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Yes, We Cal! – The Rise of California Golf Club of San Francisco

MAJESTIC – THE BROAD SWEEPING VISTAS OF CALIFORNIA GOLF CLUB OF SAN FRANCISCO. “IT’S SO WIDE, I DIDN’T LOSE A SINGLE BALL,” SAID GOLFER EDIE SILVER WALKER

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – Good things happen when a Golden Age club not only hires the right golf course architect to perform a restoration, redesign, or renovation, but actually listens to his suggestions.

It’s tough for Golden Age courses to embrace change sometimes, but by listening to the sage advice of internationally-acclaimed golf architect Kyle Phillips’s fresh ideas, California Golf Club of San Francisco was able to solve two problems at once.

Routed in 1924 by famous west coast architect A.V. Macan, and with the addition of an Alister Mackenzie bunkering scheme and green contours, the course spent four decades on the short list of every golfer visiting Northern California because of its wondrous design and storied pedigree. But a 1966 eminent domain proceeding appropriated five holes of golf course property for the building of Interstate 280, and five replacement holes ultimately designed by Robert Trent Jones, Sr. never really fit with the rest of the course.

So when the club hired Phillips in 2008 to help the course adapt to technological evolutions, he also proposed moving the practice range to a spot 600 yards away and using that land, (plus another 18 acres that were, at that time, unused), for five new holes which he would design in the same look and feel of the rest of the course. The idea worked better than anyone could have asked.

“The surest way to improve a course through a renovation or restoration is by improving its worst hole(s),” wrote golf design expert Ran Morrissett, who went on to call the new holes “exceptional” and praised Phillips’s ability to make the new holes blend so seamlessly with the rest of the course.

Morrissett is right – if you didn’t know which holes were designed by Phillips, (one – four, and seven), you’d be hard pressed to pick them out. He not only utilized the wonderful rolling terrain as a great defense itself – greens cling precipitously to steeply-sloped hillocks amid heaving seas of sand – but the bunkers are the same size, shaping, and depth of the original Mackenzie bunkers on the rest of the course. Moreover, like the rest of the course, the fairways are wide off the, but the approach shots must be exact.

“The width of the fairways is the first thing you notice when you step on the tee. I’ve never played wider fairways – not Pasatiempo, not Spyglass Hill, not even Pebble Beach,” explained golfer Edie Silver Walker. “If you hit it straight, you’ll only need one ball all day. Plus you can play the ground game. It reminded me of the way golf is played in England and Scotland.”

That may be true, fairways do blend seamlessly into the greens and you can play one bounce and on in places, but its width and open routes to greens, it’s still difficult to get the ball close at Cal Club. Greens are kept firm and fast, and between lightning speed and pronounced undulations, even shots that started at the pin can run all over the course. A pitch mark from a wedge shot that lands one foot from the cup can still scamper 25 feet way or worse. Greens roll off every which way into hollows, swales, bunkers, or other toers of the green.

Finally, many hazards are perpendicular to the line of play, requiring the golfer to think his way around them.

“There are no penalty strokes out there; you’d have to hit it completely sideways to lose a ball, but we are still so strategic that you have to think and tack your way around the course,” noted PGA Head Professional Mark Doss. “Kyle gave us all the room we need to play the game, with the terrain has so much character and movement that you have to know where to miss.

But that’s true of any truly great course, it reveals its secrets after multiple plays and changes every day depending on the wind. And that’s exactly what Cal Club does. You can play it twice a day for life and never get bored.

The golf world agrees, and rave review has followed rave review since the course re-opened for play. During U.S. Open week last year, while chatting with other writers about where to play, when Cal Club’s name came up it got a remarkable bit of praise.

“I heard it’s the best restoration in golf history. Let me know if it is,” said the editor-in-chief of one of the largest golf magazines in the world.

I don’t know if I can go quite that far, but Cal Club is definitely racing up the charts like a hit record by a boy band. I understand why some call it the best restoration. There once were some penal, watery holes that did not fit with the rest of the golf course. Kyle Phillips’s work is a dramatic improvement: Now everything is a seamless whole reminiscent of Alister Mackenzie, perhaps the most iconic architect in American golf history. I can’t call it better than the restoration work done at Bethpage Black by Rees Jones, (probably the best restoration in golf history), or the work done by George Bahto at the Knoll Club West Course, (again, like Bethpage, the rescue of a course from the scrap heap of history). But Phillips’s work at Cal Club is a quantum leap forward, and for the first time in nearly 50 years, Cal Club is whole again. Some courses never get that second chance.

California Golf Club of San Francisco
844 West Orange Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94080
415.269.3408