The NCGA’s all-new Poppy Ridge debuts May 31

Very few AGAs (1) in the United States own and operate their own golf course; in fact, only four (the NCGA, and the Oregon, Washington, and Colorado AGAs) do so, and of those four only one—the Northern California Golf Association—owns and operates two courses. Those two courses—Poppy Hills, in the Del Monte Forest on the Monterey Peninsula; and Poppy Ridge, in the midst of the vineyards and golden hills of the Livermore Valley in Contra Costa County—present two very different golf experiences encompassing the wide range of landscapes that comprise “NCGA territory”.

Poppy Hills, which opened in 1986, was the first course in the country to be built and operated by an AGA. The wooded property, which is also home to NCGA headquarters, underwent a major renovation in 2014 that improved drainage across the entire property, reduced irrigated acreage, and replaced the late-1980s-vintage irrigation system with a modern system. Now Poppy Hills’ ten-years younger sibling, Poppy Ridge, which drapes across a rolling landscape of golden hills and lush green vineyards southeast of the City of Livermore, is reopening after an even more comprehensive reworking that has resulted in what is essentially an entirely new course.

The 17th green at the new Poppy Ridge gleams in “golden hour” sunlight, overlooked by rolling hills and the soaring wind turbines that line a distant ridge. (photo credit: Joann Dost)

 

 “If you were to ask people what is a postcard of California wine country, this would be it – Jay Blasi

The new Poppy Ridge will be an eye-opener for players who were familiar with the 1996 Rees Jones layout. The original 1996 design was made up of three nine-hole loops—appropriately named Chardonnay, Merlot, and Zinfandel. This configuration allowed flexibility and variety for the golfers who came to play there, but suffered from compromises in routing and terrain that made walking the course untenable for most golfers, and could lead to time-consuming rounds of golf. The new layout, designed by course architect Jay Blasi based on guidelines provided by the NCGA, has what I consider to be a more sensible use of 27 holes of golf; it now consists of an 18-hole championship layout and the Ridge 9, a nine-hole course with seven par-4 holes and a pair of par-3s.

“We basically started over, and we built a new golf course on top of a site that used to have a golf course.” – Jay Blasi

The new layout is so different from the 1996 design that even longtime course employees have had to relearn their way around the property. Players familiar with the old Poppy Ridge will note that the 18-hole course is laid out over territory that comprised the Zinfandel nine and part of Chardonnay, mostly north of the clubhouse, while the Ridge 9 encompasses part of what used to be the Merlot nine and some of Chardonnay.

Toned Down, But Still Challenging

One of Jay Blasi’s main goals for the redesign was to improve walkability on the new 18-hole championship layout. While still a hilly course, walking 18-holes at around 6500 yards (the blue tees) is now some 2,000 yards shorter than the original setup, with 400 feet less elevation change overall.

Reworking the routing to tighten and smooth the transitions between holes involved moving some 250,000 cubic yards of soil. In many cases moving that volume of earth is done to add, or increase, contouring, but in this case that work was done, as Blasi told me, “…to soften the property, to make those transitions more manageable and easier to walk. We weren’t moving dirt to make things more exciting; the landscape was already big and beautiful and exciting—we were doing it to kind of tone it down a bit and make it more suitable for golf.”

There’s no denying that the Poppy Ridge property is a dramatic and dynamic piece of landscape on which to build a golf course. It is a property of rolling hills on which some holes rise to meet you, some lay out in front of you in full view, and others test your faith with a blind second shot. It is also criss-crossed with deeper cuts, such as the area where the drop-off-a-cliff par-three 17th hole was built. Playing at distances ranging between 154 yards from the championship (orange) tees to a mere 67 yards from the most forward tees (green), the vertical aspect of this dramatic little one-shotter will challenge a player’s club-selection skills. Its neighbor, the par-three 14th, teases with an uphill carry—more so from the forward tees—over an area of native growth; a friendly hillside to the left of the green is a safe aiming strategy for the daring carry on this hole.

Another of the goals for the new course was to make it fun and playable for all levels of golfers. Compared to the old course there is less water in play, and less sand in play. The fairways are wide and accommodating, but careful attention to placement for the approach shot will pay off, and most of the greens are open at the front to allow the ball to be run up onto the green—flying it high and landing it soft will not be the only option for hitting and holding greens.

That’s not to say that the course will be a walkover for the more highly skilled player; once in position to go for the green, careful inspection of the contours around the greens will show that there is usually a safe side and a risky side, so skillful placement of your drive or second shot will often be key to having a safer approach.

A good example of this is the par-four 6th hole, the first hole that I played during the recent preview day scramble. The fairway is wide and confidence-inspiring, as most of the fairways on the new course are, but you must be mindful of where you place your tee shot. A drive to the right side of the landing area yields an inviting approach to the green, while landing too far left leaves your approach shot blocked by mounding that leaves you facing a blind shot (2) to a (thankfully), generously sized green. In turn, the mound on the left side forms a backdrop that can help direct an overcooked approach shot, even from good position in the fairway, back onto the green.

The greens at Poppy Ridge are well-contoured, with challenging but not drastic shaping. An interesting design feature that applies to the greens as a whole is that their size relates to the difficulty of the approach shot—holes that are likely to require a long-iron approach have larger greens; those that are going to be taken on with a wedge or a short iron give the golfer a smaller target to aim at. It is risky to judge the greens of a brand-new golf course; they will always need some bedding-in time before their true character is revealed, but I think that golfers will find the greens at Poppy Ridge testing, but fair.

Teething Problems?

As I mentioned above, the new course is intended to be fun for all skill levels. Each hole features five teeing areas accommodating a range of standard yardages from 7,010 (orange) to 4,225 (green).While good in theory, my group—with one playing from the tips and three from the golds—found that the forward tees were stretched so far ahead of the longer tees that staying connected was problematic, and that, when playing from a cart, getting from the cart path to the gold or green tees often required trekking through native areas.

Another new-course teething issue that we encountered was confusion about the location of the teeing areas in the corner of the course where the 13th green, 14th tees, 18th green, and 17th tees are all clustered within a small and quite hilly area. Better signage and better definition of the teeing grounds themselves would go a long way toward eliminating confusion for players that are new to the course (as everyone will be in the near term.)

A Strong First Impression

Even with only one round on the new layout under my belt, I have already selected a favorite hole—the par-five 4th. This uphill three-shotter plays longer than the scorecard yardage thanks to the elevation gain, and while fairly straight, hands you a peek-a-boo second shot that teases the possibility of getting onto the green in two. A low, running shot with a fairway wood or hybrid might get you there if you thread the needle between a trio of smallish but well-placed bunkers placed right-left-right along the way to the putting surface. I hit one of my better 3-wood shots in recent memory on this hole and just caught the first, and largest, of those bunkers or I might have found myself, maybe not on the green in two, but certainly within Texas-wedge territory.

Windy conditions will be a testing proposition at this somewhat exposed course. It is dotted with native oak trees, but not lined with the fairway-defining rows of tall trees of a typical parkland course that would protect play from the wind. The green of the 4th and the entirety of the 16th hole are the highest points on the course, I believe, and special attention to the strength of the wind, especially in the afternoon, is warranted there.

“If you are an out-of-town guest, if you’re coming from the Midwest or the East Coast, I would venture to guess that two of your three best public options in Northern California are Poppy Ridge and Poppy Hills.” – Jay Blasi

Course designer Jay Blasi, the NCGA, and everyone associated with the creation of the new Poppy Ridge can be justifiably proud of this new course. It is a property that will take some familiarization to come to terms with, but I think that the variety of the golf holes, and of course the newness of the layout, will tempt players back again and again to build course knowledge and test strategies for assaying its dramatic landscape. It’s a good thing, then, that 60% of the NCGA’s membership lives within 60 miles of this stunning new addition to the bounteous variety of Northern California golf.

Poppy Ridge opens for play on May 31st, and the tee sheet is already full a few weeks out, but I urge everyone in the region to experience this new course as soon as they can.

*****************************
1) Allied Golf Associations, the local golf associations that collaborate with the USGA to support the game of golf in the country.

2) Despite a bit of friendly advice from the guide who led us out to the tees at #6, this is exactly what I did...

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.

PURE Insurance / First Tee event deserves some love—even up against the U.S. Open

It has been a tough couple of years for the PURE Insurance Championship at Pebble Beach, the PGA Tour Champions event that benefits the First Tee. In 2019 the tournament was scheduled against the Safeway Open, the PGA Tour’s opener that is held 2-1/2 hours north of Pebble Beach, at Napa Valley’s Silverado Resort and Spa. The two events effectively bracketed the Bay Area, and despite the obvious attraction of Pebble Beach, the big names/big hitters of the main tour are perhaps a little bit sexier for the mainstream golf fan. Then came 2020—the year when everything changed.

The panorama that greets you as you walk from the Lodge at Pebble Beach down to the 18th green is one of the finest views in golf. (photo by author)

As shelter-in-place kicked in and sports, along with everything else, shut down, the whole schedule was up in the air. The possibility of events being cancelled, even events that were months in the future, loomed large. Eventually golf came back—the first pro sport to do so, with extensive, comprehensive safety measures in place—though with big changes in the schedule, and the biggest change was the rescheduling or cancellation of the majors.

The grandaddy of them all, the Open Championship, was cancelled outright for 2020, as the British Isles struggled to get a handle on the pandemic and lagged behind the United States in reopening golf courses for recreational play. The PGA Championship was pushed back from March to August—a gloomy time of year for its venue, TPC Harding Park in San Francisco, but the change produced a thrilling, much-watched tournament. The Masters—that odd championship of nothing which is pretty much a major just on the strength of the memory of Bobby Jones, and because the green jackets of Augusta National want it to be—was delayed to November, and the United States Open, which is a championship, was pushed back to September.

Therein lay the rub, at least as far as the PURE Insurance Championship was concerned, because the USGA settled on a week in mid-September, the same week in which the PURE Insurance/First Tee event was scheduled, to put on their national championship. In a week that could have belonged to the PGA Tour Champions on the basis of the tournament venue alone, the spotlight was stolen by the national championship.

No offense to the rest of the PGA Tour Champions schedule, but the PURE Insurance event is pretty much the class tournament of the tour. I mean, come on—the venue, the charity… the venue (pardon my bias, but I am a Central California local, born and raised in Steinbeck Country.)

In a normal year play in this event is split between Pebble Beach Golf Links and Poppy Hills, the home course of the Northern California Golf Association, and the pros play with junior playing partners from First Tee chapters all across the country; but even scaled back in this pandemic era, playing as a pro-am, no juniors, and only at Pebble Beach, the event is worthy of the golf world’s attention.

Except for a two-year period (2011 and 2012) when the event was held in early June under the generally overcast “June gloom” skies that locals know so well, this event has reveled in the glorious late summer/early autumn weather that the Monterey Peninsula and the Central Coast basks in after enduring the chilly gloom of summer. There’s pretty much no finer place to be than the Monterey Peninsula at this time of year, and that might have something to do with the star-studded field that the tournament has drawn this year.

Els, Furyk, Couples, Love, Montgomerie, Langer, Singh, Jiménez, Cabrera—these are just some of the names that appear on the leaderboard this year. Major champions during their PGA and European Tour careers, most of them, along with other players who hit their stride later in life and have enjoyed great success in the post-50 era of their careers.

Don’t get me wrong, I love our national championship—but even setting aside my local bias, this is a tournament that deserves some love. Like every professional golf tournament on every tour, this event provides a great boost to local charities—even without the income from ticket sales besides benefitting the First Tee, the Monterey Peninsula Foundation distributes profits from this event and the AT&T Pro-Am to a wide variety of worthy causes in the Monterey Peninsula area.

It’s a tremendous shame that this event isn’t able to have spectators on site this year, but with any luck this tournament, and all the others on the schedule will be back to something like normal next year. It’s a great venue, with a great charitable footprint, and a slew of recognizable championship-level names on the scoreboard—with all that going for it, if the PURE Insurance Championship doesn’t deserve some of your viewing time, this week, even when the U.S. Open is on your TV and/or computer screens, I don’t know what does.

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.

All-NorCal final a possibility in 70th U.S. Girls’ Junior Championship

A week of “June Gloom” fog delays for the 2018 U.S. Girls’ Junior Championship at the NCGA’s Poppy Hills Golf Club peaked on Friday, when the completion of the last Round of 16 matches, and tee times for the Quarterfinal matches were eventually pushed back six hours from their original 7:00 a.m. starts.

When the fog had cleared and play was completed, the semifinal matchups are down to a quartet of American players, including two from NCGA territory – Yealimi Noh, 16, of Concord; and Lucy Li, 15, of Redwood Shores. Noh will face off against Gina Kim, 18, of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the semifinal round; and Li will play Alexa Pano, 13, of Lake Worth, Florida.

Yealimi Noh, of Concord, is one of two NorCal players in the semifinals of the 70th U.S. Girls’ Junior Championship, being played at Poppy Hills Golf Club this week. (Copyright USGA/JD Cuban)

Noh, who is fresh off of a record-setting 24-under win in the PGA Jr Girls’ Championship last week, is particularly strong on the par-5s at Poppy Hills, though she has yet to see the par-5 18th in match play (she birdied all three of the par-5s that she played in her quarterfinal match) – her matches have finished on 16, 16, 17, and 13.

Li, who played in the 2014 U.S. Women’s Open as an 11-year-old, will face a tough opponent in Pano, who has only played past the 15th hole once in the match play portion of the tournament, when her Round of 16 match against Stephanie Kyriacou of Australia went to the 18th hole. Li has been played down to the wire in two of her matches, but closed out her opponents in the Round of 32 and Quarterfinal matches with late birdie runs.

Semifinal matches are scheduled to start Saturday morning at 7:00 a.m., with Li/Pano, followed by Noh/Kim at 7:15 a.m. – weather permitting. The 36-hole championship match will be split: 18 holes on Saturday, after the conclusion of the semifinal round, and the final 18 on Sunday morning.