correct side of the green. The pin sheet at Pebble Beach is not the pin sheet at most American courses, where the lateral miss is forgiven and the long-short axis is the one that matters. At Pebble Beach, the lateral miss is the killer. The greens fall away on the sides. The chip back across the green, on the average pin, is the chip onto a green that runs away from the player. The number of two-putts on the wrong-side approach, in the average professional round, sits at around fifty per cent. The number on a hole like the seventh, with the green angled across the wind, drops further.
The seventh, the eighth, and the eighteenth
The three holes the broadcast spends the most time on are the seventh, the eighth, and the eighteenth, and the three are different in almost every way. The seventh is the shortest par three in major championship golf at around a hundred yards, downhill, with a green the size of a kitchen and the Pacific running directly into the face of the player. The wind, on the average afternoon, turns the wedge into a five-iron. The 2000 US Open had Tiger Woods playing it with an eight-iron one day and a sand wedge the next. The hole has produced more aces in major championships than any other par three of its length in the modern era.
The eighth is the par four whose second shot, played across the cleft of Carmel Bay, is the most photographed second shot in golf. The cliff drops two hundred feet to the rocks below. The carry from the tee shot’s natural landing area is around two hundred yards. The carry is uphill. The green sits on the far side, on a small plateau, with the bunker short and the cliff behind. Nicklaus called the eight at Pebble Beach the greatest second shot in golf. The shot, when the player is on it, plays exactly that way.
The eighteenth is the par five whose tee shot must hug the cliff on the left in order to leave a second from a place that has any chance of holding the green. The hole has decided more US Opens at Pebble Beach than any other hole in the rotation. Watson’s tee shot in 1982 found the centre of the fairway. Kite’s in 1992 sailed the trees. Graeme McDowell’s in 2010 found the rough but held the fairway. Gary Woodland’s in 2019 was the tee shot that won him a major. The hole is the hole the camera lingers on because it is the hole the championship has tended to come down to.
What playing it actually feels like
The thing about playing Pebble Beach as an amateur, on the green fee and the early tee time and the borrowed driver, is that the course does not slow down for the visitor. The starter does not adjust the pin sheet. The greens roll at the speed they roll at. The wind does what the wind does. The eight-thousand-five-hundred yard course that the Tour plays on a Sunday plays around six-five for the visitor with the regular tee, and the layout is the same. The 1919 architecture, on its hundred and seventh year, is still doing the thing it was drawn to do. The course holds up to a major. It also holds up to a foursome of mid-handicappers from the Bay Area on a Friday morning.
The number on the card by the end, for the amateur who has played the course at any tee, tends to be three or four shots higher than the player would have produced at home. The reasons are the greens, the wind, the chip from the wrong side, and the half-shot the player gives away on each of the cliff holes by aiming a fraction further from the water than the architecture wants. The player will not regret any of those shots. The course is the course. The walk, on the day’s seventh fairway, with the Pacific running below and the green sitting on the slope on the far side, is the walk that golf was invented to produce.