My favorite photograph was taken at Pebble Beach.
A few hours earlier, my foursome had been one of the morning’s first tee times. It was April and sunny, but cool — the type of morning that starts off with a quarter-zip and your hands in your pockets, but finishes in short sleeves. When we walked off the 16th green and turned left toward the 17th tee, the ocean and my wife appeared. I’d invited her to come walk the last few holes with us; “Just start at the 18th green and walk the course backward until you run into us,” I’d told her. She picked a pretty good spot. We were still young enough to travel without having to figure out what to do with kids. That was about to change, though.
At the 18th, my caddie — a lovable, foul-mouthed local named Crawford (I never caught his other name, nor was I sure whether “Crawford” was his first name or last) — snapped our photo on the tee box, as he probably had done on every loop he ever made at Pebble. He didn’t know it, but there was a third in the frame too: my wife was a few months pregnant, although almost no one knew it at the time.
I keep that photo near my desk at work. When I look at it, I see so much more than an ocean background: two young parents-to-be with no idea what they’re about to get into; the pizza and legendary nap that followed the round; and a thousand other moments from that morning that never saw a camera lens. Short of my wedding day and the births of my children, I can’t think of a better day in my life. And it wouldn’t have been the same anywhere but Pebble Beach.
Pebble is magical, surreal. I can remember standing on the eighth green, staring at that magnificent cliff framed by the full breadth of the Pacific Ocean, and thinking, There is nowhere in the world that’d I’d rather be right now. It’s a special place that every golfer should get to experience.
That’s why golf magazines should revoke Pebble’s title as America’s No. 1 public golf course.
Pebble Beach has stood atop Golf Digest’s rankings of America’s best public golf courses since the magazine created the rankings in 2003, and it probably would’ve been No. 1 long before that too. No other public-access course in America captures the imagination like Pebble. But the reality is that golfers’ collective understanding of what makes a great golf course has changed since 2003; sustainability, fun, accessibility, and creativity all play bigger roles in the analysis than they did 20 years ago. Even if they didn’t, Pebble is — for all its majesty — an imperfect golf course. It makes limited use of its most stunning aesthetic — its shoreline (even Pebble’s defenders, of which I include myself, would have to concede that Jay Blasi’s reimagined routing is objectively superior). Its tiny greens reflect the era in which the course was born, but they lack the energy and creativity of Pinehurst No. 2, or even Kiawah’s Ocean Course. And for all the unforgettability of its front nine, in truth most of Pebble’s back nine is mundane at best.
More importantly, though, is the indisputable fact that Pebble Beach is “public” on technicality alone. In 1982, when Pebble Beach hosted its second U.S. Open, the greens fee was $70 (about $188 in 2020 dollars, when adjusted for inflation). Today, Pebble’s greens fee has soared to a gargantuan $575 — and that doesn’t include the $45 cart fee, or the $95 caddie fee, or the caddie’s gratuity. And unless the player stays overnight at the resort (a two-night stay and play package starts at nearly $2,800), tee times cannot be made more than 24 hours in advance. Pebble Beach is a bucket-list destination — but that’s because few golfers are able to afford the experience more than once, if that.
Of course, Pebble Beach isn’t the only high-end golf destination charging unholy greens fees: Whistling Straits runs as high as $475, and at TPC Sawgrass, a weekend morning round will cost you a clean $600. But their license to charge those rates exists because of (or, at the very least, is exacerbated by) the standard that Pebble sets: it is public in name only, and nevertheless is rewarded year after year as the model toward which every public course should strive. If there’s no disincentive for Pebble to make itself more accessible, then why should Sawgrass or any other high-end destination?
And ultimately, it’s Pebble’s failure to embody the best — indeed, the most important — qualities of public golf that cries out for its demotion. Any course that deserves to be called the best of American public golf should offer public golfers the best the game has to offer: an inviting environment, creative architecture, and realistic greens fees. On that, Pebble fails. No course will ever reach the peak of a Top 100 list without a three-figures greens fee, but out-of-staters pay just $150 for a weekend round at Bethpage Black, and public golfers at Pasatiempo can walk 18 for just under $300 — still not cheap, but only about half of what Pebble asks. It is possible to do both: to offer remarkable architecture and a once-in-a-lifetime experience at truly accessible prices. And courses doing it better than Pebble Beach should be rewarded as truer exemplars of great public golf.
Ideally, reestablishing the ideals of public golf would not rest on the Golf Digests of the world, and some other opportunity to relegate Pebble off the list of model public venues would exist. But those opportunities are elusive. The USGA’s recent steps toward establishing a de facto rota of U.S. Open courses, of which Pebble is one of perhaps three publicly accessible tracks, can be interpreted only as an affirmation of Pebble Beach as American public golf’s paragon. That’s as unfortunate as it is ironic: Pebble might not even be a worthy U.S. Open venue anymore, much less a worthy representative of public golf. But with the USGA’s blessing laid upon it, there are few other options for rebuking Pebble and establishing that it has wandered too far.
To be clear, Top 100 lists are dumb. They are pointless. But they are not inconsequential. Pebble Beach’s impunity toward the spirit of public accessibility proves that: Pebble can charge whatever it wants to charge, because Top 100 lists say so. But there lies a two-edged sword: by replacing Pebble Beach atop public-course rankings, magazines can begin reestablishing that public-access golf requires more than a credit card reader. Real public access requires more than what Pebble Beach offers.
It probably won’t stop Pebble Beach from charging $575 per round. But it might begin reminding other courses that public access carries public responsibilities, too.
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