Pacific Grove Golf Links

Overall Thoughts

I’ve always found it difficult to write about my former home courses. On one hand, my view of them is inevitably biased, tinged by pride and nostalgia. On the other hand, I’m hyper-attuned to their flaws—the ill-conceived mowing lines, the agronomic trouble spots, the unwise tree plantings. When evaluating golf courses that I don’t just know but know intimately, I have a hard time adopting a well-adjusted perspective.

So, full disclosure: I love Pacific Grove Golf Links to a degree that likely isn’t rational. I played it almost weekly for four years. If I hadn’t encountered this course, I wouldn’t have become re-obsessed with the game in my early 30s, changed careers, and ended up working for Fried Egg Golf.

The back nine, specifically the stretch of Nos. 11-16, has garnered a lot of praise over the years for its dunesy terrain and ocean views, but it’s even better than people say. Yes, the setting is terrific. What makes the holes truly great, though, is Jack Neville’s routing and design. Just as he and Douglas Grant did with the bluffs at Pebble Beach in 1919, Neville incorporated the dunes at Pacific Grove into the course’s strategic DNA. His simple but effective architecture makes these landforms part of the golf experience, not just an object of aesthetic admiration. (For more on this, check out the hole-by-hole tour of the back nine toward the bottom of this profile.)

At the same time, I can get far into the weeds—too far, probably—about the ways that the course could be improved.

So I’ll keep it brief:

1. The front nine has some excellent parkland topography, especially on Nos. 3-8, and a strong architectural pedigree. Over the years, however, Chandler Egan’s design has been compromised in a number of ways. Most notably, trees have been planted and fences erected in an effort to protect both players and the surrounding neighborhood. These moves, while understandable and even necessary in some cases, have resulted in a more constricted, one-dimensional playing experience than Egan intended.

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Also, when the second clubhouse and parking lot were installed in 1960, two of Egan’s holes—today’s first and ninth—had to be shortened. The ninth suffered particularly, shrinking from a short par 4 to an undistinguished par 3 that now features an incongruous USGA-spec green.

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2. Most of Pacific Grove’s greens are circular and either flat or tilted in a single direction. The easiest change would be to expand the surfaces back out to their original dimensions. On the sixth hole, for instance, the edge of the green was once almost flush against the left bunker; it’s now about 25 feet away. A more delicate project would be to introduce some internal contour. The architect performing this task would have to use a light touch, as busy undulations wouldn’t suit the course’s modest character. But some subtle reshaping would give the greens a distinctiveness and fun factor that they currently lack.

3. For a course that aspires to deliver a links-like experience, kikuyu fairways will never do the job. Unfortunately, eradicating the sticky grass from Pacific Grove’s property would be nearly impossible, or at least prohibitively expensive.

Somehow, though, these weaknesses don’t lessen my affection for the course. In fact, whenever anyone else criticizes Pacific Grove’s overgrown front nine or bland greens or grabby turf, I turn a bit defensive: “Hey, that’s my spot! What gives you the right?”

Home courses really do a number on your brain. -GM

0 Eggs

I can’t find a way to give Pacific Grove an Egg within our criteria of land, design, and presentation. Still, it’s one of my dozen or so favorite golf courses in the world and, less subjectively, among the most important municipal facilities in the United States. Such is the weirdness of rating things.

Course Tour

The Front Nine

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The Back Nine

No. 10, par 3, 109 yards

A short par 3 with a plain, circular green. The main purpose of the only hazard—a back bunker—is to prevent skulled wedges from trundling onto the 11th tee. While the hole is a nothingburger architecturally, it’s not without excitement: at the green, a view opens up of the stunning dunescape below and Monterey Bay in the distance.

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No. 11, par 4, 303 yards

After the constricted corridors of the front nine, the massive openness of 11 is thrilling. The fairway is very wide, inviting you to wail away at driver from the elevated tee. If you go for the green, however, you’ll bring the boundary fence and scrubby vegetation on the left more into your line. The wide, shallow green is beautifully benched into the dune ridge that defines much of the back nine.

A word of advice: if you’re walking—as you should at Pacific Grove, if you’re able—exit the 11th green at the back. There you’ll find a lovely path that winds through a cluster of dunes before arriving at the 12th tee.

One of my favorite green-to-tee transitions anywhere: 11 green to 12 tee at Pacific Grove. pic.twitter.com/Wv38FrOZTY

— Garrett Morrison (@garrett_TFE) December 28, 2018

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No. 12, par 5, 513 yards

This par 5 unfurls over a gorgeous stretch of linksland next to Ocean View Boulevard. The primary strategic feature is a large, wide dune that crosses the fairway between 100 and 70 yards from the green. If you clear this rise in two shots, you’ll have a good chance at birdie; if you don’t, you’ll face a blind third into the small, elevated green. In order to reach the advantageous position, however, you have to take on some risk, flirting with sandy waste both off the tee and on your second shot. For the risk-averse, the hole provides plenty of room to avoid trouble.

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Favorite Hole

No. 13, par 4, 316 yards

The most basic skill of routing a golf course is finding compelling sites for tees and greens. In this respect, Jack Neville outdid himself on the short par-4 13th hole at Pacific Grove: the tee is perched on a ridge—the same one the 12th green is cut into—with fine views of the ocean and several holes on the back nine, and the green is nestled in a family of tall dunes. To play golf on such landforms is a rare pleasure.

Stronger players may be able to drive the green, but attempting to do so brings a variety of dangers along the left side into play. The obvious threat is an encroaching swath of dunesland, a section of which was recently designated an out-of-bounds environmentally sensitive area (ESA). More subtly, a mound at the front-left corner of the green obscures much of the putting surface from the left portion of the playing corridor. So if you take the aggressive line off the tee, you have to hit an exceptionally long and precise shot to find an opening to the green. The safer strategy, albeit less satisfying, is a 220-yard tee shot to the middle-right portion of the fairway, which leaves a straightforward 100-yard approach.

The green has some appealing internal contour, a rarity at Pacific Grove, making No. 13 the most complete hole on the course.

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No. 14, par 4, 356 yards

Another stunning tee site, this one on top of the dune ridge that the 11th, 13th, and 15th greens all use to great effect. The tee shot itself is the most treacherous on the back nine. While there’s plenty of room to bail out to the left, any approaches from that side of the corridor will be blocked out by a big dune. From the right half of the fairway, players can see into the hollow where the green is situated, but trying to reach that position is dicey because the dune ridge, parts of which are marked as OB, runs along the right side of the corridor. Compounding the risk is the wind, which typically comes in off the left and carries any tee balls with left-to-right spin toward trouble.

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No. 15, par 4, 397 yards

Choosing your line on this uphill, blind tee shot requires some local knowledge. The rectangular blue building in the distance—a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) hub with murals of sea creatures on its outer walls—is your main reference point. If you aim left of it, you will avoid the dunes guarding the right side of the fairway but leave yourself a long second shot; if you go right of the NOAA building, you’ll bring the sand and scrub more into your dispersion cone, with the potential benefit of a significantly shorter approach.

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No. 16, par 4 355 yards

The last of Pacific Grove’s great dunesland holes, the 16th plays from just below the Point Pinos Lighthouse to an undulating fairway that starts wide but bottlenecks around 240 yards from the back tee. Stronger players have three main options: 1) lay back to the wide part of the fairway, 2) pull a longer club and challenge the dune on the left for a chance of finding the speed slot and earning a short approach from the ideal angle, 3) aim driver down the middle of the corridor and face an awkward flip wedge over the right green-side bunker.

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No. 17, par 3, 153 yards

A simple par 3 playing over a pond that predates the course, 17 doesn’t offer much fodder for architectural discussion, but the seaside location is delightful.

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No. 18, par 4, 298 yards

This anticlimactic finisher is wedged between the driving range and Asilomar Avenue. A better hole probably could have been built on the land now occupied by the range, but Pacific Grove has sold many, many buckets of balls in its day, including a few dozen to yours truly. Shutting down the range likely wouldn’t be the right call for the facility or the community. Still, it’s hard not to imagine what could be…

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Additional Content

Monterey’s Local Links: Pacific Grove (article)