Sunday afternoon start of final round leads to a Monday finish at AT&T Pro-Am

Despite a smörgåsbord of “Crosby weather” conditions Sunday morning, third-round play in the 2023 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am wrapped up just before noon, setting the stage for the start of final-round play.

Conditions in the afternoon were breezy and slightly brisk, but mostly dry. Towering cloudscapes drifting downwind on northwesterly zephyrs enhanced the already picturesque views from the course across Carmel Bay and Stillwater Cove toward Point Lobos, but the afternoon was generally uninterrupted by the rain squalls that had plagued the morning’s wrap-up of third-round play.

Despite the breezy conditions, there were players from back in the pack making big moves as the day progressed. Denny McCarthy, a pro since 2015 out of Rockville, Maryland, and the University of Virginia, went out in 7-under 29 on Pebble’s front nine, climbing 16 spots on the leaderboard to an eventual three-way tie for second with only one blemish on his scorecard, a bogey five at the par-four 13th hole. Also in the tie for the runner-up spot are Peter Malnati, who remained static through today’s play, and UG grad Brendon Todd, who moved up eight places carding 5-under through twelve holes, including an eagle three at the par-five second hole.

Canada’s Taylor Pendrith made the biggest move on the day, moving up 27 spots on the leaderboard to solo 5th to sit at 8-under through 16 holes.

Smaller gains, and reversals, held the NorCal players in the field back from keeping up with the big gains that were being made ahead of them, and when play was called at 5:33 p.m., Kurt Kitayama had dropped four shots, and 27 spots on the leaderboard. His precipitous drop came as the result of opening with a trio of bogeys and making a double-bogey six at #8, the cliff-hanging par-four that opens the difficult three-hole run of par-four’s—8, 9, and 10—that famed sportswriter Dan Jenkins dubbed “Abalone Corner”.

Former Stanford golfer Brandon Wu made the strongest showing of the NorCal trio, sitting at 3-under for the round through ten holes to hold at T-5. San José’s Joseph Bramlett played even par through ten holes, birdies at 2, 4, and 6 being offset by a bogey at the par-three 5th hole and a double-bogey at #8 after flying the green to the topside bunker and taking a chip and three putts to get down. He had dropped eight spots to T-13 when play was called.

Justin Rose goes into the final holes of the round the solo leader at 15-under after posting 3-under through 9 holes. Rose had teed off at 10 when the horn blew calling play, so he marked his ball—in good position on the right side of the tenth fairway—and headed for the clubhouse.

Twenty players had completed their rounds by the time play was called, and players within the top twelve when the horn blew have anywhere from one to nine holes left to complete when play resumes Monday morning at 8 a.m.

Wild weather follows delayed third round into Sunday conclusion at AT&T Pro-Am

After an eventful day on Saturday, when high winds suspended and then stopped play, the third round of the 2023 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-am wrapped up Sunday morning, setting up the reshuffle to get the final round underway. It was an archetypal “Crosby” day, with sun, wind, rain, and hail all within the three hours it took to finalize the third round of the tournament.

Justin Rose took over the 54-hole lead from over at a calmed-down and once again easy-playing MPCC Shore Course, where he completed eight holes at even par yesterday before the suspension of play and was then 6-under for 10 this morning, closing out 54 holes at 12-under.

When the third round wrapped up at around 11:30 Saturday morning Rose was followed on the leaderboard by Indiana native Peter Malnati and Chico, California’s Kurt Kitayama, both at 11-under. Tennessee’s Keith Mitchell went 2-under at Pebble in the third round, good for solo 4th, with bogeys at 10 and 17 keeping him out of a share of the lead.

Following Mitchell at 9-under, T-5, NorCal natives Joseph Bramlett, of San José, and Brandon Wu, of Danville—both Stanford Men’s Golf alumni—were within striking distance of the lead once play restarted. Joining the two Californians at T-5 were Floridian Brent Grant; first round leader Hank Lebioda, who has been stuck in neutral since taking the lead on Thursday with an 8-under 64 at MPCC Shore; and Norwegian Viktor Hovland. Hovland won the 2018 U.S. Amateur Championship here at Pebble Beach, earning exemptions into the 2019 Masters as well as the 2019 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, where he claimed Low Amateur honors.

AT&T-sponsored Jordan Spieth, the 2017 winner and 2022 runner-up in this event, hung on to make the cut at 1-under, maintaining a now 11-year-long streak of made cuts at this event.

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.

Offshore Flow defeats Crosby Weather at the 2022 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am

The phrase “Crosby Weather” has traditionally been the shortcut term for the wild & woolly weather conditions that players and spectators are called upon to endure during the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am; it is so endemic that even non-golfers in the local area use it to describe stormy weather in January and February.

Some of the most famous examples of “Crosby Weather” include the 1962 snow storm that delayed the tournament by a day (prompting Jimmy Demaret, the 1952 champion, to quip “I know I got loaded last night, but how did I end up in Squaw Valley?”); the heavy rain in 1998 that shortened the tournament to 54 holes, persisting over the weekend to the extent that the final round was delayed six months, finally being played on August 17th; and the brief but heavy hailstorm on tournament Sunday in 2019 that carpeted the putting greens with white pellets, resulting in a two-hour delay that pushed the event to a Monday finish[*].

The forecast for the week of the
2022 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am is
uncharacteristic for the time of year.

This year, however, in keeping with the new world order that seems to be affecting all aspects of life on planet Earth in 2022, the new two-word buzzphrase for the weather at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am is “offshore flow”. High pressure over the inland areas of the western United States is causing winds that blow from the interior to the coast, northeast to southwest; the air compresses as it descends to lower elevations and, as you know if you were paying attention in your high school science class, warms up as a result.

The forecast for what we locals still call “Crosby Week” is for mostly clear and sunny, if somewhat chilly, conditions. The winds will generally be calm at the low, coastal elevations where the three courses in the tournament rota are located, so we are likely to see some low scoring this year.

We are also seeing the return of spectators and amateur playing partners to the event after their absence in 2021 due to COVID-19 restrictions, and the third course in the rota, Monterey Peninsula Country Club’s Shore Course, which sat out last year due to the reduced field size.

As much as some PGA Tour pros, and some golf pundits, don’t like the pro-am format of this event, the presence of celebrity golfers and even the deep-pockets non-celebrity amateurs in the field is a unique and very special factor in the success of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, and we are very happy to see things getting back to something like normal.

Except for the weather, which is going to be spectacular.

[*] Five-time AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am winner Phil Mickelson seems to thrive on delayed finishes at this event; the 1998 and 2019 tournaments were his first and fifth wins at Pebble Beach.

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)