I'm going to be in Montana the next three days with my wife (yay!) and I'm not likely to look in here during that time, so I thought this would be a good place to include a VERY little-known fact about Pacific Dunes.
In the routing that Mike Keiser approved in November 1999, the fourth, fifth and sixth holes were all different than they are today. I decided to make the change between November and January.
Number four would originally have been a short par-3 from today's back tee to a green just across the chasm, by the ladies' tee.
Number five would have been a short par 4 with the tee set back and to the left of the green just described, and its green in the same place as today.
Number six would have taken off from near #5 tee, to its current green site, playing about 390 yards on the dogleg. The ground of the current fifth would not have been used.
All of this looked pretty good out in the walk-through, but when I came back home to draw it on the map [I hadn't drawn this version before we walked it, because I only came up with it the night before], it just didn't fit well. With the tailwind, the fourth would just have been an exercise in hitting a short iron and watching it bounce to the back of the green, and the fifth would have been almost driveable. Most of all, though, I hated the thought of not using the ground where #5 sits today ... it was a beautiful little valley of dune grass with no gorse in sight, which made it a rare oasis before the gorse fire.
The other reason that we had avoided that area was that Mr. Keiser was uncomfortable with hole #6 as a very short par-4 of around 290 yards. He just didn't see what was going to make it an exciting hole -- to his defense, it was buried in gorse and you couldn't see much of it other than the green site. I had drawn that hole on my original plan before walking the site -- it's one of four which wound up making the final cut, along with #11 and #16 and the green site for #10, which I'll explain next week. But it almost didn't make it, until I realized that the routing as approved had some flaws.
I did send Mike the two versions of the routing and told him I liked the current version better, but he was uncertain, since he had walked it the other way. So, when Jim Urbina and I got out there in early January to start construction, we discussed the situation, and we agreed that Mike would never see the merits of #5 in the dunegrass, unless we went ahead and showed him what it could be. So ... the first hole we built at Pacific Dunes was the one Mike hadn't approved.
We figured we could always erase our work if Mike didn't like it. When he came out two weeks into construction, he liked it, and we were off to the races.
We solved Mike's concerns on #6 by building the tee a little farther back than I had originally drawn, in a crowded triangle between 5 and 9.
That's the kind of stuff you'll find in my book if it ever gets to print.