Balboa Golf Course Then and Now (all holes posted)

[Robert Mercer Deruntz]

Balboa is a Golden Age design by Billy Bell from 1915, which predates his most famous collaborations with George Thomas.  This course is routed on fairly interesting terrain with a decent down into a valley and a move up the valley and then moving along the tops of 3 different ridges.  It is a short course at 6,281 yards from back tees, but does feature a couple of long holes and some of the short holes are significantly uphill.  Although far from being worthy of being called a great course, there are some truly great holes, and before being vandalized by some civil engineer posing as golf architects, it was certainly a very good course.  The most recent vandalism was moving the 17th green away from a very busy thoroughfare, and constructing a very generic blah green that has difficulty growing good grass.  For the past 40+ years it was in horrific condition, but a new irrigation system combined with receiving Torrey Pines machinery has the course in very good condition with the greens rolling as well as a few of the local private clubs.

Some views of the course





A view of the 1st hole and uphill 18th on the left from a tournament back in the course's glory days


A view down the 18th, with the drop shot 17th in the far background



The drop shot 17th green complex


16th green with the VA Hospital in the background

[Robert Mercer Deruntz]

The first hole is significantly downhill par 4 of 344 yards.  Though the green was rebuilt years ago, it was done very close to the original, and still has a good back to front and hillside to valley slope.  With speed, the front right pin can be brutally difficult.  You can see the civil engineer designed cart path project being installed, which actually is helping eliminate many useless trees.




The 2nd hole has been changed from a drivable par 4 to a poor par 5 that fails to utilize a natural green complex  Because it flows through the valley, this hole has potential.  Ungortunately, the civil engineers who "fixed" this part of the course did not have the imagination to see what could have been a great hole.



And the natural green site to the left of the current green



The 3rd green is the old par 5, and is a nothing hole
The 4th is potentially, a great hole.  This is an idiot savant outcome from a lawsuit that forced the moving of this hole away from the boundary fence.  Elimination of the trees and it becomes a very interesting uphill 375 yard par 4.  This hole might be up a good 75 feet.

The area to the right is where the majority of golfers end up, but it its being maintained as an afterthought. 



This is a  really neat long narrow green that came out well, probably because they were on such a tight budget that there was not enough money to spend time creating weird fake mounding




The 5th is a 296 yard par 4  that is uphill a good 50 to 60 feet.  Though drivable for the really long, the greenside pitch shots can be very difficult.  The trees on the right are useless, but probably only keep really errant shots from reaching the brush further up the hillside.






The 6th now has a new tee making it 225 yards.  The original tee from 1915 was around 210 yards, so this still plays near the original intent.  This green is 46 yards deep.



The 7th is a fantastic short but dramatically uphill par 5 of only 470 yards.  This is easily the most severe green on the course and blends in well with the hillside.  The tee shot involves some risk reward for getting a less uphill and significantly closer to the green second shot.
The hole becomes around 500 yards for a tee ball hit down the middle, which will probably careem a good 20 yards further left.




This chip shot broke at least 20 feet




 

[Lynn_Shackelford]

Rob
I haven't ever played Balboa.  I get it that the engineers don't know what they are doing and the course could be pretty good with one of today's better architects working with it.  Having said that, given the land that I see in the pictures and with the City of San Diego maintaining it, wouldn't this be a futile attempt at the end of they day?

[Dave McCollum]

We played Balboa last January and liked it.  Your comments explain a few odd features about the layout.  It was clear to us that the original holes were the best.  I was surprised it was in such good condition.  I was expecting a run down, heavily played muni even on weekday.  I thought it was a fun course with plenty of charm and quirk. Thanks for posting the profile.

My first introduction to public golf in SD other than Torrey.  The pay window was different.  Got lots of robberies?  Also the range, a sort of vertigo inducing teeing area where one hits off matts across an arroyo into a steeply uphill landing area.  All clubs go more or less the same distance.  OK for warming up, not much else.     

[David Stamm]

Thanks for the photos, Robert. I pretty much agree with all your comments.


6 is a pretty stout par 3 that usually plays into the wind. The target provides the most "uncomfortable" moment on the course and is reminiscent of Bell's usual long par 3 with a benched into the hillside green.

I like the land movement on the fw on 7. It's a pretty fun tee shot.

[Pete Lavallee]

Phil Mickelson and his Dad played hers Sat. No report on what they shot but we two players shoot 71 in the Men's Club Tournament.

[Robert Mercer Deruntz]

The 8th is a downhill par 4 of 340 yards.  The hole originally brought the road into play, but that has been changed due to the danger of errant balls causing auto accidents.  A lot of pine trees were planted on the right and the the green was moved away from the road.  With a better shaped green, this could be an interesting hole because of the steep falloff on the left into the previous hole's extreme left fairway.


The 9th had the green moved away from the road and is another example of civil engineering


The 10th is considered by many the best long par 4 in San Diego County. For years, the back tee was out of commission because they built a halfway house in the 1960's that got bombarded by errant tee shots.  With the new halfway house, a new back tee has been built making the hole 440 yards on a straight line.  Due to the fairway slant and slight dogleg, the hole really is closer to 460 yards.






The 11th is a mundane par 4 of 384 yards that used to have a diabolically deep greenside bunker that got neutered years ago.

 Using the topography well is the 392 yard 12th.  Anything flirting with the right edge of the fairway will end  up rolling halfway down the canyon slope.

In order to have the preferred angle of approach, the tee shot needed to flirt with the right side of the fairway.



The 13th is a downhill 165 yard par 3.  Anything landing in the brown area on the left will bound down into the ravine.



Due to the low sun. was unable to a get a good picture of the hole, but the 14 is a wonderful 525 yard par 5 where you hit over the beginning of a canyon at an angle.  Drives challenging trouble left get an opportunity to hit the green in two.  This is a dangerous risk, as you can see from how the green complex is situated.





The 15 has been completely changed.  It was a straight away 320 yard par 4 that once had a well contoured green.  It is still the same length, but a dogleg left that the long hitters easily carry the left trees and bombard the green.

This is the original green complex


The 16th has been changed numerous times, but is once again a par 5.  It is a sturdy 555 yards.  This hole has always had potential for greatness, but everytime some civil engineer has been involved, they have put in weird mounds and drainage basins; as though water cannot simply drain downwards into the canyons? 






Those depressions on the left are drainage basins

The original 16th green


The 17th is a drop shot par 3 of 198 yards.  The green was moved way left and forced the 18th to change.  To the right of the green is a very busy intersection of 4 lane roads.
The original green complex is still in existence



The 18th is now a uphill 100ft+ 316 yard par 4.  This green slopes from 3 to 6 degrees---it is severe!

[Pete Lavallee]

Robert,

Thanks for the photo tour. You are quite right that a major redesign was performed from 1993-95, with each nine taking a year to complete. The work was done by the firm of Halsey Daray; they do call themselves golf course architects and not civil engineers on their web site. Jack Daray Jr is the son, obviously of Jack Daray who came to San Diego from the Chicago area. He designed quite a few courses in the San Diego region including Coronado, Admiral Baker, Mira Mar and Castle Creek.

The City's emphasis on the redesign was to make the golf course safer as the routing goes counter clockwise putting the boundary on the right side of the holes. Golfers were slicing a lot of balls over the 30' chain link fence; remember golf balls curved a lot more in the 90's before the advent of the ProV1 and its cousins. Several parallel holes had safety issues most notably 1&2 and 10&11. The City decided to rebuild all 18 greens to USGA specs. However 4, 5 & 8 were built in house by the Balboa Park crew who at the time were Candice Combs and Bill Sinclair who were transferred to Torrey Pines just before the US Open. A new irrigation system was put out to the lowest bidder and they got their moneys worth on that with the entire system being rebuilt last year with money from the USGA as part of Torrey hosting the US Open.

The condition of the course was pretty rough prior to the redesign and the greens were hard to maintain as they drained poorly; you either got muddy or baked out and rock hard. As a member here since 1990 I think the new layout is far superior to what preceded it. The greens were redesigned in a sympathetic fashion to what was there before but surely not exact copies. The original ones in my estimation were not worth saving as they were pretty mundane. Now I don't know how interesting they were in 1938, which is when those were built but if there was any interest it was long gone by 1993. The collection of holes there now is pretty good and the conditioning has improved markedly in the last few years. I will agree that the greenside mounding, so popular with civil engineers in the 80's and 90's is not in keeping with the traditions of a Billy Bell layout.

Although the first course was built in 1915 it had dirt fairways and oiled sand greens. I would doubt that Billy Bell did that course, are you sure he was a practicing golf course architect before the 1920's? Billy Bell did do the first all grass course in the 1930's, that layout follows the general path of todays but had some major differences. On the first hole you teed of today's #1 tee to the right for a drop shot par 3; there's a photo of that in the snack bar. #8 and #9 were combined as a par 5 and the 18 hole played through the driving range with the green up by the road between the 9 and 18 hole courses. I believe the old layout was formalized in a WPA project in 1938; that's when the grading was done on the hillside for the current 18th hole. That layout was the one that Sam Snead shot his course record 60 on while serving in the Navy in 1945.

The only part of the course that I don't like is the current 4th hole. There was a boundary issue with a home owner and the City decided to relocate the green up on the hill to the left. They did not use the services of a professional architect and the grading had such a severe slope that it all washed away in the first rain storm. It had to be completely regraded. The front left portion of the green is unpinnable, balls will not come to a stop in that quadrant, they'll just roll back to the center line. So if there is a needed project it would be to fix that abortion. The City is installing a continuous concrete cart path right now which is going to turn out to be a serious intrusion on such a narrow layout. We'll see how that turns out.

[Robert Mercer Deruntz]

David Stamm is the resident Bell Sr. expert and would know all the particulars.  David Moriarty probably has some awesome information on WPA projects in regards to golf.  So he would probably be able to explain what they did with the 18th.

[David Stamm]

I'm far from the Bell expert. That designation belongs to the Emperor.

What I know about Balboa is this: the original Balboa course occupied land where the Zoo parking lot now sits. The present site was worked on by Bell, IIRC, beating out a bid by MacK and Egan. I'm typing from my phone, so I don't have access to my archives with dates and details.

It was my understanding that Forrest Richardson did the most recent work.


I'll see if I can dig up the scan I have of the original drawing plans for the relief 9 there. It's pretty much intact, as far as I can tell. And it was done by Bell, Sr.