The opening of any golf course represents an ending as well as a
beginning—the end of a long struggle to identify the land, to carve the course
out of its raw potential. But Pasatiempo represents a more poignant end than
most, because it was the last great course of the Roaring ’20s, opening just six
weeks before the beginning of the Great Depression.
The founder was Marion Hollins, a female entrepreneur in a
male-dominated age. She was a prominent East Coast socialite who had abandoned
the genteel life for the hurly-burly of championship golf. Of all her projects,
Pasatiempo was the dearest to her heart. She timed the official opening of the
club for September 8, 1929, just days before the first national championship
played on the West Coast—the 1929 U.S. Amateur at Pebble Beach, down the road.
She also made sure Bobby Jones played in an opening day foursome with British
Amateur champion Cyril Tolley, Glenna Collett Vare and herself.
Much of Pasatiempo’s cachet was an extension of Hollins’ exuberant
spirit. She once wagered with two friends that the first of them to make a
million dollars would pay the others $25,000 each. Upon selling her interest in
the Kettleman Oil Fields for $2.5 million, she not only paid up on the
longstanding wager, but aloo organized a banquet at Pasatiempo for the occasion
and hid the checks under her friends’ dinner plates.
On another occasion, she and MacKenzie had a disagreement as to
whether the 16th at Cypress Point could be routed with a full carry to the
green. She took her clubs out, teed up and hit a ball across what is perhaps the
most famous and terrifying chasm in golf. The green stands where her ball
landed.
At Pasatiempo, MacKenzie refined the formula he later applied to
Augusta National: stiff par 3s, chess-like par 4s and heroic par 5s; success
requires a golfer to attack the corners, judge the roll and decipher the
lightning-fast greens. He emphasized roll, created subtle defenses with trapping
and mounding and routed the course so that golfers played over the hills and
into them rather than through the winding valleys, which mark so many British
links courses.
MacKenzie always stated that the 395-yard 16th was his favorite
hole in golf. One begins in a valley and faces a sharply uphill drive that must
draw expertly to the left around a blind corner. Here the golfer faces a
mid-iron across a chasm to a huge expanse of green draped over the slope of the
next hill. Short left leads into the barranca; short right into a scurvy bunker.
Anything above the hole leaves one almost certainly putting off the green.
For all the splendor of the 16th, the 11th requires an even higher
level of skill. A sharply uphill 384-yard par 4, the green is 60 yards left of
the correct driving line and across a winding barranca. A dead-straight and
lengthy drive leaves an uphill mid-iron across the barranca to an elegantly
defended green site. The green is pitched forward and again, anything above the
hole is almost certainly dead, as the ensuing putt will roll off the green and
up to 40 yards back down the hill.
Pasatiempo’s reputation is forever assured by its importance to
Alister MacKenzie. Many were his courses, but Pasatiempo was his home—his house
still stands today on the 6th fairway. He died January 6, 1934, in his sleep.
His ashes were scattered by airplane over the golf course.
