PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. – Pebble Beach has a problem, and it has taken Ernie Els a swing on Friday afternoon to recognize.
“If even I hit a 3-wood so far at 16, they will need some length on the golf course,” said Els Venneri. “Unfortunately, I know the USGA is trying to work on that golf ball, but it needs to happen seriously quickly.”
Els referred to the change that everyone is talking about in the first part of the week in this week’s Pure Insurance Championship: the 16th hole, where Pebble Beach removed a famous tree on the right side of the fairway and replaced with several hundred square meters of fresh sod and a series of “ground under repair” signs.
The change wasn’t just by design. According to the USGA, which will host the US Open at Pebble Beach next June, and the resort, the decision to remove the tree was not strategic in nature. The tree on the side of the 16th was diseased, and efforts by the course crew and arborists to revive it were unsuccessful, eventually necessitating its removal a few weeks ago.
The trees on 16 have a fabulous history at Pebble Beach. They rose to fame in the early 20th century as perhaps the first major design change of the course, a change commissioned by architects H. Chandler Egan and Robert Hunter after they were hired to spruce up the course before the 1929 US Amateur. Egan and Chandler pushed the green on 16 about 100 yards from their starting position, an ingenious change that turned the cypress grove into a narrow pair of goal posts framing the fairway, forcing players to hit an accurate shot down the throat if they hoped to hit a birdie putt.
For most of the next 100 years, that’s exactly how the trees stayed, forcing elite players to hit a testy layup over the fairway bunkers, but short of the trees if they hoped to convert on the hole.
Now, however, that component of the hole has changed, even for the comparatively shorter hitters of the PGA Tour Champions making their way around the golf course this weekend. According to some of the players in the field, the removal of the tree made it easier to consider a bomb strategy and gauge on the famous narrow par-4, playing on the right side just open and contemplating a flipped wedge from the rough in an unguarded green.
“You know, we thought we’d take the driver out and just send him,” Ryan Armor said. “I think the long guys can really take it if they want to.”
These changes are exacerbated by some of the changes in golf club technology that Els highlighted, which allow professionals to hit the golf ball further and straighter than ever before. Changes in driving distance have stressed Pebble Beach over the years – most recently leading to the creation of a new tee box on the 6th hole. behind a maintenance road, and the addition of a second cypress into the fairway on the 18th hole earlier this summer, a strategic change introduced before the 2009 US Open to add teeth to the par-5 finishing hole.
If you ask the people responsible for these changes, they will all give you a version of the same answer: Tweaks are intended to keep Pebble Beach in its place at the top of the hierarchy of golf courses. But not everyone will admit that concerns about distance hold more weight at this golf course, in large part because it is landlocked by its own brilliant double helix design. With so many tee boxes and greens intersecting so well together, there isn’t much room for new development.
This is what keeps Els awake at night: The fear that one of the most beautiful golf courses in America could eventually be rendered obsolete (or ineffably changed) from its tournament origins.
“This golf course is probably, without a doubt, in the top five in the world,” Els said. “To be honest, it would be a shame if the golf course became a little bit not the way it was meant to be played.”
Of course, not everyone was so convinced. At the Pure Insurance Championship, Armor and Zach Johnson said they played the hole like they might have 10 years ago at the Crosby Clam Bake, electing to lay down to avoid a wedge blown down a slope.
“I don’t think it’s such a significant change,” Johnson said. “It’s unfortunate that the tree was not in good health, and that’s what you have to do, but the integrity of the hole has not wavered.”
But when the US Open comes next summer, the changes to 16 could be more strategic. Bryson DeChambeau famously won 2020 US Open at Winged Foot – a brutal and open design – despite the fact that the penalty shots from the descent are not lacking. He learned that on a tight golf course, the penalty for missing the fairway by 25 yards was not much worse than the penalty for missing by two yards. With no trees to prevent him from hitting the driver anywhere, he did, and cleared the field en route to his first major championship victory.
Of course, Pebble Beach would need to lose a lot more trees to reach in the same territory as Winged Foot. The turns at the 16th hole are not part of a larger design by the course operators, who do not rule out GOLF that they should add a tree to the right side of 16 before the national championship next June. The goal is not to encourage another US Open winner.
But on Friday at the Pure Insurance Championship, Els’ point was just this: If the ball continues to travel further, the best plans of even the greatest golf courses could be called into question.
“You know, you need to hit certain shots at certain holes,” Els said. “With the ball flying that far, this golf course is going to hurt.”
