Pebble Beach, 2024: Everything changes, but is it for the better?

The AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, which is far and away my favorite PGA Tour event, has been through a lot of changes over the years. Still sometimes referred to by old-timers from the area (like me…) as “the Crosby”, the event can trace its roots to 1934, when crooner Bing Crosby got together with a bunch of his celebrity pals at the Old Brockway Golf Course on Lake Tahoe’s North Shore for golf, food, drinks, and laughs.

In 1937 Bing moved the get-together to the Rancho Santa Fe Golf Club, north of San Diego, where he had a home on the back nine. This is when the pro-am aspect 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.

AT&T took over as the presenting sponsor in 1986, dropping the Crosby name (and Crosby family involvement) from the tournament, when Bing’s second wife, Kathryn Crosby, sold off the naming rights to AT&T for a cool half-million dollars.

In its Monterey Peninsula glory days the event drew scores of fans to the beautiful scenery of the rugged coastline – and to the star-studded field of pro golfers matched up with celebrities from the world of entertainment such as Phil Harris, James Garner, Jack Lemmon*, and Clint Eastwood (now a partner in the ownership group of the property). The star power of the celebrity amateurs slipped over the years, with sports heroes, B-list (or lower) Hollywood types, and corporate bigwigs taking over the amateur field, but the scenery and the promise of a glimpse of a famous (or semi-famous) name struggling to make the pro-am cut (cough, cough Ray Romano cough, cough) still drew the crowds, especially on Saturday, when the A-list celebrity/pro pairings were all stacked up on Pebble itself.

For 2024, however, the upheaval in the world of men’s professional golf of the last two years, engendered by the influx of Saudi money and the creation of the LIV Golf league, has resulted in the largest change in the structure and format of this event since the Second World War shut it down.

In order to deal with the threat represented by the deep pockets of the Saudi PIF and their apparent determination to dominate the world of men’s professional golf, the PGA Tour created Signature events, tournaments with limited fields, no cut (except for three player-hosted tournaments), and most importantly, to the players at least, increased purses – $20 million (up from $9 million in the case of this tournament), with $3.6 million to the winner.

For this event, quickly, the changes for 2024 are: 

• 80-player field vice the old 156-player field.
• Course rota cut down to two courses (Pebble Beach itself, and Spyglass Hill) from three, with weekend play only on Pebble.
• Amateurs playing Thursday and Friday only.
• Amateur players restricted as to handicap (looking for better, and hopefully faster, players), and no more show business amateurs; just deep-pocket corporate and pro sports amateurs.

AT&T-featured player Jordan Spieth spoke to the assembled media at Pebble Beach on Wednesday afternoon, and as he struggled to be heard over the gusty winds that rattled the temporary tarps-over-frame media-center structure, he said that the tournament this year has “a lot less Bing Crosby” in the event this year; “on course it feels like a major, off course it feels a lot less like the old Crosby**.” 

Jordan also mentioned the potential thrill of seeing some of the best players in the world (18 of the Top 20 in the World Rankings are in the field this week) coming down the stretch in contention on Sunday afternoon. While this is undoubtedly a Good Thing, how will the new format of this classic, and formerly unique, event compare to the glory days of yore – and how will the fans, both onsite and at home, react to the new look?

No other event in the world of professional golf has ever looked like Pebble Beach – and I’m not just talking about the scenery. Now, however, with the exception of the scenery (which is unmatched in the game  – fight me…), an event that started as a gathering of friends for golf and laughs, and thrived as an entertainment showcase and the premier charity-beneficent event in professional golf, has morphed over 80 years’ time into a bigger-money clone of seven other events on the schedule.

Maybe a Sunday afternoon with four or five of the top 10 players in the world coming down the stretch in contention for the trophy makes for an exciting finish, but honestly, we can see that several times a year, at many other tournaments. What we have lost in this change, however, is an intangible charm that “the Clambake” brought to the world of professional golf for one rainy/sunny/windswept wintertime week every year – a charm that, I’m afraid, we will never see again in the even-bigger-money New Age of men’s professional golf.

* (Youngsters in the audience may want to do a quick online search of some of these names.)

** (It hasn’t been called “the Crosby” since eight years before Jordan was born.)

The State of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am

Golf fans of a certain age, myself included, remember when the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am—aka the Crosby Clambake, the Bing Crosby Pro-Am, etc.—was a glamour event. Back in the days when the list of celebrity amateurs included such names as Clint Eastwood, James Garner, Jack Lemmon, and Phil Harris, and the professional ranks could list multiple members of the Top 20 players list. These days, however, as the amateurs list has moved from the original ratio of roughly four parts professional golfers to one part show business and sports celebrities, to a one-to-one ratio in a field that consists mostly of middle- to lower-tier pros, and CEOs and B- and C-list celebrities, the revered tournament has lost much of its luster.

But what would be required to return this tournament to some semblance of its former glory? On the amateur side of the roster that is a two-pronged question: 1) How to get a better class of celebrities, and 2) how to improve the viewing (and playing) experience while still maintaining the unique pro-am format.

The first part of that question is difficult to answer. The mechanics of who gets invited is a closely held secret, I imagine, known only to the inner circle of the responsible people in the presenting sponsor’s organization and their counterparts in the tournament’s organizing committee. The names of such popular celebrities of recent years as George Lopez and Andy Garcia (who was easily the best-dressed and most dapper amateur in the field in recent times) are now absent from the amateur roster, supplanted by DJs with single names and rap singers with rap sheets. The definition of “celebrity” has become so diluted these days that the glamour associated with the no-s**t-for-real movie stars that walked the fairways of Pebble, Cypress, and MPCC Shore in the “olden days” appears to be lost forever.

When it comes to improving the viewing and playing experience while maintaining the pro-am format, I think that that is an easier question to answer—though the people who mind the purse strings aren’t likely to look favorably on my solution: trim the field. The buy-in for amateur players is—well, it’s a big number; but one that a large number of “high-value individuals” (aka “rich people”) are willing to pay. I guess the cost is worth it for bragging rights at the 19th Hole of their home clubs; to be able to say that they played Pebble (and the other two courses) with a pro. Needless to say, the wealthy non-celebrity amateurs bring a lot cash to the coffers of the Monterey Peninsula Foundation, money that allows the Foundation to do a lot of good things in the way of charitable giving in the area.

Maybe the 4:1 ratio of Bing’s original format is too much to ask for, but cutting the pro-am field to no more than half of the full field is a feasible solution—or perhaps even 1:3, allowing the field to be split such that one course in each of the first three rounds is pro-am teams slogging through six-hour rounds while the pro-only groupings play the other two at a more normal pace.

As for improving the professional field, that is another two-part question. While once upon a time the chance to network and schmooze with the movers and shakers of the business world was a draw for the professional players in the field, in these days of agents, social media, and even the tour’s PIP system, that seems to be less of an attraction—and it is well-known that six-hour rounds with a CEO or hedge fund manager, even on the amazing and scenic courses in the tournament’s rota, are offputting to most of the top pros.

The other factor is money (of course.) While no slouch in the prize money department, with a total purse of $9 million and $1,620,000 to the winner, the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am lags behind the Tour’s new classification of “designated” events with their $20 million purses. In fact, Davis Thompson, who recently carded a career-best second-place finish at The American Express at La Quinta, in Palm Springs, WD’d from this tournament after receiving a sponsor’s exemption into next week’s Waste Management Phoenix Open, a designated event which carries the aforementioned $20M purse. His advertised reason was to get a week of rest after four weeks of play, but one wonders if, given his recent success at desert golf, the $20M purse isn’t an incentive.

Jordan Spieth had something to say about things that could help the tournament, both possible format changes as well as potential elevated status, in his press conference on Wednesday:

“I’m not sure how it could work. Let’s put it this way: I'm not sure exactly how it could work. I think maintaining, at least, if it’s not every year elevated, if it were to rotate or something like that.

You know, you still have the opportunity to have the pro-am portion and you could still work it into an elevated event, I think. It doesn’t really need to change. Or that year you have the pro-am going on on other two courses or — I think there's some options to play around with.”

If you have been reading my coverage over the years, you know that I am a big fan of this tournament, however it goes – but I think that in order to regain its former prestige, some changes will have to be made. I will be here for it, whatever happens.

Starting my second decade at the Crosby

Once again, my favorite week of the year has rolled around. No, it’s not Spring Break, or even Christmas vacation – it’s Crosby Week.

The poster for the first “Crosby” hints at the
fun-loving nature of the event in the early days.

For those in my audience who are below the age of, say, 50, “the Crosby” (officially the “Bing Crosby Pro-Amateur Golf Championship”, aka “the “Crosby Clambake”) is what the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am was called before AT&T brought a bucket of money to the table and started a decades-long run as presenting sponsor of the tournament. Started in the 1930s by crooner Bing Crosby (you youngsters can Google him) as a weekend get-together  for a bunch of his showbiz friends at Old Brockway Golf Course on Lake Tahoe’s North Shore, the tournament was later moved to Rancho Santa Fe, just north of San Diego, where the event’s pro-am format began. Bing would pair 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 event came back from a 1942 wartime postponement with a move to the Monterey Peninsula in 1947, where it was played at Pebble Beach Golf Links and a rotating cast of supporting courses such as Cypress Point, the Monterey Peninsula Country Club’s Shore Course, Poppy Hills (home of the NCGA) and Spyglass Hill, over the years. In 1986 the people at AT&T bought out Bing’s widow, Katherine Crosby, changed the name of the tournament, and have been carrying on the tradition ever since.

My own history with this tournament started with watching it on TV as a kid growing up in nearby Salinas. I didn’t play golf, nor did any of my friends or their fathers, but everyone we knew watched the tournament. When I finally got interested in golf, many years later (thanks to the golf writing of Dan Jenkins…) and started playing and then writing about golf, I was lucky enough to get a foot in the door of the golf media world as a part-time freelancer, and get the privilege of entry to the media center at Pebble Beach for this event.

I actually wrote about this event for the first time in 2011, the year that saw long-time celebrity entrant Bill Murray and his then-new pro partner D.A. Points score the historic double, their team taking the pro-am trophy while Points won the pro event. I wrote that article (Cinderella Story) based on watching the event on TV at home, but two years later I was walking into the media center in the conference rooms above the Pebble Beach Gallery shops, a 50-something semi-rookie (I had started my official golf media career the previous year at the 2012 U.S. Open at the Olympic Club), rubbing elbows with the men and women who do this for a living.

I have covered the event every year since (though physically absent during the lockdown year of 2021), so the 2023 tournament marks my eleventh go-round, and the first year of my second decade as more than just a fan of the event.

In that time I have made friends amongst the ranks of the people who cover sports for a living. I kept my ears open and my mouth shut (for the most part), learning what I could from the pros in what used to be called the “press room”, and have enjoyed enlightening conversations with the likes of Bay Area sports writing legend Art Spander; the San Francisco Chronicle’s Ron Kroichick; and Mark Purdy, the now-retired sports maven for the San José Mercury News. When my first media affiliation, with the Examiner.com website, ended with the site’s demise in 2016, the connection I had made with the NCGA through my fellow Salinas homeboy and now NCGA Communications Director, Jerry Stewart, has kept me “in with the in-crowd” (PGA Tour press credentials are not available to freelancers without an affiliation with an acknowledged media outlet.)

It has been a privilege to walk the cart paths of Pebble Beach and the affiliated courses over the past decade, and to write about the events that transpire over these four days. I have seen a varied cast of characters leading and even winning this event, from big names like Phil Mickelson (twice) to no-names like Ted Potter, Jr. (sorry, Ted), and the storied venue and its companions in the rota haves never failed to provide drama and excitement – not to mention the best scenery on the PGA Tour. I look forward to at least a few more years of bringing my audience the stories from Pebble Beach (I’m no spring chicken, after all…) and hope that people enjoy reading about it as much as I enjoy writing about it.

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)

When It Comes to the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, John Hawkins Doesn’t Get It

Earlier this week Morning Read pundit John Hawkins posted an opinion piece about the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am entitled “Pebble Beach deserves better fate with PGA Tour”, in which he opined “A golf tournament at Pebble Beach in February is like Christmas in June”. The gist of the article is that this magnificent seaside venue deserves better than to be saddled with a February slot in the schedule and a hit-and-giggle pro-am. Among his suggestions? Make Pebble Beach the venue for the Tour Championship, in August.

After the statement above, Hawkins went on to write, “…instead of hosting a premium event in glorious conditions on prime-time television, Pebble peddles a Saturday full of Bill Murray in a multi-venue pro-am featuring some of the most inclement weather known to golfkind.”

Let me say this right now – Hawkins hasn’t got a clue. He tries to spin the piece as if he is suggesting improvements to better showcase this iconic venue, but what he doesn’t get, among other things, are the traditions of the event.

The Pebble Beach Pro-Am, in its original incarnation as the “Crosby Clambake”, originated the pro-am format, and still defines it. The event started in 1937 at the San Diego-area’s Rancho Santa Fe Golf course when Bing Crosby got a few golf pros and entertainment-business friends together to play golf and raise money for local charities. The original “Clambake” went into hibernation in 1942 due to the onset of World War II, and was revived in the familiar Monterey Peninsula location in 1947. 

Another prominent California-based pro-am golf tournament, the Palm Springs-area event now known as the Desert Classic, is a copy-cat that got its start when Crosby’s “road movie” co-star Bob Hope decided that he wanted to host a pro-am tourney of his own. It’s a tried-and-true formula that draws legions of spectators. You wouldn’t want to see it every week, but a time or two per year, it’s fun.

Another of Hawkins’ gripes is the weather during the event. Originally played in mid- January, the weather was known to sometimes be… tempestuous – not for nothing is the term “Crosby weather” a Monterey-area shorthand for wind and rain – and yes, there was a snow delay in 1962.

The tournament bounced around within the month of January over the years in search of better weather before settling into its current early-to-mid February time slot in 1979. The weather can still be problematic – witness last year’s delay due to a brief but intense hailstorm, which forced that bane of golf writers everywhere, a Monday finish – but compared to the weather patterns that dominate most of the continental United States in February, the Central California coast generally serves up the kind of enviable conditions that put smiles on the faces of the local Chamber of Commerce, and realtors.

One of Hawkins’ suggestions is to move the Tour Championship, with its late-August time slot, to Pebble Beach, fleeing the heat and humidity of Atlanta, or as he put it: “Playing for $15 million in gleaming August twilight on golf’s largest postcard turns common sense into the ultimate no-brainer.” While it’s true that the Monterey area serves up weather that’s much preferable to Atlanta’s late-summer conditions, the summer months tend toward overcast on the California coast, so – and as a native of the area I say this with love – his “gleaming August twilight” is more likely to be a gloomy, gradual dimming instead.

That summertime gloom is the reason that the PGA Tour Champions event that is held at Pebble and nearby Poppy Hills (home course of the Northern California Golf Association), the PURE Insurance Championship Benefitting the First Tee, moved from June back to its original September time slot a few years ago.

Hawkins’ ultimate proposal is to reposition the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am back-to-back with the First Tee event. This idea has as its first drawback an untenable logistics problem; as its second, a diminishing of the event by moving it into the former Fall Tour portion of the schedule; as its third, a potential conflict with the Safeway Open, an established early-season event held at the Silverado Resort in the Napa wine country, three hours north of Pebble Beach; and last but not least, a major loss of revenue for the resort resulting from shutting down for two weeks during its best-weather high season period.

The bottom line is that Hawkins’ opinion piece displays a comprehensive level of ignorance of the essence of this event. It may no longer be the glamorous “Clambake” of old (Bing’s widow sold the tournament to AT&T in 1986, deleting the Crosby name over son-and-tournament-director Nathaniel’s objections) – but the weather, which even in rainy (or worse) conditions cannot completely disguise the beauty of the locale, and the pro-am format, with its slow rounds, ugly swings, and sometimes silly behavior (I’m talking about you, Bill Murray…) are hallmarks of the event.

Any significant change to the tournament, whether a time slot move or a change in format, would compromise the history and traditions of an event which holds a unique opposition in the PGA Tour’s parade of week-to-week, cookie cutter tournaments.

Pebble is special—in more ways than one

Pebble Beach Golf Links occupies a special place in the world of golf, a position that is based on the physical beauty of its location, the design of the course, and its historical significance in the game.

History
Nothing accords a golf course a special position in the annals of the game like the USGA choosing it as the site for their premier championships—the United States Open and the U.S. Amateur. Pebble Beach Golf Links has hosted the Open six times now, which puts it behind only two other golf courses, both venerable East Coast layouts: Oakmont Country Club, in Pennsylvania (9); and Baltusrol, in New Jersey (7).

This plaque, in the rough on the left side of the 17th green at Pebble Beach Golf Links, commemorates Tom Watson’s historic chip shot in the final round of the 82nd U.S. Open.

Pebble holds the distinction of being the first public golf course (that is, open to play by the public) to host the U. S. Open, in 1972, when the course rewarded the USGA’s decision by producing a truly worthy winner—Jack Nicklaus—and an historic moment—Jack’s laser-beam 1-iron at the par-three 17th hole, a shot that rattled the stick for a kick-in birdie.

Ten years later Pebble’s second U.S. Open put up another worthy winner, Tom Watson, who finally racked up a win in the national championship after two Masters wins (1977, 1981) and three British Opens (1975, 1977, 1980); and another historic moment at the 17th hole—a chip-in birdie from lush Open rough next to the green, the shot that set up his victory over Jack Nicklaus—a shot so revered that it has been commemorated with a plaque.

In addition to the U.S. Open, the course has played host to the U.S. Amateur five times (1929, 1947, 1961, 1999, 2018), second only to six-time hosts Merion Golf Club and The Country Club (well known as the site of amateur Francis Ouimet’s thrilling 1913 U.S. Open victory over Harold Vardon and Ted Ray.) 

The event that really put Pebble on the map was Bing Crosby’s “Clambake” pro-am. Originally played at San Diego’s Rancho Santa Fe Golf Course beginning in 1937, the event was halted in 1942 by the onset of American involvement in World War II. When the event resumed in 1947 it was relocated to the Monterey Peninsula, playing on a trio of golf courses centered on Pebble Beach.

Showcasing the beauty of the Monterey Peninsula, with a star-studded list of Hollywood A-listers (Phil Harris, James Garner, and Jack Lemmon, to name a few) on the amateur roster, the Clambake was a PR bonanza for the region which continues to this day, in its current incarnation as the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.

Design
Challenging despite its relative lack of length—7,075 yards as set up for the Open; 6,958 for the AT&T Pro-Am—Pebble Beach makes up for its lack of yardage in other ways. While it has its detractors (mostly those course architecture buffs who revere the provision of options off the tee), Pebble presents its challenge to golfers largely in its second and third shots, and putting.

Sloping fairways and uneven lies put a premium on second-shot performance at Pebble. For example: holes 9 and 10 slope significantly to the right, in the direction of the “Cliffs of Doom” overlooking Carmel Beach; at the 6th hole you’re faced with a looming three-story-high cliff face that separates you from the putting green.

The greens at Pebble demand approach-shot accuracy of the highest order. At an average area of 3,500 square feet they are the smallest on the PGA Tour, with an average depth of 26 paces, so precision shooting from the fairway (hopefully) is paramount.

Precision second shots and fearless putting are the key to success at Pebble Beach; it’s a shotmaker’s course that asks a lot of a player.

Beauty
For the casual golf fan, or folks who aren’t golf fans, in particular, but who show up or tune in during the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am to see their favorite celebrities tee it up, Pebble Beach is special for its location.

Whether or not Robert Louis Stevenson ever called Carmel Bay “…the most felicitous meeting of land and sea in creation…” (hint: he didn’t), it is a famously beautiful setting—blue Pacific waters lapping up against the rugged, rocky California coastline, all backdropped by the green and gold oak-bedecked hills of the Santa Lucia Range rising up behind.


The rocky cliffs that edge much of the golf course give way, going south, to the broad sandy crescent of Carmel Beach, and further south yet, past the village of Carmel-by-the-Sea and Carmel River Beach, to the rocky fastness of Point Lobos State Preserve (which Australian painter Francis McComas did call the “greatest meeting of land and water in the world”), visible from the southern reaches of the golf course.


The television coverage during the AT&T is rife with beauty shots of the scenery and the local marine wildlife—seals and sea lions, whales, dolphins, orcas and the occasional squadron of pelicans flying above the blue waters in echelon-right formation—and the ubiquitous “dogs frolicking in the surf on Carmel Beach” shots.

These images are a large part of the reason that the television coverage of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am is so popular: while viewers in much of the country are shivering in sub-zero temperatures and/or digging out from the latest snowstorm, the Central California coast is, more often than not, enjoying sunshine and pleasant temperatures. (And when “Crosby weather” kicks in, with wind and rain and TV shots of umbrellas being flipped inside-out, the East Coast and Midwest audiences can gloat, just a little, at those Californians getting a taste of nasty weather.)

This combination of factors: the quality of the golf course, the almost overwhelming beauty of its location, and the history of the events associated with the venue give Pebble Beach Golf Links a unique position in the game of golf.