What a pleasure to see a post of Balboa Park GC!!
I had the pleasure of playing there scores of times as a youth in the 1960s. It was the venue for numerous tournaments for the outstanding San Diego Junior Golf Association, as well as being a course owned (as was/is the Torrey Pines complex) by the city of San Diego, and therefore a course that offered high school golf team players the tremendous value of a play card for $1.50 for up to 16 plays a month!!
Additionally, I played there numerous times with my working class father, afternoons, after his days spent at the aircraft factory, mostly on the adjoining 9 hole course (par 31 or so)....thanks Dad for all that!
The Balboa course as I remember it was a journey through the canyons and onto the ridges above, through scrub and onto slow putting greens. I cared nothing back then about the architecture, only that I was out there on a fanciful course, indulging myself in the pull of the game, and in my youthful attempts to score, score, score.
Many short par 4 holes, as depicted by the photo of #5. #16 as we played it was the 'hogback' hole, a short 4 par along a narrow ridge, falling off in each direction into pure chaparral scrub and certain dougle bogey or worse...with the sense of 'single file down the center of the fairway.'
It was golf without the conditioning we have come to expect...and I believe it was my first exposure to Kikiyu...and from the photos it is still there.
The course reeked of old city style golf, a musty clubhouse, a tightly located and tiny putting green, ringed by a boxwood hedge, a tiny golf shop with literally barrels of used clubs for sale, a practice tee with synthetic turf mats hitting irregularly shaped and hand striped balls across a chasm to a funnel shaped range. It was the old Harding Park clubhouse of the SF golf scene located in the south of the state, the cypress of the bay area replaced by eucalyptus and chaparral and mediterrean climate and a wonderful youthful life.
The holes that stand out in my memory....the first as depicted, without the stands of trees left and right...the par three 6th, playing east (not into the north wind) and a real definer of how you were playing...the following par 5 seventh, curving up and around the neighboring spanish style homes out of bounds and across the adjoining street....the series of short 4 pars in the middle of the routing...and the finishing quartet of holes, with the drop shot 17th almost literally into the traffic of Pershing Blvd., and finally the engineered ramp up the par 5 18th, known to the locals as 'cardiac hill', the green hard against and below the old clubhouse windows.
High school matches finishing in the dark, junior tournaments there after an anxious bus ride across town, clubs on the seat near me..... golf with my Dad in those great formative years. Junior golf, trying to play up to the likes of Lon Hinkle, the Trompas brothers, John and Ric Shroeder, Morris Hatalsky, Craig Stadler.
And always played with the post world war two emerging skyline in the distance, and surrounded by the legend of Sam Snead in his time there during the war, the stories of his great golf there, and his 'personal par' of 67.
Thanks for the memories!!!! Wow.
Tom