San SimeonI have to begin by saying that as an “I live in paradise” blowhard, I was very much humbled and awed by my trip down the California coast. Monterey Peninsula was baseline average scenery, the Pacific Coast Highway was like flying a helicopter over Hawaii, and throwaway segments such as Santa Maria to Santa Barbara (part foothills, part desert, part cattle farm) or the entrance to Simi Valley (which might as well have been the Grand Canyon) were simply dazzling to this Yankee.
Pacific PalisadesYes, it’s true that the always coastal, mostly liberal, formerly elite Mr. Moore had never been to California. My excuse is that for the first fourteen years of my life I spent July in Victoria, B.C. visiting my grandfather, so I get it – the stucco, the wealth, the utter desiccation, the mountains erupting out of the ocean, etc. But after being invited to California over and over again, and after hearing about it from my friends, my family, The Grateful Dead, Alfred Hitchcock, Anna Deveare Smith, Circle Jerks, The Beach Boys, The Showtime Lakers, Todd Haynes, Joni Mitchell, Wolfgang Puck, The Eagles, NWA, T.C. Boyle, Steely Dan, Joan Didion, and dozens of other artists, it was finally John Steinbeck’s
East of Eden that pushed me over the edge.
“Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you can imagine. And mixed with these were splashes of California poppies. These too are of a burning color — not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies. When their season was over the yellow mustard came up and grew to a great height. When my grandfather came into the valley the mustard was so tall that a man on horseback showed only his head above the yellow flowers. On the uplands the grass would be strewn with buttercups, with hen-and-chickens, with black-centered yellow violets. And a little later in the season there would be red and yellow stands of Indian paintbrush. These were the flowers of the open spaces exposed to the sun.”
Without further ado –
PEBBLE BEACH GOLF LINKS Do I have friends? Yes. Do I have friends who want to meet up at The Lodge in the service of guaranteed tee times? I do not, so I have to ask . . .
What kind of experience is this, where maximum-handicap golfers slash it around in five hours and thirty minutes at one of the hardest courses in the world? Where some even quit after thirteen holes to kick back and enjoy the cart ride and have their picture taken twenty more times? I was completely unprepared for the theme park aspect of this resort, where a huge number of guests make repeated 150-yard round trips from cart path to golf ball, finally returning to the shopping mall from which they started. You want Pebble, you got Pebble, and I was put into the 12:20 slot with . . . some older folks . . . from a distant land . . . who apologized to me even before the round started for what was about to happen and practically flayed themselves in remorse on the eighteenth green.
It’s true that when I am asked to wait in the third spot of the express line at the supermarket I look like a complete dick, and I suppose there is no way to mask this. And as one of my playing companions walked all the way across the second fairway to take three shots out of a fairway bunker in order to propel her ball into the adjacent fairway bunker, I started to get sick to my stomach, and I suddenly understood the following quote, which I knew was germane but had been puzzling me for a month.
“Directing is really three things. You’re editing behavior over time, and then controlling moments that should be really fast, and making them slow, and moments that should be slow, and making them fast.” – David Fincher,
Hitchcock/Truffaut There was indeed a wormhole aspect to Pebble Beach. I would wait and wait and wait and watch the others hit ten shots between my every one. I have never ever waited this long between shots, and when I got to my ball I would be like “Come on Michael, you’re at Pebble and you’re a hole and a half behind. Get in there and hit it!” I get it, it’s my own fault for showing up alone and having attention issues, but the discord between the eons spent gnashing my teeth versus the seconds having an anxiety attack over the ball before hitting it was profound. I did not play well.
As for the course, I knew that six and eight would be five-star holes, but I am going to throw three, four, and sixteen into that category as well. And nine, which I previously thought was just a long hole on the ocean, was not to be believed. So that’s six of the best holes you will ever play, added to the very fine second tier of one, two, seven, ten, thirteen, and eighteen. That adds up to two thirds of the course, so I am not going to split hairs when I gush about the extraordinary golf at Pebble, especially when it turns out that half of the “inland” holes offer a spectacular view of the ocean.
Eight, nine, and ten (!)I will be thinking about all of the heroic shots on the course, a few of which I actually pulled off, until the next time I play it. When Ran Morrissett came to visit me in 2017, he asked a great many questions, and one of them was “what course that you haven’t played would you most like to” and I was like “ahhh . . . errrr . . . Pebble Beach.” Is that so wrong?
PASATIEMPO GOLF CLUB As Verne Lundquist once opined, “Oh, wow!” This was clearly the highlight of the trip, and her countless subtleties are difficult to write about. All I knew going in was that this would be my introduction to Alister MacKenzie – I did not know that is was a residential course, nor that the back nine would outshine the eye-popping front, nor what was in store for me as I crested the hill on thirteen –
Are there better par-threes anywhere? Especially on the front, the diversity, green contours, and visual appeal of the short holes may be the best I have ever seen. And speaking of contours, if there are any topologists out there, what is the name of the shape of the eighth and eleventh greens, which are just twisted planes, high front left and rear right, low front right and rear left. What is that like a tesseract or something? In any event, I suspect that this might be a Mackenzie trademark, and putting through these contours was thrilling.
Those high features at the front of the aforementioned greens, which greatly help a marginal shot and greatly harm a slightly worse one, are repeated at the right of the second, the left of the sixth, and everywhere on the fifth. Mounding near the green has rarely been so integrated and strategic.
Fifth hole - 190 yardsFinally, the unmaintained areas, the view from the first tee, the clubhouse, and especially the secret clubhouse with live music on Tapas Tuesday are all just so. I commend Pasatiempo for welcoming visitors at for a plausible fee and I will join if Henry attends college within a hundred miles.
OBSERVATIONS 1. The tap water in Los Angeles was delicious, and it was pretty bad elsewhere.
2. Rustic Canyon was great fun, despite wondering if Tuco Salamanca was going to emerge over the horizon and slit my throat. The angles and the greens were as advertised, and I loved one, three, ten, thirteen and fifteen. I did have a couple of putts that slid back and forth down a trough like a child at the water park, but that’s all good, and I gained a new appreciation for my home course with its flat lies and good greens. I played behind a foursome from the California Lutheran University team who all hit it 310 yards, proclaimed “God damn it!” and “Jesus Christ!” throughout the round, then drove off in a gigantic Mercedes, which is not how I remember my undergraduate years.
Sixteenth hole - 479 yards3. Spanish Bay is a true feast for the eyes, and features eighteen terrific and fairly well-integrated greens. Yes, the difficulty and awkward carries are piled high at seven, twelve and eighteen, but this is a perfect course for letting your guard down a bit and spending the afternoon with actual golfers by the ocean.
4. The liquor stores in Santa Monica sell laundry detergent, t-shirts, socks, and many other supplies for the substantial itinerant population.
5. The Mexican food was delicious at every price point, and the goat, which is generally not on the menu at home, was sublime.
6. San Francisco Chinatown was just as dingy and chaotic as the ones back home, and I took all my meals there.
7. The vibe at Harding Park was outstanding – I had a great group that did not shut up the entire way around, and there was a rambunctious lunch afterwards. The whole day reinvigorated my substantial commitment to municipal golf.
8. In-And-Out Burger, the single, was not good and I did not care to explore any other west coast burger chains.
9. The beach volleyball infrastructure and level of play was yet another pleasant surprise.
10. The collection at the Getty Center was not my thing but it is one of the most exciting public spaces I have ever been to. I leave you with a photo I saw there,
Golfing at Le Toquet by Norman Parkinson, which currently hangs in my dining room.