‘The golf course is going to get hurt’: A shape-shifting Pebble Beach has players talking

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — Pebble Beach has a problem, and it took Ernie Els one swing on Friday afternoon to recognize it.

“If even I’m hitting a 3-wood all the way down there on 16, they’re going to need some length on the golf course,” Els said Friday. “Unfortunately, I know the USGA is trying to work on that golf ball, but it’s got to seriously happen quickly.”

Els was referring to the change that has everybody talking through the early portion of the week at this week’s Pure Insurance Championship: the 16th hole, where Pebble Beach removed a famous tree from the right side of the fairway and replaced it with several hundred square feet of fresh sod and a series of “ground under repair” signs.

The change was not entirely by design. According to the USGA, which will host the U.S. 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 16th had grown diseased, and efforts by the course’s grounds crew and arborist to revive it were unsuccessful, eventually necessitating its removal a few weeks ago.

The trees on 16 have a fabled history at Pebble Beach. They grew to fame in the early 20th century as perhaps the course’s first major design shift, a change commissioned by architects H. Chandler Egan and Robert Hunter after they were hired to spruce the course ahead of the 1929 U.S. Amateur. Egan and Chandler pushed the green on 16 back some 100 yards from its initial location, an ingenious shift that turned the grove of cypress trees into a narrow pair of goal posts framing the fairway, forcing players to hit a precise shot up the gully if they hoped to face a birdie putt.

For the better part of the next 100 years, that’s exactly how the trees remained, forcing elite players to hit a testy layup shot over the fairway bunkers but short of the trees if they hoped to convert on the hole.

Now, though, 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 tree’s removal has made it easier to consider a bomb-and-gauge strategy on the famously narrow par-4, playing it down the newly opened right side and contemplating a flipped wedge from the rough into an unguarded green.

“You know, we were thinking about taking driver out and just sending it,” Ryan Armour said. “I think the long guys can really take it on if they want.”

These changes are exacerbated by the some of the shifts in golf club technology Els highlighted, allowing pros 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 that sits behind a maintenance road, and the re-addition of a second cypress tree in the fairway on the 18th hole earlier this summer, a strategic change introduced before the 2009 U.S. Open to add teeth to the par-5 finishing hole.

If you ask the people responsible for these changes, they’ll all give you a version of the same answer: Tweaks are aimed at keeping Pebble Beach in its place at the very top of the golf course hierarchy. But not everybody admits 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 neatly together, there isn’t much room for new development.

This is what keeps Els awake at night: The fear that one of America’s finest championship golf courses could eventually be rendered obsolete (or ineffably changed) from its tournament origins.

“This golf course is probably, arguably, in the top five around the world,” Els said. “To be honest, it’d be a shame if the golf course becomes a little not the way it was meant to play.”

Of course, not everybody was so convinced. At the Pure Insurance Championship, Armour and Zach Johnson both said they played the hole as they might have 10 years ago at the Crosby Clam Bake, electing to lay-up to avoid a testy wedge shot off a downslope.

“I don’t think it’s that significant a change,” said Johnson. “It’s unfortunate that the tree wasn’t in good health, and that’s what you got to do, but the integrity of the hole has not wavered.”

But when the U.S. Open comes next summer, the changes to 16 might prove more strategic. Bryson DeChambeau famously won the 2020 U.S. Open at Winged Foot — a brutish, wide-open design — despite no shortage of punishing shots from downhill lies in the rough. He learned that on a narrow golf course, the penalty for missing the fairway by 25 yards wasn’t too much worse than the penalty for missing by two yards. With no trees to keep him from hitting driver everywhere, he did, and he blew away the field en route to his first major championship victory.

Of course, Pebble Beach would need to lose a lot more trees to wind up in the same territory as Winged Foot. The shifts to the 16th hole are not part of some grander design by the course operators, who would not rule out to GOLF that they would re-add a tree to the right side of 16 ahead of the national championship next June. The goal is not to encourage another bomb-and-gauge U.S. Open winner.

But on Friday at the Pure Insurance Championship, Els’ point was just that: If the ball keeps traveling further, the best laid plans of even the greatest golf courses could be rendered moot.

“You know, you need to hit certain shots to certain holes,” Els said. “With the ball flying this far, this golf course is going to get hurt.”