Renovating Cal Club

I totally agree. It's made with soft Peruvian pee mccotton, and one of the great things about is it offers up a little bit more dressed up, look like you don't look like a schmuck like you would if you're wearing a regular T shirt and you're somewhere. So we have some of these T shirts up in our pro shop, or you can get them online at bdraatty dot com, or hopefully you can get them at your local club or courses pro shop and if they don't have it, ask for it. Now on to episode one hundred and

thirty three of the podcast. Today, I am joined by Al Jamison and David Normoyle. Al is a member at the California Golf Club and was club president in two thousand and six when the club decided to overhaul their golf course with Kyle Phillips. They underwent a restoration plan on the holes that the original holes that remained of their AV McCann and Alistair McKenzie designed golf course, and then they renovated a few of the other holes that

were non original. The project has been revered among the golf community as one of the most influential and ambitious projects seen by a club. So the end product has been a smashing success, and one of the things I find most interesting has been the drastic culture change that occurred at the club within the membership. So L comes on to talk about the process, the highs and lows

of the restoration, and the end results. And after our conversation with Al, revered golf historian David Normoyle points UH to give us some background on the California Golf Club's unique history. He works with the club as a consulting historian. This pod UH will lead with a line from David before it goes into our conversation with Al. I just love this line from David. I thought it would be a great way to set the tone for the podcast.

Hope you guys enjoy the podcast, And without further ado, here is Al Jamison and David Normoyle.

It's the California Golf Club. And so how can you in everything you do from golf course to clubhouse, to the quality of your membership, all of your principles that you care about, how can you honor the name of your club by offering the high in this private golf experience you can in.

of the club is the real goal. Took fifteen months to build a golf course, but it's taken us ten years to slowly adopt the culture of commensurate with where we are in the eyes of the rest of the golf community. And David, he has good tastes, he's very articulate. The pieces that he writes about golf in general and us in particular, I think have been very informative and educational.

As I said, he can't discover things that weren't there, that were lost to history, but he can put these things in perspective and give some guidelines going forward on what we need to do.

in history. So there was the Roaring twenties, which we call the Golden Age of architecture. Then there was a depression, and then after World War Two there was a lot

of golf course construction that was sort of mediocre. And in this particular area, all major metropolitan areas as it relates to golf, seemed to break down into a club that is very established, sort of old money generational clubs, which would be San Francisco Club here, and then Olympic Club was sort of the everyman's club and a large membership,

very active. And then in most major metropolitan areas you had clubs that were founded in the twenties and thirties that were primarily Jewish clubs, because in those days many of those other clubs were restricted. It was just a fact of life. And be lake merced here. My reading of this club was that it had allegiances with San

Francisco at one time before my time. For instance, Eddie Lowry, Francis we Met's caddie, was the president of this club in nineteen forty seven and simultaneously was the club champ at San Francisco Club, and he was also a cypress member. Ken Venturrey told me many stories about regular games Tuesday at San Francisco with Eddie Harvey Ward and others. Friday would be here. There was a recession in the sixties that was very severe around here in nineteen sixty eight.

I came to this Bay area in nineteen seventy, and you know, fell in with people who played golf, and so anecdotally I heard about clubs that had fallen upon hard times. And it was in that period of the early seventies that one could get into this club merely by picking up somebody's dues and maybe paying two thousand dollars.

The club underwent a big transformation, and there were lots of people who joined the club as their first experience in golf or in a private club, and they really weren't steeped in the game, didn't play it as kids, didn't play competitively, and their idea, my observation, was that this was their country club. However, this location was never

conducive to country club activities. It's called in Windy In the spring and summer, most of the members live a few miles away, and with all the microclimates we have, the weather is much nicer just ten miles south or

in Marin County. And so the club struggled in its identity and the So these people who eventually became the leaders of the club, in my opinion, didn't have a lot of what we call golf i Q or what I call golf i Q. So your first question was what was it like in the nineties when we undertook to gain control of the board of directors and try to reverse the direction of the club. So by the nineteen nineties there was the first tech boom that was

let's say ninety six to two thousand. All of the clubs around here maybe tripled their entrance fees and accumulated capital. There was one club down the peninsula where there was no set fee. It was a bid and ask like a stock. They had a membership trade at four hundred and sixty thousand dollars. Col club went from thirty five thousand dollars to one hundred and two, but some people overbid at one hundred and twenty. I had been on

the board the first time in nineteen ninety two. From ninety two to ninety five, and that was the beginning of that period. The the problem was that most of the other clubs around here undertook improvements to their facilities. Lake Merceid brought in Rhys Jones in ninety six. Of course, the Olympic Club, you know, always had resources and opens and they were always doing work. San Francisco Club did work.

The Peninsula Club in two thousand and one closed down for the better part of three seasons and brought in ron Force to bring back some of the Donald Ross features. And so we had done nothing, and worse than that, the additional capital that had been accumulated by the rising

entrance fees had been squandered to subsidize operating losses. And in my opinion and the opinion of my friends, the outrage was that the directors of the club made no distinction between capital and operating money, and they did not want to raise the dues because they wanted to be popular with their friends. That's maybe the nature of a

voluntary organization. And so they took much of the fresh capital that came into the club and subsidized operating losses well by one to two thousand and three, through a couple of elections. We organized some like minded individuals to run for the board and did in fact get control of the board and started down this path of being more fiscally responsible, but also to address our golf course, which showed the effects of what I call amateur tinkering.

In nineteen ninety one, there was some ill advised lakes put in that were done with little architectural input. Not only were they ugly, but they were completely out of place. The place was a ribbon of asphalt. It was very wet in the winter because the trees had overgrown the place. We took out about two thousand trees in nineteen ninety seven, and that was because the USGA recommended it. But also there was a Green's chairman by the name of Bill Zirkle,

and you know, God bless him. He found a company that would remove the trees for the salvage value of the lumber and treework is extremely expensive and that's why it gets neglected. So you have all this deferred maintenance with trees around here. So that helped a great deal. But that was long before we thought of the Kyle

Phillips restoration. In two thousand and three, we had Bradley Klein from Golf Week as a dinner speaker, and Brad had a wonderful PowerPoint press presentation about the restoration of classic courses and the whole concept that we were trying to imbue in the membership is to make them realize what a gem they had and what it could be. And that was a hard sell because, as I said earlier, many of the members just just didn't have that kind

of a golf background. Well, once we got that conversation going, then we knew that we were about we were going to lose our greens because there was a chemical for nematodes that was going to be outlawed by two thousand and seven. And so we made the case that our greens needed replacement, and most people said, okay, that sounds reasonable, won't be too much money. And then of course I liken that to dragging the voting public, you know, from the goal line to the other end of the field,

and so, okay, we need new greens. And then you say to them, okay, but you can't tear up a green without doing the bunkers. Well, okay, so now you've got them to the ten yard line. And then you remind people that well, our irrigation system was done thirty years ago and it's past its prime. And then reluctantly

more people say, well, okay, that sounds reasonable. Now you've got them to the thirty yard line and so forth, and so because the other clubs with whom we compete for members had all done something and we had done nothing, there was that competitive thing too. It's like, you know, how is the club going to be vibrant if you don't keep pace. So in two thousand and five we interviewed ten architects and the idea was to hire somebody to give us a master plan and a proposal for

a Greens renovation. And that was the thinking. It was pretty modest then, and we went through two rounds of interviews. We cut the field to five. That's a great story in itself, and I think I remember most of them, but they were all interesting fellows. People you would like like that. You've probably met Mike Devrees, Brian Silva, David Essler, John Vote US Amateur winner, Tom Lehman, who spent two

hours with me here on Saturday. And Kyle Phillips, you know, clearly won the day with his presentation, his demeanor, his maturity, his background, because when he was being interviewed right in this room, it was evident to me, with my history at the club, that he had the maturity in the background to handle our members, because I knew that it was going to get ugly, and it did, and so

he made us think outside the box. We in our amateurish ways, had a rough idea of a part of the golf course didn't look right, and that was the corridor along Westboro that had been altered by Robert tren Jones in the sixties. And I know Ken Venturi was a great help during this period. He said the same thing. And so we asked all these architects to come back with a drawing that we ordered, said what would you do in this corner here? And they all dutifully complied

except for Phillips. And when Phillips came back for his second interview, he wouldn't take the bait, and people said, well, we're the drawings, and he as much as said, you know what, you don't get to look behind the curtain until you hire me. I'm the pro you're not. And he had a wonderful PowerPoint presentation saying, look, this was the old golf course it was wonderful, but this is the land you lost, and you're never going to get

that land back. However, you guys are lucky because you have seventeen acres in the middle of the property that you never used for golf, which was true, was up on a hill, was the highest point on the golf course. In nineteen twenty six, they didn't do that. And so when he walked out of the room, there was a fellow on our committee who had played the tour, made a lot of cuts. I was a member named Dennis Trixler, and Dennis turned and said, is there any doubt this

is our guy? And Dennis was good friends with Tom Lin. In fact, he caddied for him a lot on the senior tour. So we hired Phillips. He came up with

the plan at the golf course you see today. He did have some other plans, but we wanted to stay as true as we could to the nineteen thirty eight aerial photograph, and part of that was our consideration with We had been on the Golf Week Classic one hundred list, and I asked Brad Klein, how much can we change and still stay on the list, And he said, well, you know, you can't change the routing, and so our

goals were rather modest. In our wildest dreams, we didn't think we'd be where we wound up, and so so Phillips was constrained to that and he restored well. I remember I went with Phillips to Ken Venturi's house at Rancho Mirage. We spent a day with Ken, because you know, Ken had offered to help. He came up here for several meetings. He had been a friend of mine. I coached his grand children in the Little League. His son,

Matt is a very good friend of mine. And I knew that Ken's opinion would carry some weight with our older members because we needed to get a vote of the members to borrow the money and that's we needed to finance this. And so Ken we went to his house. We spent a day with him. Then Ken came up here and along with Aaron Oberholzer, who I know you've done a podcast with. And Aaron is he's just he's like a son to me. And Ken loved Aaron because

Aaron was like him. Public course, Golfer self taught Santase state and so Aaron had won the at and t the year that we were going to take the vote, and so Aaron and Ken and Kyle, we had a professional videographer and they made a CD which we sent to all the members where they he toured the golf course and they looked at different spots and they were down on what is our driving range today used to be the eighth hole, and that was it became very a bone of contention with the members of why are

you moving the driving range? They liked it close to the pro shop and so forth and so on, and of course they have a driving range like we do that doesn't require any netting, is a bonus that I think most members just don't understand. And it's forty by fifty all grass, and our old driving range was squeezed in between the first and second fairways with an asphalt

hitting pad and a slice wind. So that really was a pretty easy decision, but it was just a huge shock for people to hear that they had to take a cart and drive four hundred yards down to the range. So we then after those things, we had a dinner here and Venturi addressed the members and at that dinner, Overhoulzer gave the club his at and t trophy, and of course we all thought it was the first of many.

And Venturi stood shoulder to shoulder with Kyle Phillips and Aaron and he said, you know, folks, you get one shot at this and you don't get a mulligan. And to me that was profound because there were many members that while they they would go along with it, they wanted to do a piecemeal approach, maybe do nine holes at a time, or just fix a few greens. And of course it ken understood, and he explained to them, what you don't want is cereal fixes that could go

on for years. Just close it down, completely, blow it up, and do it right. And so that's what we wound up doing. We the vote carried to encumber the property with a mortgage, and the Board of Directors had a great deal of leeway in what happened next. There were no more votes to be taken about process. When they

scraped the whole place. It was actually it was frightening to me as someone who had been, you know, the proponent for this, when I came out here and it was all bare dirt, and I said, how, how in the hell do you build a golf course in the

middle of an urban environment. I just didn't understand. I didn't understand it because I had never seen it, and said, a lot of people, you know, just don't to this day, they don't understand that the place was just ground down to bare dirt, big drainage ditches, you know, trenches, and every fairway pipe millions of feet of pipe underground. You never look at a golf course the same way in your life until you've seen one built. And this was the first time I had seen one built from the

ground up. Most people just thought, well, you're just going to give it a nip and a tuck. It wasn't the case, and the work went so rapidly it was shocking. I think we were lucky because while we have neighbors on three sides, we have no housing on the Westboro Boulevard coming in from the freeway. And we brought in five thousand truckloads of sand and so that wasn't a big impact on the neighborhood. Just we created a lot

of dust and a lot of mess. And you know, we went around to neighbors and we we powerwashed a few houses and we gave them, you know, free coupons for the car wash. And so forth. But they actually they started. We got a little bit of a late jump. It was closer to May, but late April or May seven, and by the last green was seated in December. We did have some terrible rains in October and we had some setbacks there where we washed away some seed and

we had to do some things. It would have been faster. So the longest period of time was in the construction. It was growing the grass, and so the growing period was until July of eight when we reopened. However, we all know what was happening in the economy, and O seven Lehman Brothers blew up, and then but eight Lehman Brothers might have been owait. But the point is it was starting to go south.

they do in San Francisco. All of these objections, some of them were personal, quite frankly, people that just you know, disagreed with the board for a number of reasons. There were people that you know, felt there was an agenda to price them out of the club and it would be more expensive. There's all these little, sort of petty things that happened at a club. And it's interesting because obviously private clubs are a certain slice of America, maybe

you know, upper middle class or upper class. But yet when it comes to their golf course, people can get in terrible fights over it and be very petty. But our contention always was that we we hired a pro and he didn't need micromanaging from us, And the idea that you know, a bunch of amateur golfers would be voting on a plan was absurd. And the resentment came when I think that the people who wanted more input, when they realized that the bylaws gave the board tremendous

authority to do everything except borrow money. Just once the vote passed to borrow the money, a lot of these people said, well, let's vote on doing nine holes at a time, like they did at Peninsula Club, and we said, no, you got to read your bylaws more carefully. You don't get to vote on that. So there was a lot of acrimony around that. When we had the rainstorm and we had we had a mudslide on seven, there was some of the I told you sos.

you still, we still ran the operation. We painted the clubhouse, we had lunch every day, We left our chipping area open. And the thing that I'm really the most proud of is that the golf course contractor, who was the Olephant Company, it was a wonderful guy. He took on our crew and they did about forty or fifty percent of the work, so we never laid off anybody. We had our bartenders and locker room attendants. We taught them, you know, how to paint and scrape, and they got the place ready

for paint. But when we reopened, I remember our green screw, many of whom had been here twenty years plus. They had a hat made and on the back of the hat it said we built it, so they had ownership.

But so for all these years, you know, they worked out of a I call them tents, but their tent buildings and trailers, and we had a mechanic working outdoors in the winter, so you know, they really this was their baby. And I never heard a complaint about those working conditions, which clearly were not what you would like. So that was a great success. So when we opened up for play, recession was kicking us in the teeth. It was September of eight.

two thousand and eight. Actually that's when I first met him, and I really think that that drove a lot of high IQ golfers to visit here, and especially raiders. And so as the economy improved, young people who could afford it, were looking for a place to play, who were serious about the game started to come around. And that I think saved us financially is that we have probably turned

over two hundred and fifty people in those years. We modified the bylaws in twenty ten, which I think has had a huge impact on the club because we created a special category for young men under forty and we call that the Byron Nelson category because Byron Nelson was a member here and was Ken Venturre's mentor and a good friend of Lowery's. And so when we overhauled the bylaws. We gave the board the latitude to create some ancillary

categories other than the owners. So we have national members, We have these byrons who are under forty and are paying their way gradually to full status, and we have about three hundred and fifty owners. And that that structure has given us a demographic balance. The club's gotten a lot younger anyway, and as I said before, the the preponderance of new members that have come in are either you know, in the tech business or the financing thereof.

So there's there's the finance community, the venture community, and the people in technology, and that seems to be the you know, the main occupation of our members. And that that's that's all you could ask for. Because right now the club is full. It has a younger, more vibrant membership. We went from a club that had a very heavy cart culture to a club that is eighty percent walking. We have a caddy program. Caddies aren't mandatory like they are at some places, but more and more people are

taking them. We have the youngsters who caddy in the summer from youth on course and it's it's become a place one of our older members. Who's one of my favorite people. He's a retired heart surgeon. He said to me, this is a club for people who are serious about the game, and I think that's true. It's doesn't mean that everybody's a five handicap. The most high golf IQ people I know are seventeen handicappers. But it's it's people who respect the game and respect what we have here.

We have brought back one of the Golden Age classics which had wandered so far afield from what it was intended to be. That's that's the greatest accomplishment of what we are today.

learn more. Member SIPC. I think the story of cal Club and one of the reasons I asked you'd come on is such a with the culture shift, you know, how the membership has changed, the type of member you have now is such a worthwhile story for the rest

of the golf world. You know that looks at renovation, whether it's a club and another city, a municipal course, where putting the golf, you know, really it was a example of putting the golf first and prioritizing the golf rather than the rest of the club's activities, and putting forth the best club a golf course product possible.

This location was never meant for country club activities. It's just it's very harsh here in the spring and summer. So by putting the focus on golf, I think we're identifying the people who appreciate that. As far as the culture, it takes longer to change, and obviously you turn over members, but you have to educate the new members. And I think a big turning point was twenty twelve when we

hired our general manager, Glenn Smickley. I've said this before, I've said it publicly, and Glenn knows how I feel after Kyle Phillips. He's the best thing that happened to us. And the reason is that Glenn was a superintendent by education. He was to grow in superintendent at the Robert tren Jones Golf Club in Virginia over twenty two years, rising to be the general manager, and he oversaw the first three President's Cups, two as a superintendent, one as a GM.

So he's very well versed in all aspects of running a club, but moreover taking care of a golf course. He also knows everybody in golf and when he came here, the management of our club, like a lot of clubs, had fallen on various boards of directors who tend to want to micromanage a club's activities. So we had a GM who was really not much of a golf guy, and then you had the club pro and the superintendent. And what happens at a lot of clubs. It's sometimes

it's comical, but it's tragic. They get like Bushwood and you have a president with a big ego, may or may not know anything about golf.

Now the trick was over, you know, several turnovers of board members to get board members to buy into that, because, let's face it, at clubs like this, you have, you know, people that own their own businesses, so it's their way or the highway. You have you know, corporate executives who are important people and very capable people. But exactly and

so right now we are there. And I think when when Glenn came on board, the big thing was his background as a superintendent, because we were going through a period where the golf course budget was not commensurate with the growing status of the golf course and that was a tough sell to some board members. And wait a minute, what do you mean we need this equipment, that equipment? Why does it cost so much more to keep this rescue this way, to keep it well? Because we're a

top one hundred golf course. Now we've got to start acting like one. And so for many years, as I alluded to, before the dues were artificially suppressed, there was a big culture shock in getting the monthly costs where they need to be to be who we are. And we're there now. And a lot of that credit goes to Glenn, where the board said, Okay, here's a list of equipment, what do we really need, how can we do this? What can we buy? What can we lease?

So forth and so on, And now you know, he's assembled his staff, he's hired our pro or food and beverage director. We have great staff, a great clubhouse engineer. We just we have so many great people. I mean, I kind of pinch myself every day hoping that none of them go away. And we have a great board of directors who understands the difference between governance and management, and so, you know, knock Wood, we can keep going in that direction.

the municipality is almost like your board. And hiring a GM that really gets golf should be their chief focus, as opposed to a GM that might know how to run a restaurant.

it with some of our new members. This is their second club, believe it or not. And most of them live further south where in the summertime the weather could be twenty or thirty degrees warmer than here, and so they'll belong to a club closer to home that has all those amenities that the family would like, and then this is their place for serious golf, And to me, that's that's a heck of a formula if somebody can afford it.

but that's a very small number. Nobody's joining in a country club for the food, that's correct, like the food in the pool and the tennis at most country clubs are a sales tool to get to play golf there, you know, and to get the whole buy in of the family.

reputation and what other people tell them about it. And so that's all we have is the golf course. But I agree with you that you know, the primary function of a country club is the golf course, and you have to focus on that and make it as good as it can be. There are some locations that, you know, the golf courses the land is not quite right or but we're so lucky that we still have the majority of this original golden Golden Age golf course.

deal of fun and camaraderie. I think what the board is we're constantly sensitive to is you can't become a frat house either, So yes, you should have fun, but it's still a gentleman golf club and I think that's where we're evolving a little bit. And it's a fine line. You can't have everybody be a scold and say you don't have any fun. But you and I have been to clubs where you know things are very quiet and staid, and you know people don't talk above a whisper. Well,

this club's not like that. We have a younger membership, they have fun. We're very welcoming to the kids. I know a local country club here where there's no kids under eighteen are even allowed in the locker room. We're not like that. This is a place for the members to enjoy. We try to treat a guest like a member,

and we get comments about that all the time. You see a perfect stranger sitting at the bar, and if you looks lonely or he's waiting for his host, one of our members will invariably go up and say hi, welcome. You never want to lose that. And but still it's it's a gentleman's club, and for instance, the culture. We've had a few tournaments where we have coat and tie for dinner. Well, coat and tie is a tough sell in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley single handedly killed fashion in America.

But it just adds a touch of class, I think, And so you know, those are the little things.

them gotten positions of governance. And that's another thing I'd love to insert here, is that I've been around the game my whole life, and I remember even hearing this from my dad in the nineteen fifties on the East Coast, that the better players at a club, the people who knew the game anyway, usually didn't want to be bothered. They go, come on, I come up here to play golf. I want to be left alone. I got enough trouble at work. I don't need headaches of being on a

volunteer board. That is what causes clubs to go downhill, because I saw it happen here. The people who should be running the affairs of the club don't want to be bothered, and so into that vacuum go to the people who serve, who either don't have the back or they have ulterior motives of ego, of this, of wanting to make a statement, and you know they serve for all the wrong reasons, and so you know, not to be melodramatic, but I think it was Edmund Burke who

said tyranny succeeds when good men do nothing. Well, this golf club went pretty far down the wrong road because good men did nothing. And in the years since, we have a wonderful member who was in the CEO of a professional search firm, and he taught us how to recruit, and we've recruited board members. We've gone to those good men and said you need to serve and a lot of them were reluctant, but they're glad they did it

once they did it. But we actively recruit, as we say, look for the best athlete, because the guy that raises his hand and says I want to be on the board, I'm always suspicious of that guy. We want. We try to get people involved early on in the process. Get on a committee, get on the greens committee, get on the finance committees, see how the place really works. Most members have no idea what it takes to run a club,

what it takes to grow the grass. And you try to get people involved and then from that will bubble up to the top, your best people because it's a big commitment. It's you know, the president of the club winds up here every day and one spell or another, and right now we're in the process of building a building. But it does take a commitment, and finding the people who are willing to make that commitment is the key to sustaining what we have here.

you've been here. But for people that are listening that haven't been here, if they look at the aerial photos, they can find online that the front nine originally was a counterclockwise loop, kind of a link that went around the hill in the middle, and the back nine has six contiguous fairways, so they're really two different architectural styles, and the front nine had been compromised by the street

beginning put in. But Kyle Phillips with what he did, now the front nine is as good as the back nine. Everybody that played here ago say, boy, the back nine is great. The front nine is just so. So now the front nine is equal to the back. But there's something majestic about the back because you see it all from the sixth screen and you've seen that. It's just it's fabulous. And even though there are six contiguous fairways,

it doesn't feel cramped. It's not a back and forth golf course because there's tremendous scale from the center line of one fairway to the center line of the other. And this is another thing that I learned from Phillips. And he's just brilliant. He's become a friend. We made him an honorary member, and nothing gets done here without him. And that's another bit of advice that I would give

to people who are thinking about doing this. Once you've got the work done, and if you've left it to a pro like Phillips, then you can't have amateurs come back in and start to fiddle with it. Be goes, I can tell you. I mean, we weren't open three months. People would come up to me and say, geez, you think we ought to change this over here or cut this. So Phillips was made a member immediately and we have

stuck to this. Now. It's not in the bylaws or anything, but everybody buys into the fact that nothing happens to this golf course without Phillips signing on.

down into the bowl. There's just so much variety in the topography and the roles of the land that it do you know while you're playing back and forth for a stretch of holes, each one the the content words that cut through the fairway, where the greens positioned, how the bunkers are arranged, are so varied that it's not back and forth.

in elevation. The sixth green is two hundred and twenty feet above sea level and the first fairway, the first green is eighty feet so this is about one hundred and sixty, you know, so it's not a hilly place, but it's got nice movement. It's got enough so it's easy to walk, and you know, it's just it's just a pleasure to play every day. And the wind it's never plays the same every day. You don't get tired of play in here.

golf courses that have improved the most over time. So AL appreciate the time, and I hope everybody enjoys the story.

beginners on the municipal golf course. There was nothing in the middle, and so that was really the original intent behind the creation of the California Golf Club at Ingleside. But they had one fundamental flaw in all of that,

which is they didn't own the land. And so in the early nineteen twenties, taking a look at the landscape, there was a general assumption that all of the land surrounding, Lakener said, which included the Ingleside Course which is now San Francisco State University, and included San Francisco Golf Club, the Olympic Club, Harding Park, all of that, that the land was going to become too valuable for golf course

and was going to be turned into housing. So in a bit of sort of innovative thinking, they decided to move further down the peninsula, seven miles south of Lake Merced and the land that they found in south San Francisco was they thought the best land available close to San Francisco, and so in nineteen twenty four they acquired the property and spent two years building it in nineteen

twenty six open for good. And of course there's no way they could have forecasted the Great Depression and everything that followed, which changed everything. And I think one of the things, and this is a bit of a tenuous link, but I think it's worth pursuing, is that the creation of the hetch Hetchy Reservoir, which provided water to the San Francisco Peninsula, changed the value of Lake Merced as a source of water for the citizens of that peninsula.

But there was a time when tennis courts were considered, which would be a mass to the club today. And so I think everything's backwards in a straight line when you look backwards. But at the time the kind of high golf IQ culture that currently defines the California Golf Club, that's not the story throughout its entire history with.

If you look at photographs from nineteen twenty six, before mackenzie, Hunter and the American Golf Course Construction Company got involved, there was none of the sort of mackenzie style fingering and capes and bays and really dramatic artistic bunkers. There was much more oval plane and straightforward in shape.

for that work. Plus there's a nineteen twenty nine aerial photograph that shows the McKenzie style bunkers still relatively raw in shape.

golf course that the members played today. No chance, both in the beauty of the landscape, the architectural features, the balance of the trees, the open spaces, the views, none of that. But the club weathered the storm of I think did a great depression of World War Two in a fun way, so that a lot of the leading citizens of San Francisco were members of the California Golf Club,

not just the California Golf Club. One of the interesting things I'm not sure if al covernt or not it was how Eddie Lowry was both the president of cal Club in nineteen forty seven and the club champion at San Francisco Golf Club.

and rebuild those holes. So some of the great holes from the early days in the McCann and mackenzie era were lost forever along the creek that's now under Westboro Boulevard.

And it was that change architecturally to the golf course, along with some economic challenges in the San Frusco Bay area in the nineteen seventies that really started to change the culture of the club away from the kind of players golf club that had attracted Ken Van Curiy and Harvey Ward and Eugene Salvage and George Archer in the fifties and sixties, into a different kind of local golf club in the next couple of decades.

this was an outstanding course. In fact, if you look at the club's archive, there's a letter from Frank Hannigan at the USJA, the long time executive and executive director, talking about the quality of the golf course as the side. An interesting point is that Gene Andrews, who won that nineteen seventy Senior Amateur, is believed to be the first person to win a USG national championship using an anchored

long putter. Nineteen seventy events pretty wild. But as the golf course matured and trees grew in the seventies and eighties, and finances were difficult and the focus wasn't put into maintenance like it is today. I think the club shift did from and this is all due respect to the people who did the best they could at the time they had it shifted away from a club where golf first came together as a club to just simply a

place where people played golf. The membership was much more transitory, coming and going, and the priorities were not about golf,

they were about other things. And one of the byproducts of this was in I can't remember the exact dates right now, but the installation of the ponds on the eleventh and the eighteenth holes, and if you look at some of the photos into the nineteen nineties and early two thousands, when you played that famous twelve hole looking away from the clubhouse, you had a pond on either side, right and left of you as you were approaching the par three.

a restoration element to it. But when you're stripping it down to the studs and putting the sand amendment that you did and rebuilding all the infrastructure underneath, I mean, that's completely a reconstruction of the golf course, but it's

being done in an older style. And so I think col Club is absolutely one of the leaders in the clubhouse when it comes to not accepting what you were and not accepting what you are, but trying to imagine the best that you could possibly be and having the willingness to take the risk to find out what that is.

culture of innovation. All of these buzzworthy things that go around, but these aren't These aren't new ideas of the One of the great quotes to me in thinking not about the California Golf Club, but just the environment itself, comes from of all people, aw Tillinghast, who says in February of nineteen twenty, when one stands on a California course, he almost invariably impressed with a magnificent panorama. The country

seems so very big. Everything is on such a gigantic scale that it makes itself felt as well as seen. The trees seem bigger than those usually encountered, and they are the mountains loom high and extend far. How is it possible to put pawky things in the very heart

of such surroundings? And I think if you stand on the back patio at the Cow Club, and you take a look at that expansive view in the heart of some of the most densely populated urban areas in the United States, and you've got San Francisco Airport to the south, and you've got the San Bruno Mountains on the other side, and you've got the ocean breezes, and you've got these high moderny pines and cypresses and open spaces, and it's exactly the same view that Tilling has had nearly one

hundred years ago.

It's the California Golf Club. And so, how can you, in everything you do from golf course to clubhouse, to the quality of your membership, to all of your principles that you care about, how can you honor the name of your club by offering the highest private golf experience you can.