California Golf Club of San Francisco
CA, USA

Green Keeper: Thomas Bastis

When is the best a course has ever been?

In the case of many California courses built during the Golden Age, the answer is frequently withinits first decade. Some of the greatest designs ever seen in the United States- Lakeside, Bel-Air, and Los Angeles – were radically changed for the worse prior to World War II. Other designs like Pasatiempo were compromised by the subsequent residential component that was built too close to the playing corridors. Only a few clubs like the Valley Club of Montecito have retained and/or returnedthe best playing attributesofthe course’soriginal design.

Yet, there is one club that has returned the best Golden Age design featuresto its course and taken full advantage of thefinest aspects of modern golf architecture and agronomy. The result is a startling transformation that makes the California Golf Club of San Francisco arguably one of the golf-rich state’s five finest courses for the first time in its history.

Originallyincorporated in 1918, the club moved from its Inglesidelocation to its presentsite in 1924.Referred to as the Baden property after Baden Farms, the new site was well removed from what then constituted the city of San Francisco. The club hired theScot Willie Locke to do the original routing andthe opportunity presented tohim was excellent as the Baden propertymeasuredover550 acres. The final site that Locke chose was full of interesting land forms and possessedviewsof Mount Diablo (the tee shots and/or approaches at the sixth, eleventh, fourteenth, and seventeenth line up on it), Mount Tamalpais, San Bruno Mountain, and the San Francisco Bay to the east.

Though Lockeis not a familiar name today, he is credited with designing nearby Lake Merced as well as Rosedale Golf Club in one of Toronto, Canada’s poshest suburbs.Sean Tully,the well respected historian and devoted chronicler of Alister MacKenzie’s work, believes that Locke’s visit to Pine Valley was directly responsible for the 200 plusbunkers with which Lake Merced originally opened. Tully also hypothesizes that Locke’s fallout with the California Golf Club stemmed fromhis unflinching desire to build small greens.

Whatever the reason, the club elected to replace Locke with A. (Arthur) Vernon Macan, an Irishman who lost part of his leg in World War I,when construction started in 1924.Macan eventually madequite aname for himself throughout the pacific northwestbut his disdain for travelmeant he never achievedthe samestanding of his more famous Golden Age contemporaries. Though it is unclear if Macan made any routing changes here, he deserves full credit forthe original greens, tees, and bunkering and was thus creditedas the architectof the course when it opened.Uniformly favorablereviews followed, in part because it was fully mature when play commenced asgrow-in occurred in both 1925 and 1926 as the Club mandated zero playuntil the clubhouse wascompleted in 1926.

Macan’s greenside bunkering and green contours were appealingly bold. However, hisfairway bunkering lacked the same inspiration and popular conjecture is that Macan planned to add fairway bunkers after play had commenced. Indeed, this concept of studying play and then adding bunkers based on where divots were was not uncommon back in the 1920s. It truly makes sense, which is to say why not put bunkers directly where they influence play (i.e. where divots are) as opposed to on the sides of holes where they frequently only snare already bad shots. However, in 1927 when it came time to address the fairway bunkers, the club elected to go with a different architect, again for reasons unknown.

Happily though,it was Alister MacKenzie, from the design firm of MacKenzie& Hunter. We all know the fame that MacKenzie later achieved by virtue of such world class designs as the West Course at Royal Melbourne, Augusta National, Crystal Downs, and Cypress Point. Timing-wise though, this was only his second project in North America (the Meadow Club one hour’s drive to the north was his first), so he was yet to become the name in golf course architecture.As an aside,it is worth noting that the American Golf Course Construction Company that MacKenzie formed and used here was the same group that worked on Cypress Point the following year.

His assignment at the California Golf Club wasto redesign all the bunkering and rebuild at least two of the greens (the tenth and eighteenth). However, to be perfectly clear, he did not change any of the playing corridors and the photographs prior tohisarrival show the coursewas already avery good one.

Having said that, MacKenzie’sflair for building bunkers was immense and after his work was complete, the California Golf Club’s reputation was cemented as one ofthe best in the state and it began to host important events like the California State Open. Unfortunately, world events can always push sports to the side and such of course was the case with the Great Depression and World War II.

Eventually, better times returned and by the mid-1960s, the club once again wanted to make sure that they offered the bestcourse possible and the day’s biggest name in golf architecture, Robert Trent Jones Sr., was brought in. His work is discussed below thoughlittle ofit remains today, and the club proudly hosted the United States Senior Amateur in 1970.

In 2005, the club boarddecided to address the nematode problem that was afflicting thegreens just as it was at other leading clubs in northern California. Given that the greens needed to be rebuilt and thus the course would be closed, the club board mulled over what else needed attention. Certainly, the course didn’t drain particularly well in the winter. Also, the bunkers in generalhad becometired and there were several competing styles as no one would ever confuse a Jones bunker for a MacKenzie one.

Sensing this was a one-time unique opportunity to make major improvements to the course, the club solicited proposals and fourteen different architectsresponded. One of the fourteen, Phillips Design, didn’t even submit a plan but rather gave them a sense of the opportunity thatit saw by looking at the land where the new seventh hole now sits.This bold vision of Kyle Phillips impressed the board and ultimately it led to his being hired.

As we will see below, his proposal differed in substantialways from the other proposals/architects that the club considered. In particular, the front nine had seen several events conspire against it since the days of MacKenzie and Macan. To bring the front nine up to a similar quality as the back, Phillips’s plan needed to be dramatic and indeed it was.Its two key elements were for the practice area to be relocated as well asforfive (!) entirelynew holes to becreated. To Phillips’s everlasting credit, three of the new holes (the third, seventh and eighth) are among the best on the course and as a result, the members now have an active debate as to which of the nines is better.

Just as important,Phillips knew when to leave well enough alone. No outside events had materially impaired the back nine as they had the front. Thus, there was a sense that the club possessed a relatively untouched nine thatfeatured MacKenzie’s own indelible stamp. Armed with a 1938 aerial, Phillips focused on realizing as much of MacKenzie’s playing spirit as possible on the back. In doing so, two small man-made ponds that had been added by the club in the early 1990s were mercifully removed and the fifteenth green was slid to the right by thirty-five yards.

When Phillips was done, the two nines seamlessly melded together under one design style consistent with the Golden Age. However, just as crucial to the project’s overwhelming visual success was what went on underground.Without doubt, the foundation of this project commenced six feet under whenall the drainage wasreplaced. In addition, there was an amendment of sandbrought in with four to six inches spreadacross all the playing surfaces. The poa anna grasses were replaced by bent with afescuemix inthe fairways and native fescues were allowed to grow in the rough.

The result of the above and below ground work is a sequence of holes that now play better than at any point in theirhistory, as we see below.

Holes to Note

Please note: The hole yardages beloware from markers that measure slightly over 6,800 yards. There is another set farther back that stretch the course to over 7,200 yards, from where a professional tournament could be played. The name of the back tees is Venturi, in homage to the United States Open champion who joined the club in 1949 through the help of his patron Eddie Lowery. Lowerywas the club president in 1947, and despite a very rich life, he will always best be known for being Francis Ouimet’s ‘little caddie’ in the famous play offwith Harry Vardon and Ted Ray for the 1913 United States Open Championship at The Country Club.In 2006, Venturi kindlyassisted the board by speaking in favor of Phillips’s plan and hetold the members at a dinner meeting with Phillips, ‘You get one chance in a lifetime to do this,
and you don’t get a mulligan.’

First hole, 510 yards; Though there was plenty of gnashing of the teeth in regard to moving thepractice areaaway from the clubhouse/first tee, the playing characteristics of this hole help to soften the blow. Namely, this is a reachable par five, which allows the club golfer to ease into the round without immediate severe shotmaking requirements. Consistent with a Golden Age design, there is a feeling of spaciousness off the tee with the challenge stiffening at the green.

Second hole & third holes, 410 & 415 yards, respectively; The surest way to improve a course through either a restoration or renovation is by improvingits worst hole(s). Good to great holes have a way of taking care of themselves but outright poor holes lower how a course/club is perceived in a more drastic manner than good holes do in elevating it. Here, time had been cruel to these two holes with the now busyWestboroughAvenue having replaced the San Bruno Creek as the north boundaryto the club’s property.Trent Jones did the course no favors when he crammed the second holebetweenahillside and this busy road in 1963 for the sake ofkeepingthe existingpractice area in tact. Phillips displayed his big picture prowess when he envisaged moving the range further into the interior of the club’s property and creatinga new second and third holes. Asking forthe range to be moved away from the clubhouse was a divisive request and it could have cost him the project. To his credit, Phillips stuck to his belief and was unwavering that the range be moved as it was truly in the course’s best interest. To the club board’s credit, they weathered the criticism from some members and eventually agreed torelocate the range six hundred yards away. This created the room for the new second with its excellent green andthe striking new downhill third. Previously, the third hole was a Trent Jones par three that played over a man-made lake that reeked of something out of the 1960s.Phillips’s third with its Golden Age overtones is a remarkable improvement.

Fifth hole, 325 yards; Short par fours have always been used by skilled architects as a means of transporting a golfer uphill without allowing him to become bored or discouraged. Examples include Macdonald’s second hole at Sleepy Hollow as well as his fourth at Mid-Ocean, Donald Ross’s seventeenth at Essex County, and Coore & Crenshaw’s eighth at Colorado Golf Club. Modern equipment leaves the golfer with many options on how to play this hole. A driver can leave a mere flip but as can be expected to an uphill green on a Golden Age course, the green features a ferocious amount of back to front slope. The wise golfer may opt for a shorter club off the tee for the sake of being able to control a full wedge in.

Sixth hole,180 yards; The first of a superlative set of one-shot holes, the pushed up sixth green complex takes maximum advantage of its stellar location. Undoubtedly, C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor would have taken this opportunity to build an Eden, given the long views in the background. However, as the last hole just featured a steep back to front fall in the putting surface, Macan went in the other direction, which is to say that a green was built that falls slightly away toward the back left. Especially as this hole playswith the prevailing wind, the challenge is to have one’s tee ball avoid the deep front greenside bunkers while not rolling over and downits tightly mown back slope.

Seventh hole, 405 yards; In trying to find criticism of the course as it is now played, there is little to grasp onto. Perhaps the simplest one is that four of the playing corridors on the back nine roughly parallel each other, which hints at a lack of playing angles (in fact the bunkering schemes and how holes thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and seventeen fall across the land snuff out such concern). Still, it is a welcome addition to the overall variety of the course to find this newly created Cape hole by Phillips. In fact, the hole seems such a natural today, one wonders why none of the previous architects pursued it. The reason is actually simple: a fair amount of earthmoving had to occur to make the fairway suitable for golf and that was beyond what the Golden Age architects could have undertaken given the equipment/budget at their disposal. Though none of the other architects that the club interviewed had the vision of creating a hole here,the new seventhandthe timelessstrategic questions that it posesmake it feel like it absolutely belongs on this Golden Age course. Though only Phillips possessedthemental image required to createit, hindsight shows thatnot incorporating thedeep hollowwhichthe fairwaybends aroundwould have been a great pity.

Eighth hole, 215 yards; While the big picture thinking on this project was outstanding, so toowas the detail work. With the advent of the seventh hole, the possibility was created for a long one shotter to play from the shoulder of the hillside to a green well below. Everything about the hole isbig including the long views out to San Bruno Mountain. The fun though ishad in a three foot mound that Phillips and histalented shapers built ten yards shy of the green that can be used to help propel balls well onto the deep putting surface. His shapers went to painstaking efforts to ensure thatthe moundplays just right and this is but one example whereby without their in-the-dirt efforts, Phillips’s vision for the California Golf Club would not have been fully realized.

Ninth hole, 400 yards; This classic dogleg was made possible only by Locke’s willingness to have the golfer climb a steep hill with his tee ball. Arguably the best two shotter on the course, it is therefore hard to believe that few modern architects would share his same conviction in routing a hole up and over such a steep embankment. Too many modern architects wouldeither not route the hole in such a manner or even if they did, they would make some sort of saddle cut into the hillside to lessen its stern appearance. Either way, course and hole would suffer.

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