Bob
Zoller can still see Mike Strantz. When Zoller, the superintendent of Monterey
Peninsula Country Club for almost 30 years, walks the Shore course, he sees the
late architect sitting in his utility cart in the middle of an unfinished
fairway, staring into the distance.
“He
would be there just zoned out, looking at where a green would be,” says Zoller.
“I realized right away that instead of talking to him, I should just leave him
alone and not break his concentration.”
Strantz
brought his unique brand of intensity to the venerable course’s redesign even
prior to being awarded the assignment. “Before we even selected him, I bet Mike
put in more than 40 hours, walking around, beating a path out there and trying
to get a feel for the land,” Zoller says. “He came to the presentation with an
idea in mind already.”
The
six-person committee was enraptured by his presentation and his ideas for the
layout, which Strantz had sketched in stunning detail. His drawings showed a
complete rerouting, with most of the course facing south toward nearby Cypress
Point and Spyglass Hill. The original design had faced north from the 5th hole
on, offering a middling backdrop of Santa Cruz, typically shrouded in peninsula
fog.
In
January 2002 the committee chose Strantz. Around that same time, he also was
diagnosed with an aggressive form of tongue cancer. Nevertheless, a year later
he moved into a rented house on what would become the 15th fairway.
While
its sister course, Dunes, was built in 1926, the construction of Shore came more
than three decades later, after developer Samuel F.B. Morse turned the land over
to MPCC’s membership for $1. The condition of the transaction was that a golf
course would have to be built within two years. On a shoestring budget of
$164,000, Bob Baldock and Jack Neville hurriedly built Shore, straightforward
layout with flat fairways supported by a hard clay base that softened
considerably in the rainy season.
