If you are going to gripe about the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, get your facts straight.

On the Monday after the final round of the 2021 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, a GolfWRX.com contributor named Ronald Montesano pulled up his soapbox and summed up the event, taking the opportunity to laud the absence of amateurs (thank you, COVID-19), take shots at the native Californians in the event who didn’t win, and generally pitch in his uninformed two-cents worth from a part of the country where golf courses lie sleeping under blankets of snow from October to May.

PEBBLE BEACH, CALIFORNIA - FEBRUARY 13: Tom Hoge of the United States plays his second shot on the ninth hole during the third round of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am at Pebble Beach Golf Links on February 13, 2021 in Pebble Beach, California. (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

I read his piece (Berger wins at Pebble, golf world wakes up) with much head-shaking, and considered scrolling down to the Comments section to set him straight on a few points—but then I decided that I would get a bigger audience here.

This is what I have to say to Ronald: 

“You really should do some research before you sit down at your computer in the frozen tundra of Buffalo, New York and start pounding, monkey-like, at the keyboard, Ron.

“Referring to the Crosby Clambake in your latest Tour Rundown article, you wrote, ‘That event went through an evolution, from a few friends in the California desert to a move to the coast, to a short stay in North Carolina (without the PGA Tour, of course) when AT&T took over the title on tour.’ This sentence runs the gamut from grossly misconstrued to factually incorrect, so let me enlighten you.”

The Crosby Pro-Am was never held in the desert. The event that we now know as the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am can trace its earliest roots to 1934, to an informal gathering of Bing’s celebrity friends at the Old Brockway Golf Course on Lake Tahoe’s North Shore. In 1937 Bing moved the get-together to Rancho Santa Fe, just north of San Diego, where he had a house on the back nine. This is when the pro-am really began, with Crosby pairing touring pros with amateur players drawn from the ranks of his show-business friends, and the member of the Lakeside Golf Club in Hollywood, where he was a member (and five-time club champion).

“The Clambake” as the event came to be called, named for the closing-night beach party, ran for five years in Rancho Santa Fe before the Second World War called a halt, but in 1947 civic leaders in Monterey convinced Crosby to revive the event and move it to the Monterey Peninsula, where it became the National Pro-Am Golf Championship. From the beginning of its run at Pebble Beach, the tournament was a charity event that supported local causes, and it has remained so for 75 years.

As for “…a short stay in North Carolina”, well, when AT&T took over as the presenting sponsor in 1986, dropping the Crosby name (and Crosby family involvement) from the tournament, Bing’s second wife, Kathryn Crosby, started a somewhat look-alike charity tournament in the Winston-Salem, North Carolina area called the Bing Crosby National Celebrity Golf Tournament. Running from 1986 until 2001, this event did feature both amateur and professional players, but they did not play together in pro-am pairings. (Kathryn Crosby was responsible for the sell-off of the naming rights to AT&T, for a cool half-million dollars.)

Of course, in this COVID-19 year all golf tournaments have looked different, with, as of this writing, only one—the Waste Management Phoenix Open—allowing spectators (and then only a fraction of the usual number), and the Pebble Beach Pro-Am was no different.

For the first time, there were no crowds of spectators lining the fairways and clustered around the greens, and not only that, there were no amateur playing partners—so the event was a “pro-am” in name, but not in fact. Cutting down the field to just the 156 pros brought in another change from previous years—the move to two golf courses, Pebble Beach and Spyglass Hill, leaving the third course of recent years, the Monterey Peninsula Country Club’s Shore Course, off the roster.

Montesano had something to say about all this, too (another mixed bag of mostly bad takes):

“Should the amateurs return? In one word: No. We don’t love golf for the antics of the celebrities, and we don’t need to see corporate types […] play well on a big stage.”

While the 2021 event had a different look from its seventy-four predecessors, without the amateur participants it just looked like a better version of a regular PGA Tour stop (because, hey, Pebble Beach and Spyglass Hill). The pros might have liked the (relatively) quicker pace of play and shorter rounds, but those who play this event regularly missed the networking opportunities that the tournament has always provided—many a lucrative sponsorship or other business relationship has had its beginning in a pairing at Pebble Beach.

And sure, this is no longer the Golden Age of radio, movies, and TV, and the celebrity roster has, in recent years, lost a bit of the glamour of the past. No longer do stars of the magnitude of Phil Harris, James Garner, Jack Lemmon, and Clint Eastwood stride down the fairways during the event, but there is a new generation coming up who have name recognition and a love for the game that matches the big names of yore.

The lone celebrity event that remained on the schedule this year, a Wednesday five-hole charity shootout, included stars of the worlds of movies and TV (Bill Murray, Alfonso Ribeiro, and Kathryn Newton), music (hip-hop recording artist Macklemore), sports (Arizona Cardinals WR Larry Fitzgerald), and even a former Miss America (Kira K. Dixon). This mini field of celebrity golfers all have stick, and put on a good show while raising a wad of cash for the event’s causes.

PEBBLE BEACH, CALIFORNIA - FEBRUARY 10:  Kira K. Dixon tees off on the 18th hole during the Charity Challenge at AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am on February 10, 2021 at Pebble Beach Golf Links in Pebble Beach, California. (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

And even the corporate CEOs and other deep-pockets participants have their place. Sure these folks are almost all members at swanky private clubs, and while they may play more golf than many of us, on better golf courses, they don’t play for a living like the pros they are paired with. Watching them play alongside a pro in this event allows us to vicariously put our games up against the highest standard in the world—and that chance at comparison has entertainment value.

The celebrity watching which makes Saturday of tournament week (when the biggest names are scheduled at Pebble Beach) the best-attended day of the tournament broadens the scope of attraction for this event beyond golfers. I have seen a bigger gallery following a pairing which included a San Francisco Giants pitcher than I think I have ever seen following any of the pros.

“Why might the amateurs stay? Some would point to the origin of the event, as the Bing Crosby Clambake. It’s the last event that folks from past generations (little dig there, I think – GKM) associate with a celebrity host; [no other event has] had that staying power.”

I can sum it up in one word: tradition. Bing Crosby invented this format, and while imitators sprang up over the years, the Pebble Beach Pro-Am—the original and the greatest—is the only one that still survives. The Bob Hope Desert Classic came closest to the format of the Crosby, but that event, and all of the rest of the celebrity-name events on the PGA Tour over the years have either morphed into something else or faded away entirely.

I grew up in Salinas, an inland farming community not far from Pebble Beach, and though neither I nor any of my friends or family played golf when I was growing up, everybody knew the Crosby, and watched it on TV on those January or February weekends in the ’60s and ’70s.

“The AT&T has the opportunity to reimagine its event, (to) make the bold decision to eliminate the Am portion of the event. Return the Monterey Peninsula (Country Club) Shore Course to the rotation next year (and) add even more professionals…”

Here Mr Montesano is off-base in more ways than one. As I laid out above, the amateur participants are a huge part of this tournament’s appeal, and an enduring tradition that has no counterpart in the world of golf. Eliminating that aspect of the tournament would change it into just another PGA Tour event, albeit an exceptionally beautiful one, as no other venue that the Tour travels to can provide such scenic vistas.

Yes, we look forward to the return of the MPCC Shore Course to the event; it is a beautiful and strategic seaside layout that takes good advantage of its location, and being private, its inclusion provides golf fans with an opportunity to see the course that they otherwise would not have. As for adding even more professionals—while going back to three courses and a 54-hole cut with no amateurs might make it feasible, schedule-wise, to bump up the standard 156-player field, such a move would require approval from the PGA Tour, and, I warrant, the Players Advisory Committee.

To sum up: While I admit to a certain bias, having grown up in the area watching this event on TV, and now, as a golf writer, having attended the event in a professional capacity for eight years in a row, I look forward to a return to normality (hopefully) for the 2022 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am; a return to throngs of spectators, and amateur playing partners—both celebrities and CEOs; a return to three courses and a 54-hole cut; a return to the traditions that make this tournament stand out, head-and-shoulders above the rest of the cookie-cutter events on the PGA Tour.

A return to all the things that make this tournament the one that we who love it still call “The Crosby”.

(References for facts presented in this article: Cover Stories, a publication of the Monterey Peninsula Foundation Book Project Staff, 2009; 18 Holes with Bing, by Nathaniel Crosby with John Strege, Harper Collins Publishers, 2016)