The Monterey Peninsula is the site of the PGA Tour”s AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am Golf Championship this weekend. There is $6.2 million in prize money on the table and the winner will pocket $1.1 million for finishing atop the leaderboard on Sunday afternoon.
One of the oldest tournaments on the PGA Tour, the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am features a tournament within a tournament. The pros play 72 holes like they do every week on tour. They also participate in a two-man best ball pro-am (low score of two) format. First begun by Hollywood move star and popular singer Bing Crosby in 1937, the earliest of the Bing Crosby Pro-Ams were a mixing of golf”s top players with the elite of the Hollywood screen, music industry and sports pages. The Crosby was a fun week scheduled at the end of the West Coast swing just prior to the professionals driving cross country in late February to begin the Florida portion of the circuit.
During its heyday, the Crosby Pro-Am featured such amateurs as Bob Hope, Phil Harris, Dean Martin, Glenn Campbell and Jack Lemmon, among others. The professional champions of the Crosby were just as famous starting with the inaugural winner, Sam Snead. Other winners of note included Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, Jack Nicklaus, Ben Crenshaw, Tom Watson and Hale Irwin. From the California angle, local linksters such as Ken Venturi, Tony Lema, Johnny Miller and Mark O”Meara have also won at Pebble Beach as has the Langtry Farms director of golf, Johnny Pott, who defeated Billy Casper and Bruce Devlin in a playoff to win in 1968.
The amateur field at this week”s Pebble Beach National Pro-Am includes ESPN”s Chris Berman, comedian George Lopez, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, former soccer star Brandi Chastain, musicians Michael Bolton and Huey Lewis, and former greenskeeping great Bill Murray of Caddyshack fame.
The professional field includes big-name golfers such as Phil Mickelson, Sean O”Hair, Jim Furyk, Sergio Garcia, Retief Goosen, Vijay Singh, Padraig Harrington and Davis Love III.
The field for the Pebble Beach Pro-Am is the largest in golf. Most full-field events top out at 156 professionals. At Pebble Beach there will be 180 pros and 180 amateurs and the field will be cut to the low 70 and ties after the completion of the third round today.
The original Crosby was contested at Rancho Santa Fe Country Club in the San Diego area from 1937 through 1942. The tournament took a four-year hiatus during World War II. When it resumed again in 1947, tournament founder and host Bing Crosby incorporated two major changes into the event. The first change was that the tourney was relocated to Northern California”s Pebble Beach area alongside Carmel Bay. The second change was that in order to accommodate the popularity of the event, it would be held at multiple sites.
In 1947, the Crosby was contested at the Pebble Beach Golf Links, the Dunes Course at Monterey Peninsula Country Club, and the Cypress Point Club. All three courses sit geographically alongside one another. Pebble Beach is the older brother of the trio, having opened in 1919. The team of Jack Neville and Douglass Grant designed it. Seth Raynor built Monterey Peninsula in 1925, and Cypress Point is an Allister Mackenzie design from 1928 and is affectionately known as the Sistine Chapel of Golf. Pebble Beach is a high-end resort course that charges exorbitant fees to play, while Monterey Peninsula and Cypress Point are very exclusive private clubs.
In 1967, the tournament rotation changed with Monterey Peninsula dropping out and the newly built Spyglass Hill Golf Club added. Spyglass Hill is a Robert Trent Jones Sr. design that was universally detested by the tour pros. Its reputation has improved over time and nowadays it is consistently named in top-100 course listings. Back in 1967 its target golf mentality and punitive nature made it a most unpopular venue with the pros.
In 1977 Bing Crosby died while playing golf in Spain. The tournament continued with his name associated with it through 1985. In 1986, corporate giant AT&T began sponsoring the event and still does to this day.
In 1991, as a follow-up to the Shoal Creek controversy regarding private golf clubs and lack of minority membership, Cypress Point was dropped from the Pebble Beach rotation and replaced by the newly built Poppy Hills Golf Course, the Northern California Golf Association-owned course in the hills above Pebble Beach. Robert Trent Jones Jr. designed Poppy Hills, the son of the Spyglass Hill architect.
Poppy Hills met with negative fanfare similar to the initial reaction when Spyglass Hill became a Crosby site. The pros disliked the greens, hated the many contrived dogleg holes, and sorely missed playing at the historic Cypress Point. The only problem was that while the professionals came to appreciate Spyglass Hill as it matured and as target golf became a staple of American golf design, they continued to dislike the bizarre nuances of Poppy Hills.
This year”s Pebble Beach Pro-Am marks the first golf course rotation change since 1991. Heeding the complaints of the tour and its pros, Poppy Hills has been dropped from the rotation. While the AT&T will return to Monterey Peninsula Country Club, the tourney will be contested at MPCC”s other course, the relatively newer Shores Course. Opened in 1961 and designed by Bob Baldock and Jack Neville, the Shores Course is the equal of the Dunes Course. It”s also interesting to note that Jack Neville had his hands in the development of Pebble Beach and the Shores course, albeit 42 years apart.
The AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am concludes Sunday alongside Carmel Bay. Dustin Martin is the defending champion. Oh, and the weather will be great, something you couldn”t always say about past playings of the Crosby and the AT&T.
