Bucket lists, budget golf and everything in between-
Northern California courses have it all
BY BRADLEY S. KLEIN
This article first appeared in the Winter 2015 edition of NCGA Golf
By any stretch of landscape imagination, Northern California is a big, diverse place. Its golf courses embody the full range of settings, surfaces and playing textures, from the rollicking, wide-open linksland back nine of Pacific Grove on the coastline of the Monterey Peninsula to the deep, dark forested parkland of Schaffer’s Mill, a mile above sea level in the Sierra Nevada west of Lake Tahoe.
Green fees obviously vary across Northern California, from the two-digit, easily affordable range to the three-digit, bucket list realm. Those with privileged access to the exclusive private world of golf can play courses like Cypress Point along the rocky shoreline, and Martis Camp in high wooded land. But many of the region’s distinctive layouts are readily accessible daily-fee courses or resorts. Northern California is open to exploration by itinerant golfers with a penchant for interesting destinations.
There’s a rich design history to be found in Northern California, such as Alister MacKenzie’s Pasatiempo in Santa Cruz. This 1929 gem was created by a British-born physician who turned a lifelong interest in military camouflage into a second career as a world-traveling course architect. His use of the native terrain, as well as the arroyos and natural high points makes the back nine especially compelling particularly given the juxtaposing back and forth nature of the opening nine. MacKenzie even lived the last few years of his life in a house along the left side of the narrow par-5 sixth hole at Pasatiempo.
MacKenzie’s work at Cypress Point (pictured above, credit: Joann Dost) might be the single best example of a routing that moves through several distinct Northern California landscape rooms. The course starts through a maritime forest, transitions to sandy dunesland at the par-4 eighth hole, and then famously breaks onto rocky shoreline at the first of two back-to-back par 3s on the 15th.
A consistent engagement of indigenous landforms can be found at Wente Vineyards, a Greg Norman design in Livermore, 30 miles inland from San Francisco Bay, at the base of the northern end of the Diablo Range. The opening and closing holes sit at the toe of a huge grassed foothill and are dotted with oaks and sycamores. Actively farmed vineyards frame many of the holes, and in the upward hike to the 10th tee, golfers travel along a 250-foot long, eight-switchback path that feels like an homage to Lombard Street.
Wine and golf have a strong affinity in Northern California. Seventy miles north of San Francisco, in the heart of Sonoma County Wine Country, the Jack Nicklaus-designed Mayacama Golf Club makes fine use of a rugged, 675-acre site. The land sports thousands of live oaks and dense understory shrubs, interspersed with a scattering of residences done in the form of Tuscan or rural Spanish cottages. The par-72 layout, opened in 2000, stretches to just 6,813 yards, but the chief issue is keeping the ball in play, and not running out into the creek beds or washouts. With its proximity to the three premier wine growing regions of the Alexander, Dry Creek and Russian River valleys, Mayacama makes no pretense of its aspirations as a private club retreat for elite vintners. Its expansive hacienda-style clubhouse even contains private wine lockers.
It’s too bad all designers don’t have the freedom of land and the low density of housing that Nicklaus had with Mayacama. A big part of design is fighting for the integrity of golf, sometimes against developers whose primary interest is real estate, or other times against marketers coveting the publicity of what once used to be called “signature holes.” (We can at least be thankful that the term is now out of date, uttered only by novice writers at press events.)
Back in early 1995, when the land boom was devouring farmland throughout the Sacramento Valley and the biggest crop on former agricultural parcels seemed to be real estate golf, Palo Alto-based designer Robert Trent (“Bobby”) Jones Jr. was at work at Serrano Country Club in El Dorado Hills, 30 miles east of the state capitol building. The routing formed what’s called double-loaded corridors, meaning real estate paralleled holes were placed in solo or tandem formation. At the tee of the par-3 sixth hole, with water down the entire right side to a green set diagonally to the hazard, one of the developer’s representatives suggested to Bobby that he stretch the hole out to 250-plus yards from the back in an effort to surpass 7,000 yards on the scorecard. Jones didn’t miss a beat. “I design golf holes,” he told the project overseer, “Not scorecards.”
Notable, influential architects
Robert Earl Baldock (1908-2000). A former associate of Southern California-based Golden Age designer/builderWilliam Park Bell, Baldock worked out of Fresno, then Costa Mesa and succeeded on a large scale through efficiently designed, modest but playable courses, including Baywood GCC, Butte Creek CC, Chimney Rock GC, the original Monterey Peninsula CC- Shore Course, Ponderosa GC and Soule Park GC.
Robert Muir Graves (1930-2003). A Walnut Creek-based designer who championed training in landscape architecture for course design, Graves built dozens of new and renovated courses in Northern California, co-authored several books on course design, and created a legendary summer workshop at Harvard University.
John Harbottle Ill (1959-2012). A standout collegiate golfer and protege of Pete Dye, Harbottle was heavily influenced by Scottish links; his new designs include Cinnabar Hills, Schaffer’s Mill and Stevinson Ranch.
Robert Trent Jones Jr. {b. 1939). Dozens of courses, both new and renovated, were built by the elder son of the Hall of Fame architect, including Bodega Harbour (pictured below), Resort at Squaw Creek, Poppy Hills, Links at Spanish Bay, Serrano and Granite Bay.
Alister MacKenzie {1870-1934). Meadow Club, Northwood, Pasatiempo, Cypress Point, Haggin Oaks, Sharp Park. Enough said?
Kyle Phillips {b. 1958). A longtime associate of Robert Trent Jones Jr., Phillips has been on his own since 1997, with design credits for Morgan Creek GC and major renovations of Del Paso CC, California Golf Club of San Francisco and Menlo CC.
William “Willie” Watson {1860-1941). An emigre who worked intensively during the interwar Golden Age of Design, Watson designed the original Olympic Club-Ocean Course as well as the club’s Lake Course, plus Harding Park, Orinda CC, Diablo Hills, Menlo CC and Mira Vista GCC.
With energy and ambition, Jones has served himself well by relying upon a number of very fine associates, and giving them freedom. Golf design is too demanding a trade to be harnessed from a central observation point. A good designer tracks work, gets selectively involved full bore, and otherwise entrusts talented partners.
At Granite Bay GC (pictured above, credit: The Hennebrys), 25 miles northeast of Sacramento on the west side of Folsom Lake, the project brought Jones into a fascinating collaboration with a businessman named Mark Parsinen. The result was something rare-a real estate course with a core routing, as residences were confined to the outside of the property, and the course enjoyed the space and feel of a traditional golf club. For 1994, this was an eye opener.
Jones’ design associate at Granite Bay was Kyle Phillips. He hit it off so well with Parsinen that the two worked together over the next few years on Scotland’s Fife Coast, 10 miles south of St. Andrews, on what would open to rave reviews as Kingsbarns. By then, Phillips was working on his own out of an office in Granite Bay. When a chance arose to redo the prestigious but somewhat tired-looking California Golf Club of San Francisco in 2005, Phillips landed the job.
The turnaround was remarkable. When it reopened in 2007, Cal Club (pictured below) sported a very different look evocative of its 1920s design heritage, with a routing by A. Vernon Macan and the telltale escalloped bunkering of MacKenzie. Phillips recreated the layout’s shared fairways that linked parallel holes on the back nine, and in the process opened up interior viewscapes with extensive tree management. But it was his bold recapture of the heathlands look that really turned heads, including relocating the practice range to the middle of the course to regain vital play space for holes by the clubhouse.
Phillips had the bold idea of taking a previously untouched parcel and converting it into a breathtaking hilltop par-4 cape hole, the new seventh.
If, as novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives,” there are still second chances in golf. The rebirth of the Cal Club proves it. So, too, does the fate of Poppy Hills, a Jones design from the 1980s that has now reopened with an airier look, a better integration with the surrounding forest floor and a lot more diversity in its shot-making. The key to golf design-good drainage-has also been solved there, so that the course can now play, as Jones and his longtime collaborator Bruce Charlton like to say, “firm, fast and fun.”
That’s a good mantra for a highly visible golf course in Northern California. It’s also proof that after years of creating features and mounding up target areas, golf can thrive when it’s back down on the ground. The Northern California terrain allows for that, whether on coastal dunes or deep within an inland forest.
BRADLEY S. KLEIN , longtime senior writer at Golfweek, is the 2015 winner of the Donald Ross Award, presented annually by the American Society of Golf Course architects for lifetime achievement. His most recent book is “Wide Open Fairways.”
Hidden Gems
NORTHWOOD GOLF CLUB (pictured below) in Monte Rio, is a nine-hole Alister MacKenzie diamond in the rough on a bend of the Russian River that ambles through redwood trees and occupies its own eerie, heavily-shaded and cool microclimate 25 miles west of Santa Rosa.
BAYWOOD GCC in Arcata, 300 miles north of San Francisco and 90 miles below the Oregon border, is a delightful private club layout cut through towering redwoods just inland of Humboldt Bay.
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