xxviii

MY FIRST ACTUAL view of the course on Monday morning at 10:46 more than met my expectations. Stewart allowed me to gawk for a few minutes as we stood on the first tee before giving me his overall view of the way to play the course. “We’d best make our birdies on the first six holes. After that, par will be a good score.”

It didn’t take long for me to understand what he meant. Pebble Beach is one of those courses that becomes progressively more difficult as you move through a round, especially under Open conditions. When the USGA sets up a course for its national championship, it grows what I call Footjoy rough, meaning you can lose your shoes standing in it. On top of that, the greens are so fast they appear to be lacquered rather than mowed. The idea behind these severe conditions is to find out who hits it straightest in the air and rolls it best on the ground, the two most essential skills required to play the game.

Of course, not everyone likes this. Some say it destroys the creativity of players like Seve Ballesteros, who can no longer manufacture dramatic recoveries from trouble spots because the tall rough permits only a chopped wedge back into the fairway. In a famous response to a player who groused that the Open setup was humiliating the competitors, then-USGA President Sandy Tatum commented drily that the USGA wasn’t trying to embarrass the world’s greatest players, just identify them.

I had often heard the same kind of grumbling from players on Tour whenever the subject of the Open came up. I never saw much point in joining in, though, because no matter what the conditions were, they were going to be the same for everyone. Besides, the guys who set up the course were thinking of the game, not the players. I knew enough about golf to know that was important. (If you knew some of these pros like I do, you wouldn’t want them running a lemonade stand, much less the game of golf.)

Anyway, I didn’t do as well as Andy Dillard once did on the opening holes (he started the ’92 Open with six straight birdies to vault to the top of the leaderboard), but I did make two birdies in that stretch. When we reached the 106-yard par-three seventh hole, which is the most famous short hole in the world, I got my first taste of the famous Pebble Beach weather. A small, dark cloud came out of nowhere and rolled across from our right as we stood on the tee. Immediately, the wind changed direction and intensity, and we were suddenly showered with surprisingly hard-driving rain. We played the hole in the storm, and I was lucky to make bogey.

It was over by the time we got to the eighth tee, which is barely more than twenty yards from the seventh green. The sun came back out, and we toweled off. I had been in and out of my rain suit in a span of ten minutes. And now it seemed as if nothing had happened. As we put up the rain gear, I said, “That was quick.”

Stewart shrugged. “That’s the way it is around here. There’s nowhere else quite like it. You’d best be prepared for a little bit of everything: wind, rain, fog, heat, cold, whatever. And you may get ’em all in one day.”

I also learned quickly that Stewart’s first-tee assessment of the course was dead on. The degree of difficulty definitely picked up after the first third of the round was behind us. In particular, the eighth, ninth, and tenth holes are without a doubt the toughest stretch of beautiful golf terrain in the world. All three holes are par fours that run alongside the ocean, stretch more than 400 yards apiece, and feature small greens. To make things worse, their fairways slope toward the cliffs above the sea and further reduce the effective landing areas from the tee. No one seriously expects birdies on these holes. In fact, the talk among the players was that anyone who escaped that stretch with only one bogey each day had a leg up on the field.

The course turns inland beginning at the eleventh hole. While the scenery is no longer quite so dramatic, the golf is still plenty hard. You don’t see the ocean again until the seventeenth hole, which is a long par three that plays straight out to the sea lions and gulls. It’s about 200 yards through unpredictable winds to a figure-eight green that is heavily bunkered. When the pin is on the right front portion of the putting surface, it’s got a landing area in front of the green that may be the only place on a par three where I’ve ever been tempted to lay up.

Of course, just about everyone is familiar with the great finishing hole at Pebble Beach, the par five that curves around the ocean. It starts with a teeing ground that juts out over the ocean and would have been reclaimed by the forces of erosion long ago but for dramatic bulkheading that only a civil engineer could have designed. To compound the golfer’s challenge off the tee at the eighteenth, there’s out of bounds on the right. And that’s only the beginning. Although the hole is reachable in two for big hitters, it’s such a low-percentage play that few attempt it. For one thing, the green is too small to offer much of a target, and it won’t receive a long second shot well, anyway. It’s a far better play to lay back with your second shot, wedge it on, and try to make your birdie that way. That’s how I played it, and my birdie four there gave me a 70. A score like that would be plenty good once we started playing for real.

Of course, practice-round scores are meaningless for precisely that reason: We weren’t playing for real. As Bobby Jones once declared, there are two games: golf and championship golf. And, he further explained, the two have little in common with one another.

Nonetheless, Stewart seemed very pleased with my play. As we made our way back to the bungalow, he remarked that I seemed ready.

I wasn’t quite so confident. “Well, let’s hope I continue to hit the ball as well the rest of the week. We don’t start for another three days.”

He smiled. “I’m not just talking about the Open, Bobby.”