Golf, being a wholly outdoor game, is subject to the whims of the weather, and nowhere more so than at the seaside venues which carry on the traditions of the game’s nascency in Scotland. The AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, contested on the famed oceanside venue on the Monterey Peninsula, and two neighboring courses, has had its share of weather delays over the years: a rain delay in 1996 that postponed the final round until the following August, a hailstorm in 2019 that pushed the final round to a Monday playoff finish, and even a snow delay in 1962. Arguably the biggest changes in the tournament’s history, however, have come about as a result of World War II, and a global pandemic.
The original Crosby Clambake, as it was informally known in its early years, was played at Rancho Santa Fe, in the San Diego area, from 1937 to 1942, and then halted, as many events were, by the United States’ entry into World War II. Revived in 1947 and moved to Pebble Beach, the event became a staple of the Monterey Peninsula events calendar.
Through thick and thin, fair weather and foul, PGA Tour pros and their amateur partners have flocked to the golf mecca of the Monterey Peninsula to take part in this unique event, undeterred by the unpredictable weather conditions. The weather has been so much of a factor over the years that the phrase “Crosby weather” has come into use among locals, even non-golfers, as a shorthand term for the widely variable conditions that the area is subject to in the January-February timeframe in which the tournament has been played over the years.
The 2021 event, however, is faced with a more ominous obstacle—the COVID-19 pandemic—which will give this year’s event a (hopefully) unique position in the tournament’s history: for the first time, the tournament will be played by professionals alone, with no amateur partners.
We have become accustomed over the last several months to seeing golf tournaments being played without spectators, and with the continuing high rate of new cases of COVID-19 as well as deaths due to the disease, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the amateur component of the event is being cut this year.
With the field down to just 156 professionals, the usual triumvirate of courses; most recently Pebble Beach Golf Links, Spyglass Hill Golf Course, and the Monterey Peninsula Country Club’s Shore Course, will be trimmed to just the two Del Monte Company properties: Pebble Beach and Spyglass Hill.
The tournament will still be enjoyable for television viewers—watching the pros take on these two venues is always a worthwhile way to spend a couple of weekend afternoons—and with any luck we will get to see a bit more of Spyglass Hill than we have in the past.
Spyglass is the course which prompted Jack Nicklaus to comment “Pebble and Cypress (Cypress Point Golf Club, which was in the Pebble Beach Pro-Am lineup until 1990), they make you want to play golf. Spyglass Hill—that’s different; Spyglass makes you want to go fishing.”
Acknowledged to be the most difficult of the three courses in play in the tournament, Spyglass Hill, a Robert Trent Jones design, was a controversial selection when it first entered the lineup, in 1967. Brand new, and in need of some growing in and adjusting, Spyglass drew approbation for the first couple of years that it was in the line-up; after its tournament debut an anonymous amateur contestant commented, “We played Spyglass under some unfortunate conditions—it was open.”
Not only can we hope to see more of Spyglass, but with any luck the course will be allowed to show its teeth to an extent that has been lacking in recent years. Under normal conditions all three courses are played to the same flags for the first three days so that all contestants play the same setup—which means that the hole locations at Spyglass Hill are eased up for the sake of the amateur contestants.
With a pros-only field this year, I hope to see both Spyglass Hill and Pebble played to more challenging flags than we are accustomed to seeing during this event, which will silence some of the naysayers who decry this tournament as a fluff stop on the PGA Tour, and the courses—Pebble in particular—as beautiful, but not necessarily challenging.
In any event, what we will see, I imagine, is that this event, a cherished, long-standing tradition on the Monterey Peninsula, will carry on despite the challenges presented by the current health crisis—and come back as strong as ever in 2022.
