PGA West: San Andreas, the monster 16th, and the hardest course in the world
The monster bunker on the 16th hole at PGA West steals headlines and strokes. We’ve got a firsthand account of its inception.
Watching the CareerBuilder Challenge takes me back to the days when the courses at PGA West were being built and I’d been hired to do media relations for the developer creating the golf community.
At the time, the first course was under construction, and Pete Dye was spending a lot of time getting the design just right. The guys in charge of the company said they had long ago given up trying to tell Dye anything about how to make golf holes. These days, they just told him what they wanted and let him go. This time, they wanted the hardest golf course on the planet. The one time they tried to get him to change something is a funny story in itself, but I digress.
Although I’d spoken to Pete on the phone for golf articles a time or two, and had met Alice Dye on a trip to south Florida all before I moved out to California, I had not actually met Pete. The encounter came at La Quinta Hotel Golf Club. Pete was headed to the range to hit balls. He looked a bit disheveled, wearing his trademark blue shirt and khaki shorts. He had dirt stuck to his legs, but that didn’t stop him from working on his game.
I introduced myself and said, how’s business.
Pete said, ”Kath, I’ve got dirt for life.”
Funniest answer ever. I knew this was a guy who was easy to like. I told him I wanted to see the progress at PGA West and asked when could I come out and see it. We made arrangements for me to meet up at what became the maintenance facility for the Palmer Course a year or two later. It was, in fact, a house that had come with the acquisition of the 2000 acres of the original PGA West property.
Getting up close and personal with PGA West
When I got there, Pete was on the phone with one of the guys at Golf Digest, Jerry Tarde, I think. Pete gave me the phone for a hello, and because it was winter, I asked Jerry what his weather was like and told him what it was like in the desert. I knew what it was like in the northeast that time of year. Lived through winters in Massachusetts, New York, Ohio and Illinois and was now done with that, so couldn’t resist. My zip code had no snow or sleet.
“If they are dumb enough to be down here, I don’t want them to be able to see the green for their second shot.”
Well, after that, we got out onto the golf course, and Pete wanted to go to number eleven. It was amazing. Off the tee, it looked normal, but then far down in the fairway where the drives should land, on the left-hand side, there was this pit that was kind of flat at the bottom. Pete was talking to the guys with bulldozers and told them he wanted them to keep lowering the pit.
“If they are dumb enough to be down here, I don’t want them to be able to see the green for their second shot,” he cackled. “Just pile the dirt up over here,” he added, pointing to the right side of the hole. Making it harder, there was another hole which would become water fronting the green. So, no problems there.
Well, turns out this course had more lumps than buttermilk. More holes than the Beatles song about fixing them. It was basically a Henry Moore sculpture that reclined over 18 holes. The golf got more challenging and in-your-face as the course progressed. At the par five 5th, though, it was nearly pancake flat but had a water hazard to be off the tee to the left and water to the right on the second shot. When I say water, I mean nearly as much as you’d see at the 18th TPC Sawgrass on the first shot, and then again on the second shot.
If that didn’t stop you, the next hole, there was a monster body of water, all carry at the 6th, a par three which seldom gets mention. In addition, in 1986, a par three was supposed to stop at 255 yards, and the back tee on that hole was 255. It would make you gulp looking at it.
The 12th had a moat of sand around the gumdrop-shaped green, but you really couldn’t see it when you were hitting your second shot unless you are Dustin Johnson. That’s the one where there are pictures of Arnold Palmer climbing out of the moat by walking up the wall, holding on to the end of a golf club with someone holding the other end, I think Glenn Tait, then a PGA Tour rules official. That was in the Skins Game. (If you watch the video, start it at about 32:00 for the 12th hole.)
When my mother played the hole, I gave her a yardage and suggested she add two clubs to what she would normally hit. You know, on a golf course where the ground doesn’t disappear into a hole from time-to-time.
“Mother, no guts, no glory,” I said. She put her second shot right on the green and had a look at birdie.
Surviving “San Andreas” – and beyond
On this course, by the time you have played 15 holes, you are mentally beat. And then you get to stand on the 16th tee and look at San Andreas, the name that was given to the hole.
San Andreas, in case you did not know, is the monster fault underground in California that runs from about 10 miles north of PGA West all the way to somewhere in Northern California. They say if the Big One hits, meaning earthquake, everything north of that will be beachfront property because everything south will fall into the ocean. Probably an exaggeration, but nobody knows for sure. So, the biggest hole on the course was named for the biggest fault in California.
You can see the sand unfolding on your left, beyond the schmutz in front of the tee. Nice wide fairway with mounding on the right and a that noxious ribbon of sand on the left.
That looks bad until you get closer, until you see the next two bunkers, one left of the fairway bunker and an even deeper one left of the green, wrapping around back of it. It’s 19 feet deep, no matter what they say on TV, unless somebody filled it in a couple of feet.
I asked why it was that deep, and apparently, that’s as high as Pete Dye could hit a sand wedge. That’s what I was told anyway. On this hole, you can only miss the green to the right or short. If you are right, it’s a downhill shot to a mostly flat green, and if you hit it too hard, it will roll right off and skitter down the slope, 19 feet below, into the sand.
Now, this is not as impossible a shot as you would think because even I have hit a shot out of it onto the green. And I was never a particularly wonderful golfer. If I practice a bunch, I might be able to manage a few bogies, the occasional par and more than likely a lot of doubles. I wouldn’t want to try this shot without having played some golf, though. It’s not for sissies.
The 16th is followed by Alcatraz, the island 17th, like the one at TPC Sawgrass, but longer. The PGA West island green is about 165 yards, and Sawgrass is about 135. I have hit them both, I have to say. (The ladies tees are shorter!)
After that, you basically crawl in up the 18th because you have had it.
The hardest course on the planet
The day the course opened, Deane Beman, then commissioner of the PGA Tour, and Pat Reilly, then an officer of the PGA of America, were there to cut the ribbon with the two executives who made the course possible, Ernie Vossler and Joe Walser.
Vossler and Walser asked for the hardest golf course on the planet, and they got it. A few weeks after it opened, the course rating committee gave it a course rating that I thought was higher than other notable courses in the country. Not wanting to guess on these matters, I called the USGA, and they said it was definitely a higher rating than on any other course. Now that was 1986 or 1987, and a lot of difficult tracks have been built since then, but at the time, it was the hardest golf course in the country.
It became memorable at first because the Skins Game moved there in November of 1986.
Two months later, when the Bob Hope Classic was played, PGA West was included for the first time, using the Stadium Course. After that, the players deemed it too tough to play, and it was removed from the tournament rotation. Now, they were playing Eldorado, Tamarisk, Bermuda Dunes, La Quinta CC and Indian Wells at the time, and except for Bermuda Dunes and La Quinta CC, the other courses were significantly easier. PGA West was much harder than any of them.
However, the difficulty did not deter the Skins Game organizer, the late Don Ohlmeyer. He kept bringing the event back as long as the courses were available. In 1987, Lee Trevino notched a hole-in-one at the island 17th, and as they say, the crowd went nuts.
What was kind of amazing in all the complaining about the degree of difficulty is that John Cook and Fred Couples, and a couple other Tour players who lived out there at the time, played PGA West’s Stadium Course just before it opened. They played it from the tips, and Couples shot a 64. At least, that’s what I was told. A 64, and that was from 7700 yards, which is all the way back, and it was in the age of persimmon. Today, they should probably add another thousand yards to make it Dustin Johnson proof.
And now, for the story about the time the developers tried to tell Pete Dye what to do with a golf hole. It happened at Oak Tree Golf Club ( now Oak Tree National), which it was under construction. It was a par five on the front side, so that means either the 3rd or 5th hole, and honestly, I have forgotten which but the sons or daughters of Vossler and Walser can probably tell you. The developers thought the green was the wrong size for the shot to the putting surface. They wanted Pete to modify it.
Next: Rory McIlroy rested, ready for whirlwind 2018 schedule
Since both Vossler and Walser had been PGA Tour pros, they had a pretty good idea what was right for a golf hole. After the conversation with Pete, they left for the day. A day or two later, they went out to the course, and saw the hole hadn’t been changed and, worse yet, it was grassed. They went in search of Pete to find out why he didn’t make the change.
As the story goes, Pete said, “I did, but I didn’t like it, so I changed it back.” That was the last time they tried to give advice to Pete Dye on golf design.