U.S. Amateur — Sports Commentary

By Art Spander

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — Two words, one locale, a dateline that excites golfers, a landscape that thrills artists: Pebble Beach, where Bobby Jones was slammed a year before he won the Slam and where Jack Nicklaus won an Amateur, a Crosby and an Open.

Many of us know Pebble for winter storms and celebrity hijinks, but now it’s summer, when the weather is morning fog and afternoon sun, and they’re playing the 118th U.S. Amateur, so players are grinding and not goofing.

The Amateur had been played only in the East until the U.S. Golf Association chose to hold it at Pebble in 1929. Jones, the defending champ, was eliminated in the first round of match play.

Nicklaus won the Amateur at Pebble in 1961, then of course won the Crosby a couple of times and in 1972 the first Open held at Pebble. He also redesigned the par-3 fifth hole, which was moved to the edge of Carmel Bay.

Nicklaus, interestingly, planned to stay amateur and chase Jones’ records, but for a person to become as dominant as Jack did with his 18 pro majors, it was necessary for him to turn pro, which he did in 1962 — and then a few months later, he won the Open.

Surely, the kids who have success in this Amateur, which now has reached the quarterfinals, will all turn pro. Maybe they’ll be stars like Nicklaus or Tiger Woods, who remains the only man to win three consecutive U.S. Amateurs. Or maybe they’ll be near-misses, like Ricky Barnes, who won the 2002 Amateur but hasn’t done much since going pro.

But whatever transpires, the contestants will have special memories. “The 18th hole,” said quarterfinalist Austin Squires, “there’s all that water on the left and the little stretch of fairway.”

Years ago a San Francisco journalist nicknamed the iconic 18th “The Closer,” not because it ended careers but because so many match-play events ended there, the fans on one side of the fairway, the surf crashing spectacularly on the other.

Jack Neville, with the help of Douglas Grant, laid out Pebble along the rolling bluffs. “It was all there in plain sight,” Neville told me back in the 1970s. “Very little clearing was necessary. The big thing was to get as many holes possible along the bay.”

Do courses make the player, or does the player make the course? The answer is both. Nicklaus hitting that 1-iron off the stick at 17, Tiger making that birdie out of the rough at six. That’s how we think of Pebble.

The quarterfinalists think they are in some of links heaven, and that’s a figure of speech because even though the official name is Pebble Beach Golf Links, the course does not traverse linksland.

Isaiah Salinda, a quarterfinalist, is from Stanford and South San Francisco. The Pacific Ocean is no big thing, although to him Pebble always will be. Squires, from Union, Kentucky, shakes his head at views he never imagined existed until his first trip to Northern California — and Pebble.

“It’s my first time at Pebble,” said quarterfinalist Devon Bling, who plays for UCLA. “This is an unbelievable place. I prepped by playing the little Tiger Woods PGA Tour game. It looks a little different in person. This is amazing.”

Is it ever.