Cypress Point: To Paradise and Back

“We might potentially be able to play Cypress in a couple days,” Andrew initially texted me, which I somewhat brushed off, although I knew from experience that there was a non-zero chance that his connection might pull through. Akin to one day going out to a bar, seeing Ana De Armas, chatting her up, getting her number, and starting a life together, to a person like me, a very average person like me, ever playing Cypress Point was such an obscure concept that it was hard to fathom it somehow being in the realm of possibility. 

After a day or two of radio silence on that front, on a non-descript late November Tuesday auguring the coming of winter, as I sat in my home office, with eyes bleary from staring at spreadsheets all day, back sore from my unergonomic posture, and debating whether upon receiving the next pointless email I would drink bleach and call it a life or simply start selling my body instead of working, I received quite literally the best call of my life: “do you want to play Cypress Point next Tuesday?” 

Listen, I’ve never had a kid (that I know of), nor seen the Leafs win the Stanley Cup (and probably never will), but I can’t fathom that either would be much sweeter than that.

I have to be honest with you, here and now, dear reader, considering the cost of the flight and accommodations, green-fee, caddie-fee, and of course the inevitable pro-shop spending-spree I’d go on, all at a tragically feeble exchange-rate to boot, I hesitated to commit to the trip for a few minutes, until my two best friends told me that I was insane to even consider turning it down. Andrew had initially agreed to attend the media day for the opening of Jay Blasi’s Golden Gate Par 3 and thus had a business related reason to go. I, on the other hand, did not. 

“Take out a line of credit, if you have to,” Jason told me, “it’s Cypress! What else do you spend on in life? You have no kids, no wife, no mortgage, no car payment.” A hurtful and somewhat damning, albeit accurate, assessment on Jason’s part. 

“Ya it’s Cypress, one of the three or four golf courses in America I’d quite literally drop anything, risk the chance of getting fired, and stomach an absolutely disgusting Amex bill for a chance to play. Of course, I’m in,” I told myself and then Andrew, too. Moreover, I comforted myself by saying that I’d be helping the company at the media day as well. 

Who would have ever thought that a twitter discussion regarding our mutual dislike of Thomas McBroom’s golf courses would lead, a few years down the road, to a time-tee at Cypress Point. Strange, isn’t it, how the dominoes of life can tumble. 

Although I’m far from rich, I of course didn’t have to take out a line of credit to afford the trip; however, I did have to break the news to my boss, who was less than impressed but also totally understanding as a golfer, himself. “Just get me a hat,” he responded, which I judged a more than fair trade.

Playing Cypress Point! Me, a mediocre bureaucrat from Ottawa, playing Cypress Point. Realistically, how many people from Ottawa have ever set foot upon Dr. Mackenzie’s and Robert Hunter’s piece-de-resistance before me. Ten? Maybe fifteen? What in the world? How? 

It didn’t immediately sink-in, even as I trekked down the 401 on Saturday morning to catch a Sunday flight from Pearson. The cost of flying from Ottawa or Montreal to San Francisco was nearly double than to do so from that hell-hole, but it was worth it, I figured. My mother was also kind enough to agree to drive me there, using it as a guise to visit family and the city of her halcyon years spent at the University of Toronto. 

When possible, I tend to arrive shockingly early to the airport, since I am a nervous flier and hate being late in general. In addition, Chelsea were kicking off at 9am against Brighton and so I planned to get through security a full three-and-a-half hours before my departure time to catch the whole game. 

Mauricio Pochettino’s hideous football, with Conor Gallaher trying—and failing—to play as a #10, is not something that I necessarily enjoy suffering through sober, so I ordered a first morning beer, then another, then another, until I was sufficiently lubricated to watch Chelsea jump out to a two-nil lead, which brightened my mood in regards to my favorite football club, who are currently the mockery of the footballing world, as we sit outside of the top 10 after spending a cool billion pounds in the transfer market, at the time of writing.

Of course, they proceeded to surrender a goal and then be forced to play with ten men, after a rash and totally uncalled for second yellow by the aforementioned Gallagher before the half, which, in turn, caused me to unleash a peal of profanity towards him and Pochettino both, which, in turn, caused everyone around me to gather their things and escape to greener pastures away from the raving lunatic in his Chelsea kit.

Luckily for me, and for everyone else on my flight too, Chelsea held on for a rather underserved three-two win. I was feeling good, and a little drunk since my stomach had nothing in it except four Stellas Artois, as I sauntered over towards the gate from which my American Airlines was scheduled to leave. There were already a number of attractive members of the opposite sex gathered there, and I dreamt of embarking upon a great, wild Californian romance with one of them. 

Coyly, I smelled myself to make sure I’d applied enough of the cologne I’d bought in Europe, a cologne specifically designed, it seems, for heterosexual men looking to attract heterosexual women who are into heterosexual men. 

The music for the mood was The Radio Dept’s latest record, Committed to the Cause. 

True to reputation, for no apparent reason, for it was perfectly sunny outside and relatively calm inside the airport, the first leg to Chicago was delayed for a half-hour, which then elongated into a full hour, nearly the full length of my scheduled lay-over in the windy city. Something would go wrong on my way there, I told myself. It just had to. A missed flight or lost golf clubs. The universe simply wouldn’t let me have it this easy. 

The first leg of the journey, taken aboard a fifty-some year old flying and shaking and quaking death-trap in the sky, featured no wifi and no in-flight beverage service, and I was squeezed between the window and a reptilian-shaped human being, whose preferred method of breathing was from the mouth and whose left shoulder spent the whole flight pressed against my right one. 

I tried to read but none of the four books that I’d brought tickled my fancy and, moreover, I was too tightly squeezed to do so comfortably. Thus, I simply spent the last hour or so of the flight burning with my death-stare a hole through the back of the seat ahead of me and running over the worst possible travel scenarios that I could conceive in my mind.

Straight from script-writing 101, at first, air-steward Tim was a thorn in my side, but then he became a hero. In truth, I don’t know if our hero’s name was in fact “Tim”, yet he struck me as a “Tim”, so I’ll just call him “Tim” for the sake of this exercise. “Tim” was from Green Bay but he hated the snow and the cold and the Packers. He wore his navy blue suit rather poorly. His haircut couldn’t have cost more than fifteen dollars. He was of a huskier build and apparently his chosen regime of exercise was marching up and down the aisle every five minutes to peddle at the top of his lungs his stale pretzels and tasteless cookies and drinks and pretzels and cookies and waste collection services. A half-hour to Chicago, when the chances of me making my next flight seemed to have vanquished into the nothingness of middle America, I could have punched “Tim”. I could have punched “Tim” real good. 

But then “Tim” took control of the situation, and an everyday hero emerged. A lesser steward than “Tim” could have simply continued with the daily menial performances of his tasks and let us unlucky travelers to fend for ourselves amongst the cold-hearted, careless bureaucracy of the airport down there. And, after-all, what were we, us unlucky travelers, to “Tim”? “Tim” over-eagerly served thousands upon thousands of men and women just like us every month, every year. Our faiths could have meant nothing to “Tim”. 

But once we flew with “Tim”, we became Tim’s children; he was our guardian in this cruel world and he would faithfully guide us as best he possibly could to our respective destinies. All those years ago, he’d made such a promise upon swearing his oath to faithfully and dutifully carry the badge of American Airlines upon his left breast, and sure as hell wasn’t going to break it. 

“Alright folks, obviously we’re running a bit late which means that some travelers are in a tight squeeze to make their connecting flights,” he announced camply. My pulse quickened, my hope was reborn, and I immediately asked forgiveness for all of the cruel wishes I’d afflicted upon “Tim” throughout our journey together. 

“Tim” called my seat, and because of his valor in the line of fire that morning, I made my next flight to San Francisco. I’d opted to half-jog from gate to gate, but I could have simply walked and made it still. Yet, once I settled into my seat, I figured there was no way that my clubs had also made it. I knew it. I bloody knew it. I should have flown from Ottawa. You cheap skate, you should have just spent the money. 

However, all I needed was for my clubs to arrive by Tuesday for Cypress; Andrew had his and I could use them to play a par 3 course. Par 3 courses don’t overly move me, not even the very best ones that I have played. To me, playing par 3 golf is like going to the best restaurant in town and only eating an appetizer. Or bringing a girl home and only getting to first base with her. It’s still golf and all, and it’s better than not playing golf, but it feels undercooked. 

On this second flight, I was seated next to a San Francisco 49ers jacket and toque clad latina, which instantly triggered me, since I am an ardent Packers fan and still harbor vivid nightmares of watching Colin Kaepernick run all over Dom Capers’ inept defenses in two playoff games, of the 37-20 drubbing that they gave us in the 2019 NFC Championship Game, and of the egg that we laid against them in what would turn out to be Aaron Rodgers’ last playoff game for the franchise in 2021. I hate the 49ers – they’ve made my life miserable. 

I soon mentioned my packers-driven hate to my personable row-mate, who seemed in her late 30s or early 40s, and she understood my stance. This time the wifi-worked well, and, after ordering a drink each, we proceeded to chat Xs and Os for a while and eventually watched the Niners lay a drubbing on the Eagles. She fist pumped all of their good plays and tackles; she waived and muttered in frustration and kicked the floor at their poor ones; and she swore audibly when that utter jabroni “Big Dom” pushed Greenlaw and got himself ejected. I enjoyed her antics, just as those in the terminal had probably enjoyed my Chelsea-induced ones earlier in the day. The gold band on her finger, however, stopped me from asking for her number and also eliminated my shot at a much-treasured green card.  

As we neared the Bay area, both my sobriety and golf-bag related anxiety augmented. Although I had a “tile” to track my golf bag, I refused to check the app until we landed, for I saw no real point in doing so. If my bag hadn’t made it, ultimately what could I do and I would spend the rest of the flight torturing myself even further; if they did, however, then that would be a spirit-lifting bonus. 

When I landed, Andrew was still playing at Gleneagles, a nine hole course that he reported as serviceable, if unmemorable, and so I made my way leisurely through the airport, stopping for a coffee and a croissant Illy Cafe, which criminally cost 12$ usd, plus tip. 12$ usd, plus tip! That’s like 20$ cad for something that cost no more than 1$, at most, to make. Moreover, I’m a weak man, and despite my convictions to the opposite, I usually tend to welt and tip, even when I deem the service unworthy of receiving a tip, as I did then. 

As Geoff Dyer once surmised, by nature, most writers, which I occasionally pretend to be, are neurotic about their expenses and about their budget, and I was already well resigned to the fact that mine would be blown out of the water on this trip. I’d spent days and days planning my approach to Cypress Point’s pro shop: a polo, 2 hats, and a belt. No, wait, 2 polos, no belt, 2 hats and a headcover. No, actually, a pull-over, a polo, and a hat. No, no. On and on I went, back and forth, settling on one approach, then another, then another. I had a salary cap in mind and planned to stay under it, estimating what each item would cost based on experience. 

Rather than wait by the oversized luggage ramp, I walked around the other conveyor belts hoping to round the corner and see my bag waiting there for me. I knew that my hopes of a smooth trip had likely been let down by the overworked and understaffed stewarts of O’Hare, but I manifested it. Alas, somehow, someway, on the third lap, I saw the blessed sight—I couldn’t believe they had in fact made it across the tarmac. 

“It’s gonna be a tight fit, but it should be okay,” Andrew said when he arrived to pick me up by the curb. I pictured four grown men, armed with golf clubs and bags, squeezed into this cherry-red rental Jeep and pulling up to Cypress. A clown car, they’d judge us, I figured. How’d these Canadian jokers get access to our club?

To wintered northern soul, few scents are as satisfying as the first whiff of a temperate climate. I hadn’t been to California since my high graduation trip, which occurred a decade ago now, when my mother and I journeyed from Bandon down to Santa Cruz. Like most, I’d heard the doomsday proclamations about the social disintegration of San Francisco—about the clear and present danger on the streets; about the tent villages; about the apps specifically designed to alert for human excrement on streets and such—, and in truth, I’d largely dismissed them as more alarmist hyperbole spewed by that end of the political spectrum, an end of the political spectrum that tends to merely spew human excrement from the mouth, but I digress.

In my experience, in terms of uniqueness, San Francisco is the most immediately striking of American cities. The rows of attached, multi-colored terraced houses snaking up the bare hillsides. The sky-scrapers of the downtown core that almost seem to tilt sideways from afar because of the severe topography. The still-intact Victorian buildings scattered about. The omni-present haze or fog that muffles the eyesight slightly. The criss-crossing highway grid. The expansive industrial sector and low-rise warehouses lining the bay. In a sense, San Francisco feels rather South American in character. 

A more glorious past co-exists uncomfortably with the present in this city. A harsher California, to use Joan Didion’s term, seeps through the paradisiacal California, the land of the golden dream, a site of dreams and disenchantment, formidable beginnings and ruinous ends. 

Blake Almedinger reminds us that “the region has always been a blank slate for projecting other groups’ frustrations and fantasies. Once a blank slate, California now became a giant projection screen, a fictional substitute for other places.” Both literally and symbolically, California has always loomed in the psyche as the end point of American destiny, a mythical, quasi-edenic place way over there, over the Rockies, by the Pacific, to which one can venture, lose one’s former self, and start again, if need be. As the American dream promises, you can make something of yourself in California; you can become someone with a little luck and hard work. Westward runs the course of empire, and California, that supposed golden land of orange groves and endless coast-line, movie stars and real-estates moguls, producers and singers, oil and agricultural and mechanical industry, is the last stop on the line. “Things better work here,” Didion surmised fifty some years ago now, “because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.” 

Well, sister, let me tell you that things haven’t exactly worked out here. Nor have they there, either, in truth. It’s hard not to lend credence to those doomsday proclamations made about San Francisco by the right-wing. A more biblically inclined person than myself, perhaps one of the countless street preachers we encountered, might equate the modern day city to Sodom or Gomorrah, in fact. 

We stayed on the edge of the infamous (with infamous intended here in its true connotation) Tenderloin and ventured through its street on our first night in search of food. Walking merely three or four blocks from our hotel down towards city hall, we passed a handful of Coleman tents erected along the sidewalk housing dreamers of the golden land, clinging however perilously to their little slice of this fallen Eden. Upon passing by the stately and impressive marble, Beaux-Arts cum “city beautiful” inspired city-hall building, along with its adjoining park and similarly impressive flanking structures, we came upon, what had to be, two hundred and fifty gathered homeless men and women. I’m not exactly sure why they were all gathered there, but this was a scene common to most any big city in the world—what was especially striking, however, was that not three blocks further east, there was a bustling christmas market replete with merry families and loving couples sampling the delicacies and waiting for the decorated trolleys to take them up one of the severely uphill streets lined by Prada and Gucci and Montcler. In effect, over these few hundred feet, the dichotomy of California, of contemporary America in fact, could not be more explicitly foregrounded. 

Moreover, in nearly every store or restaurant window, there was a “help wanted” sign pleading to those very streets now occupied by thousands and thousands of forgotten and weary wanderers of the golden land. Yes, I understand that it’s not that simple as it seems, and I know that this is not a specifically Californian issue, but there’s something inherently wrong with this image when you actually think about it for a second.  If we really wanted to, which we clearly don’t of course, we could find a solution that would benefit all parties; alas, though, we’d rather omit waiters and bartenders and instead have customers place their orders over their phones, as was the case at the brewery we finally chose. 

Come to think of it, this brewery was rather symbolic in many ways of the San Francisco of today. Set next to a theater, it was a long, thin and high ceilinged affair, with a black-and-white tiled floor and nude cinder block walls accentuated by cast-iron trimming and brass moldings. Its general patina, however, was slightly worn and faded. In it and around it, you could sense harbingers to a more glorious San Franciscan and Californian past (a more glorious San Franciscan and Californian past, that is, if you were among its chosen ones). Jazz clubs, corner establishments called the “Route 101 Bar” or “The Infatuation Room”, amber and dim mambo joints in which you could probably still smoke if you wanted to while drinking a scotch, surf and turf restaurants, seafood depots, and historic century old Victorian style hotels that are all equally chic and elegant but also slightly pathetic and sad now. 

In the way that these things tend to materialize, our invite to SFGC came about at the very last minute, literally on the morning of. Initially, I wasn’t supposed to play it with Quinn and Brett, but upon pleading my case, I managed to thankfully get on, too. And no, I didn’t feel bad about letting Andrew mingle with the industry alone at Golden Gate Park. Nor did he begrudge me for ditching him to play it…I think…..

Unlike much of the rest of city, apart from unfortunate changes to Tillinghast’s original layout that were precipitated by the planned expansion of the highway bordering the club’s property to the east, the San Francisco Golf Club has remained largely immune from the cruel hands of chance and change, tucked away beyond its gate and green fence in its secluded, private sphere near Lake Merced, around which the Olympic Club and Harding Park are also located. Unlike both of those clubs, however, SFGC has only rarely opened its gates to the outside world and is still reticent towards publicity of any sort, really. Cameras, phones, GPS, and range-finders are shunned once on property. Like Mount Bruno here in Canada, the club simply seeks to operate without fuss and without being known; as Brett stated before we played it that sunny and warm afternoon, there’s something pretty cool and unique nowadays, in this oversaturated age of instagram and course tours, about playing a top 25 golf course in America without knowing more than a hole or two prior to showing up. In fact, it’s much better this way, if you ask me.

Broadly speaking, the golf course is routed across a piece of property that slopes towards Lake Merced. The western half of it is bisected by two massive ravines, at the floors of which the 2nd, 7th, and 8th play, and on the crests of which the 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 6th are set. Meanwhile, the long par 3, 4th, runs from north to south, and the six-hundred and some yard par 5, 9th, runs from south to north and culminates beneath the beige colored clubhouse, which is set on the high point of the property.

In terms of nine holes, because of the intense land and the clever routing, SFGC’s front 9 is as good as it gets, really, especially in terms of everyday play. The term “member’s course” often brings about a negative connotation, it seems, but this is truly the most apt way to describe Tillinghast’s only course west of the Mississippi. There are no shots beyond the capability of any golfer, yet it’s amply challenging. The fairways are generous, yet you must approach from certain angles which are usually guarded by the tongued and sculpted bunkers. You shouldn’t lose a ball. The walk is sporty, yet perfectly reasonable. 

The back nine, however, is routed across a more macro-tilted plot of land, with the par 3, 11th, being the only hole to somewhat touch the ravines. Although this second nine does not reach quite the same heights that the front does, it’s still an extremely strong nine holes of golf that just keeps on delivering solid hole upon solid hole. In particular, the 12th stands out in my memory, with its Hollywood GC-esque raised bunkers fronting and surrounding the obscured green. The short par 3, 13th, “little Tillie”, which Tom Doak rebuilt fifteen years or so ago, is another nerve-racking highlight, as is the tremendous downhill 14th, where the slender green interacts brilliantly with a nob short and to its right, meaning that the golfer must challenge the guarded left side of the fairway in order to be able to attack any hole-position at the back of the surface. 

In truth, I expected the greens to feature more intense internal contouring, ala Somerset Hills or Winged Foot, but they are of a more subtle variety than those, with clever segments and shelves and run offs. From a Canadian context, Tillie’s work here is akin to much of Stanley Thompson’s oeuvre, in terms of aesthetics and strategy, from the manner in which Tillinghast uses his bunkering to obscure the golfer’s eye and thus create issues with depth perception, to the snaking fairways, to the greens themselves. 

As the days have passed since my round, SFGC has grown and grown in my estimation. I immediately recognized its genius, of course, but coming a day prior to my round at Cypress Point, it naturally took a bit of a backseat to Dr. Mackenzie’s sensory overwhelming creation in the near aftermath of the trip. In short, I’d confidently place SFGC among my handful of favorite golf courses, somewhere on the very cusp of the top 20, along with Old Town and Bandon Trails.

Part II

“Pondering, in hindsight, my initial impressions of that most startling of stretches in golf, I am reminded of Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction” (1935), in which he laments, among things, that the rise of film and cameras have significantly stunted the impact of seeing great works of art and architecture for the first time, in the flesh, since we’ve already seen them so often, albeit through reproductions (i.e the countless pictures and videos we’ve seen of the Mona Lisa prior to actually visiting the Louvre in Paris). Yet, as he also states, “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”

The clinging sun bobbed near the world’s rim and it tinted the far-reaches of the Pacific an ember orange. Closer to us, the mirror still of the water was only sometimes interrupted by a white-crowned wave creaming its way with ever-decreasing vigor to the shoreline. Truth be told, I’ve never felt great affection for the sea, or any large body of water, for that matter.

In fifteen or so trips to Florida, I’ve never once dipped as little as a single toe into the Atlantic or into the Gulf of Mexico. I detest the feeling of hot sand between my toes and, especially, of it burying into every nook and crevice and pore of my body afterwards. And the novels of Melville and Conrad and London have never made me want to venture upon the great blue endless wide-opens, those unmarked and wild and still dangerous and untamable arteries of the world’s commerce, unlike how the novels of Kerouac and Steinbeck, for instance, once made me want to hop in a car and venture across the continent, or how the novels of Larry McMurtry or Cormac McCarthy made me want to live in the West.

Even to a typically non-oceanic bent sensibility as my own, few drives, if any, are as awe-inspiring as that along Highway 1 from the south end of San Francisco to Monterey, as it passes by Sharp Park, cuts through the sleepy coastal outposts of Half-Moon Bay, Pescadero, and Davenport, and coils north at the mouth of Monterey Bay, where gritty and tough Santa Cruz stands guard. From this town of about 60 000 until it reaches Carmel-By-The-Sea at the opposite end of the bay, Highway 1 tucks slightly inland, traversing denser Californian forest and then the golden, luxuriant farmland of the Salinas Valley, those acres of toil and vain glory and blood and sweat chronicled by Steinbeck in East of Eden and Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat.

In effect, this two hour stretch is an anthology of American roads: city, cookie-cutter suburbia, mountains, ocean, small-town streets, and plains—all you’re missing, really, are desert and swamp and you’ve got the lot. 

The affect that is repeatedly evoked along this drive, particularly on the stretches where the highway crests and the Pacific thus extends from one limit of the eye-sight to the other, is that of the sublime, understood in its 19th century context as something delightful and astonishing but also terrifying and frightening and, of course, humbling. As noted by Kant and Edmund Burke, among others thinkers, such overwhelming natural canvases reaffirms just how miniscule, how fragile, how infirm we, in fact, are as humans—that the self is nothing but a little, indifferent, vulnerable grain of sand amidst a vast beach scattered with millions of other ones. A self apt to be smothered and avalanched by larger external power at any moment. 

Driving through Davenport and Pescadero, eyeing their sleepy streets lined with single story bungalows and their few desolate bars and restaurants set along the highway and looking out at the Pacific, I imagined them populated by a cast of adrift Pynchonian characters: burnt-out hippies and artists living off of social security or other forms of passive income; government suspicious renegades; scientists and meteorologists and marine biologists; city-weary executives and brokers content to let pass the waning years of their lives away from the hum and buzz of Los Angeles or San Francisco; colorful lifers who’ve recognized decades ago that the grass isn’t in fact greener elsewhere; and, of course, people with useless graduate degrees who wasted their (relative) youth writing 10 000 word overwrought, self-serving pieces about fictional Pynchonian characters in remote Californian outposts on the way to Cypress Point.

By the time we arrived Monterrey was night-enveloped and its size startled me. Out of pure ignorance, I was unaware that it is a mid-sized American city, replete with all of those standard mid-sized American city thropes: a Wall-Mart and a Safeway surrounded by nondescript strip-malls and busy gas-stations and national fast-food joints morphing into blocks of condos and tract-homes. Shift Monterey 100 miles inland and it’s your average American town, really. A placeless place amidst thousands and thousands of other placeless places. 

A dozen minutes further down the highway, though, once you get off at Carmel-By-The-Sea, it doesn’t take you long to realize that this is a very different California from Monterey and Santa Cruz. The entire town seems enveloped by tall, comforting Cypresses, and its houses and buildings are all set back from the streets and bear a rather uniform aesthetic: Spanish-colonial with dark blue or gray siding, wood trimming, and peaked roofs.

If anything, Carmel-By-The-Sea is uncomfortably clean and proper and spotless and quiet. I fully expected to come upon a rabbit ear on some front-lawn. Looking back, however, our sojourn was so short that I hardly got a true sense of the area; even trying to locate where we’d stayed on google maps in preparation for this article was a slightly discombobulating exercise. I assumed that we’d stayed south of Pebble Beach, when, in fact, we were well north of it. 

After a round of golf and two hours sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Brett (we folded down one of the backseats to accommodate our golf clubs), despite the endless circumambient natural splendor and friendly banter, my sanity was at wits’ end, my legs and glutes were crying for mercy, and I felt like Frank Booth about to butterfly into his “daddy” persona.  

Even the Super 8, the blessed Super 8, we eveninged at was, somehow, quite alright. The rooms were freshly renovated and painted and well-lit, the bathroom sealed and without visible grime, and the parking lot free of cars likely belonging to some of California’s finest and most enthusiastic meth-users [CFEMUs]. 

One can single out a CFEMU’s ride—which is most commonly a badly rusted and unwashed 1990s or early 2000s American-made sedan, such as a Pontiac Sunfire or a Saturn, and which I assume populate many of America’s other Super 8 establishments, particularly in places like Albuquerque, NM, or Johnson City, Tenn, or Springfield, Missouri—thanks to the presence of numerous discarded yellow fast-food wrappers littering the shelf above the back row of seats inside the rear-window, baby seats of dubious safety standard, ashtrays overflowing with cigarette ash and butts, permanently cracked windows due to the lack of a functioning air-conditioner, and Incubus and Stone Temple Pilot CDs, scratch-off tickets, and 7/11 Big Gulp cups filled with stale Mountain Dew in the central console. When you pass a CFEMU on the road, which you routinely do since their lack of gainful employment combined with the poor state of their vehicle and meth-weakened faculties means that they rarely exceed the speed-limit by much, beanies, flat-brimmed Fox-40 or Hurley ball caps, scraggly beards or sharp goatees, wife-beaters or Tap-Out UFC t-shirts, jean shorts, mullets, and dental damage that borders on Appalachian cartoon are their common uniforms. Trying to spot CFEMUs is a good way to pass the time on long journeys, one of my favorites in fact, and Highway 1 is a surprisingly fertile place to spot CFEMUs. 

We agreed to shower and meet again downstairs at around 7pm for dinner. When it comes to food, I have the palate of a twelve year old: I’d be perfectly fine with solely eating the mostly deep-fried or flat-topped seared grub cooked by my local dive-bar for the rest of my life, or simply surviving off of fast-food. Haute-cuisine doesn’t do it for me, nor does wine, really. Trust me, I’ve been to Michelin Star restaurants before, eaten at a handful of the top 25 ranked restaurants in Canada, sampled some of the finest that Italy and France have to offer, and I’ve never walked away from one of them more satisfied than after engorging two-pounds of wings, a plate of Nachos, and two pitchers at my local boozer. 

However, being in the company of more hoity-toity establishment inclined persons than myself, I had no choice but to choose between a handful of French classics at a downtown Carmel bistro boutique. Once again, the downtown core feels more like a set than an actual place where humans toil, beg, borrow, and steal for their livelihoods. I don’t know how many people come to Carmel to buy fine-art and paintings, but it must be a lot since eight out of ten businesses, it seems, is a gallery of some sort—other than that, it’s either a high-end clothing store or a restaurant. 

Brett and I both opted for a gnocchi lathered, and I mean lathered, in a garlicky cream, a decision for which we both paid later. In truth, I don’t like gnocchi all that much, but it was the only thing besides pizza that was under 50$ on the menu—and I sure as hell wasn’t ordering pizza at a French restaurant (although we had it as an app and it was decent. 6.8/10). The gnocchi and cream, although quite tasty, sat so heavy in my stomach that I could hardly drink a second beer with my dinner. Brett, meanwhile, expressed a similar ill feeling. We were becoming worried. 

I could hardly talk as we walked back to the car and I trailed behind the others, in agony. When we got back to the hotel, what had metabolized in my gut kept expanding and expanding, and I was really not feeling well. Yup, I told myself, food poisoning before Cypress. I knew this would happen. It had to. My clubs hadn’t been lost, and I hadn’t been stabbed by a crackhead in Tenderloin, so something else was bound to happen. This wouldn’t have happened with a burger and Budweiser. 

Despite seething in my own stupidity and anger and doomsday scenarios, by miracle, I fell asleep quickly, slept through the night (something I do once or twice a year), and woke up not necessarily feeling better, but not worse, at least. I still felt bloated and full. Moreover, I hadn’t woken up with a stiff neck or a seized lower back, two other recurring calamities I assumed I might be afflicted with again on this day. And this was the day. 

“How are you feeling?” I asked Brett, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. Thankfully, my body hadn’t yet west-coasted, so I felt rather alert and awake already, despite it being 6am, an uncivilized hour at which to be awakened for anything other than playing one of the world’s best golf courses. 

“Better than I did at 4am, I’ll tell you that” he answered, lying in bed, checking his phone.  

“You didn’t hear me go to the bathroom?” 

I guess I’d slept like a log. To soothe my parched mouth I took a sip of the Coke Zero I’d grabbed for some reason the day prior and immediately dumped the rest of it into the sink when I realized that it tasted more like a household chemical than a refreshing Coke substitute. 

Whereas dawn along the Atlantic is intensely irradiated by the fresh sun mounting higher and higher into the sky, by the Pacific, especially near Monterey, this time of day seems suspended in time, basking in a silvery light, with the sun not yet visible over the horizon of hills and cypress forest to the east. The vast, vast majority of the other cars that we saw on our way to 17-Mile Drive were pickups hauling various sorts of maintenance gear in their cabins, presumably heading to service one millionaire or billionaire or another. 

It now costs an 11$ usd toll to simply drive along 17 Mile Drive, unless, of course, you’re a worker or a golfer with a tee-time secured, which is what Andrew told the sixty-some year old curmudgeon manning the guard-house. Having just watched him give the Mexican driver of the white Toyota Tundra ahead of us a hard-time for not having an access sticker glued to his windshield, before ordering him in no uncertain terms to get out of the way, call his boss and have him show proof of permit if he wished to avoid paying the toll, I figured that we’d have to flash “Joe” (as with “Tim” from American Airlines two days prior, I don’t know if this man’s name was “Joe” but he looked like a “Joe”) an invite email to gain free access to the road, his road.

 “Jeez, who’d you have to kill to get access there?” “Joe” simply answered and waved us on a merry day. Perhaps it was because we were golfers heading to Cypress or maybe (and more likely) because we were also white, but, regardless, we’d crossed the last literal and metaphorical hurdle on our journey to paradise. The pearly gates, so to speak, had been breached

Once through the winding and more isolated portion of 17 Mile-Drive zig-zagging through Del Monte forest which is dotted by opulent mansions with values mirroring the GDPs of some African countries and from which occasional glimpses of Poppy Hills and Monterey Peninsula are afforded, the Drive’s apparently 11$ valued splendor appears once the vista opens up and you venture between the pacific and the sand-scrapped, native-grassed hillside opposite, on which the occasional mansion is benched and golf hole seeded. Aside from the tamely lapping surf and a bird gliding above it, the landscape still seemed perfectly unstirred, with deep blue, cloudless skies and nary a breath of wind. “Forget a top 5 day, this is a top 1 day of the year,” our caddie would later tell us. Despite a perfect forecast, throughout the day anticipated that a hadean strand of death clouds would rise from the nether reaches beyond the horizon and sweep in. In case you haven’t realized yet, I harbor a very optimistic attitude towards life.

 

“There she is,” someone said as we rounded the little crescent-shaped beach around the inlet of the cove across from which the middle portion of the golf course is available for all to gasp at and admire but not touch, like forbidden candy in the window of an exclusive shop. Tantalizingly in reach Cypress Point looms, just across a strip of short native grass and a foot high fence, but a world away. 

Akin to asking someone to put into words the experience of reading Proust for the first time or the taste of Franklin’s BBQ or the flavor of Pappy Van Winkle or seeing the Great Wall of China or the Taj Mahal or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, just as with anyone who’s tried before me, anything I write about the golf course will wither to lend it merely adequate justice. Like all works of art and architecture and construction of such superlative, quasi-divine quality, golf courses like Cypress Point do not transmit accurately, not in words nor through visual representations, be that drone footage, video, or photography. They must be seen, felt, heard, touched, and, of course, played. 

We arrived to a far more crowded environment than we’d anticipated, with nearly a dozen cars in the unmarked parking-lot separated from the first tee and surrounding pro-shop-cum-locker-room by a waist-high hedge. In truth, the crowd afforded a real vibrancy, a palpable buzz, to the scene, where caddies were conversing with their players, who, in turn, were conversing with each-other while waiting for the clock to strike 7am, go time. Rather than feel like one of the most private, selective and secluded places on earth, it very much felt like a local country club on men’s night. And yes, it was an all-male bunch, from golfers to caddies to employees. The testosterone level was percolating more forcefully than the gnocchi and cream and coffee in my belly. 

Along this line, a week or so prior, we’d received a copy of the club’s guest policy, a rather sternly toned document. No shorts. No range-finders. No phones on the golf course. Pace of play had to be kept under four hours. It was really nothing out of the ordinary, in fact quite standard to higher end private clubs, but it had nevertheless augmented my impression that it’d be a stringently austere club, a place where you walk on egg-shells and don’t dare look anyone in the eyes and where you’re served by the employees as a nuisance. And with valid reason, too: if any club has the right to be like this, it is Cypress Point. Venerable Cypress Point. 

In truth, though, around the first-tee scene, this early in the morning, it was perfectly the opposite: the service was the warmest I’ve ever received at a club. In fact, the employees were nice and helpful to the point that I became slightly suspicious of their motives: they can’t really be this nice, this happy to have us here, I said to myself. Now, as I said, this was at the crack of dawn, and not near the actual clubhouse, which is of course off limits to unaccompanied guests, but Cypress Point felt like a normal country club, not one of, if not the world’s greatest and most revered. I certainly wouldn’t wear my hat backwards, or play music, or sport my shirt untucked ‘round there, but everyone appeared relatively at ease: some were checking their phones while stretching brazenly out in the open, some were drinking coffee casually inside the men’s locker room, and others were joking and chuckling loudly. Like Paris’ Chantilly, my favorite club in the world, Cypress Point feels like a place meant for sport, a test of the will pitting the sportsman against nature.

Immediately, as with one’s first exposure to Augusta National, the actual severity of Cypress Point’s undulation is not evident. For example, although you can sense in footage that the 1st hole is downhill, it is, in fact, plungingly so. Elsewhere, the holes at the bottom of the main valley traversing the property—the 12th and 13th—are well, well below those at its crown; whereas the 5th, 6th, 7th, 10th, and 11th are more undulating that they appear. 

Cypress Point’s green-sites are second-to-none and, in my mind, the course’ architectural highlight, from those benched in or near natural dunes (the 1st, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 11th, 12th), to those accentuated by Mackenzie’s artful bunkering in particular (the 10th 13th), to those set atop or just beyond the natural rolls or shelves (the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 14th, and 18th), to those that were, well, crafted by the hands of chance and change and time (the 15th, 16th, and 17th). 

From the tee, the golf course is pretty generous, for the most part, with a couple of the holes requiring you to know where and what to hit. Overall, I wouldn’t describe the golf course as being especially difficult, more so tricky and finicky—you can get after it, undoubtedly, once you’ve played it once or twice. Particularly on some of the shorter holes, like the 8th, 9th, 17th and 18th, you need to know where to hit it. Often on and around the greens, merely being a few feet too short or too far can be the difference between having a rather doable putt or chip, and being completely dead with no chance to stop the ball within fifteen feet or so of the hole. 

Where you can get into trouble, deep trouble, however, is in the raw, unkempt sand surrounding the dunescape holes, which is absolutely brutal to play from, a true, true hazard. The sugar-fine sand is so soft that it simply disintegrates upon impact and the ball comes out limp. Moreover, since it’s unkempt, chances are high that your ball will be in fried-egg or in a footprint or depression with no hope to get down and explode it out. Truth be told, the play from this native sand is 7 or 8 iron nipped from the middle of the stance. 

Like the 1st at the Old Course or at Pinehurst #2, the 1st at Cypress is, what I would describe as, a dufus-exposing hole: although it is a relatively easy tee-ball, to a massive fairway with ample room all around it, there is just enough visual clutter to set you on edge, to pucker your rear, to moisten your palms, especially if there is an ample gallery watching you address your ball. Really, though, if you can’t knock it somewhat competently down the fairway in play, or if, god-forbid, you knock it into the hedge a dozen yards or so in front of the tee box, thank your partners for the invite, walk to your car, take off your shoes, drive down 17 Mile Drive, stop by the ocean, dump your clubs into it, enjoy your gift bag, and take up paddle ball or another sport instead. No one needs to see you out here. 

I can’t recall the names of our slightly ruffian, albeit highly knowledgeable and competent caddies that day, but I’m always amazed at how nonchalantly so many caddies at high-end clubs roam their golf course. After-all, I’m then reminded, this is their workplace and lord knows I don’t view mine as anything sacrosanct. Personally, I would prefer to save (or spend in the pro-shop) the 200$ caddie fee and carry my own bag, but having a caddie is a threat and, in the vast majority of cases, if not a help, then at least a pleasant distraction for the round. Caddies, if you will, are very much one of the last truly nomadic bunch, replete with all of the larger-than-life figures that such a lifestyle is apt to attract and produce. Had I been born in the United States, or in another country where caddying is more common than in Canada, I would have loved to have worked as one in my late-teens and early twenties. The hours are flexible and favorable; the money is quite good; the work-place is unmatched; and everyday is different. 

 

The day prior, at San Francisco, our caddie, a lifer there, somehow kept producing an endless conveyor of Modelo beers for us, despite my bag being empty and him never venturing far from the fairways. I’m still baffled and mystified at how and from where he kept finding them. At another point, while we were waiting on the tee-box and he was adjacent to the fairway up ahead, he grabbed one of our irons, dropped two balls, and hit a couple cross-country shots to another green. We were having one of the great days of our lives, while it was just another day down at the mill for him. I loved it.

By some stroke of luck, for I am far, far from the world’s best lag putter, on the 1st, I knocked my seventy-five foot putt from the front to a few inches, within the friend zone, of the hole cut at the extreme rear of the back-to-front sloping, gently shelved green, accepted the gimme, laid my Scotty against my bag, and strode up the bank at the rear towards the 2nd tee while the others finished theirs. 

What’s especially tantalizing about Cypress is that you don’t get a peak of 15 or 16 until you cross 17 Mile Drive and arrive at the former’s tee box, grasping perilously to the edge of western civilization. Let’s call a spade a spade here, that stretch is what you’re foremost looking forward to all day; and although you’re in a rush to get there, you don’t really want to get there, because that means the round is over. 

Standing on the second tee, eyeing a man and his dog walking along the little crescent-shaped beach well below, I couldn’t help but be overcome by a strange, slightly bewildering sense: I was finally here; I was somehow actually playing Cypress Point. This is just about the peak few hours of my life, I told myself. I thought about my mom, about all of the trips we’d taken together, about our trip years ago down the west-coast. But then I snapped out of my reverie and, as one does, sent a snapchat to all of my buddies: “hello poor people”. 

Serenaded by the sunlight shining slantwise through the mist-hewn air, lending a kind of celestial effect to the scene, we marched on away from the ocean back towards the Del Monte forest. Even if the golf course never touched the ocean, and instead remained for its eighteen holes among the dunes and forest, it’d still be among the finest handful in America. The first thirteen holes are that good. My favorite hole, not only at Cypress but that I’ve played anywhere, is the tumbling, roller-coaster par 5, 5th, which plays a tad under 500 yards on the scorecard. The inside portion of the landing area is guarded by a typically stylish, dancing bunker complex, over which a severe downslope will provide a generous kick forward to the daring driver. Feeling chach coming off of a kick-in birdie at the 4th, I quite literally hit the best drive of my life and had only a mid-iron second remaining. A less ideal drive than mine, however, especially one that finds a bunker, leaves the golfer with a perplexing choice: lay up to the bottom of the gulley in the fairway, or try to fly it to the top of the severely bunkered ridge, leaving a clear pitch to the green from there. The beauty of the 5th very much echoes that of Augusta’s 10th, and could be situated amidst that former nursery in Georgia. 

The most inspired routing choice comes following the 6th – whose seemingly naturally resting green-site at the base of a sandy dune is my favorite on the course – where rather than return the golfer to the main valley, the architects opted to fold the routing back upon itself, allowing for the wonderfully benched and perilous par 3, 7th, and then the bite-off-as-much-as-you-can-chew 8th, over the corner of the broad, sand-covered slope which extends all the way northward to Spyglass Hill and westward to the edge of 17 Mile Drive. For those uncultured among you who complain about the 12th at Lakeview (that wonderful golf course’s best hole), it is essentially the same hole as the 8th at Cypress Point…

Some hours later, we lagged our putts close on 14,  handed our clubs to our caddies, and made that walk. The walk. 

Pondering, in hindsight, my initial impressions of that most startling of stretches in golf, I am reminded of Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction” (1935), in which he laments, among things, that the rise of film and cameras have significantly stunted the impact of seeing the great works of art and architecture for the first time, in the flesh, since we’ve already seen them so often, albeit through reproductions (i.e, for example, the countless pictures and videos we’ve seen of the Mona Lisas prior to actually visiting the Louvre in Paris). Yet, as he also states, “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” What all great works of art in their original forms posses, according to Benjamin, is an aura, an aura which cannot be dissociated from its locale; and mechanical reproductions, however technically advanced they may be, cannot transmit this aura.  

Along this line of thinking, then, I’ll omit from trying to mechanically reproduce the affect of playing 15, 16, and 17, for that is a futile exercise, and instead spend a moment looking at 18, that most unfairly criticized of holes. Is it a great hole? No, probably not. Would it be better if somehow Mackenzie’s fantasy tee on the rocks jutting into the ocean could be built? Yes. But as it is, it’s a perfectly fine hole, requiring a deftly placed tee ball with something less than driver between the tunnel of Cypress trees and featuring one of the most attractive final green-sites in golf, beneath an overhanging, ceremonial-feeling Cypress with the clubhouse to its left and a last view of the crashing surf near the 16th green afforded. 

All in all, looking back at my favorite golf courses, Cypress Point and Pinehurst #2 (and even Augusta) offer me a dilemma. I love Pinehurst #2 as much as anyone, and considered it a perfect 10, but it’s not in the same stratosphere as Cypress Point, not even remotely so. However, by definition, and comparatively to the rest of America, it is a 10. Despite having essentially ruined every other golf course for me, my round at Cypress Point not only accomplished my impossibly high expectations, but somehow surpassed them.

If you’re somehow still reading, thanks for following along, not only here but with everything I’ve written. It’s been a fun journey, and I bid you adieu for now. ZC.