Pebble Beach Exceeds Expectations

Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb, when I made clouds its swaddling band, and prescribed limits for it and set bars and doors, and said, 'thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed?'  Job 38:8-11

It seems like every time we turn around someone is trying to sell us some type of product, service or person. These sales pitches bombard us daily, and are chock full of spin, embellishment and hype--many the brainchild of some ad agency's high dollar marketing campaign. These systematic assaults have left us largely jaded and grossly underwhelmed when we eventually encounter the focus of the hype.

Today I encountered Pebble Beach Golf Links for the very first time. I'd been told things like "it is breathtaking" and "you won't believe how beautiful it is." I usually thought to myself 'I bet it's nice, but it can't be that nice.' I reasoned that at some level Pebble Beach was just another "product" being over-billed by the media and golf establishment and that it would be certain to fall short of expectations. I was wrong.

The English language sometimes falls short when called upon to adequately describe a product of God's creation. Our language has met its match at Pebble Beach. Words like "breathtaking" and "beautiful" don't scratch the surface of what I saw today. Pebble Beach, if anything, is under-hyped. Perhaps those that come here year after year take it for granted and have lost a little of the wonder that comes with the certain astonishment of a first encounter.

Pebble Beach has been called the "greatest meeting of land and sea." It's hard to dispute this claim when looking out at the Pacific Ocean as its waves crash the shore beneath the 7th green. We know God created the Monterey Peninsula, but we must also acknowledge its designers Jack Neville and Douglas Grant, who, being created in God's image, wonderfully reflected their Creator in fashioning this property into arguably the best golf course in the world.

Some other first impressions and observations of Pebble Beach and today's practice round...

• I knew a good bit about holes 17 and 18. These are nice golf holes, but numbers 6-9 were especially surprising and certainly more beautiful than 18. These really caught me by surprise.
• Hole 17 is relatively flat. When I've watched it on television over the years I had gotten the impression that it had a pretty steep decline from tee to green toward the ocean. Not so.
• U.S. Open caps are expensive. The merchandise tents were asking $34 a piece.
• The rough looks pretty wicked and the greens appear postage stamp sized.
• Kenny Perry has lost a lot of weight.

That's all for today. We'll try to write some more each day. In the meantime, take a look at some other photos from today's practice round.