Back
DALY CITY, Calif. - Three restoration efforts.
Three distinct courses.
Three different modern architects.
One legendary man.
Dr. Alister MacKenzie's brilliance as an architect continues to be a driving force in the game more than 85 years after his death. Not just at Augusta National, host of The Masters this week, but at all of his courses around the world. MacKenzie courses are treated like a Mona Lisa, a piece of art that must be preserved, protected and admired by all.
Three California courses thousands of miles from Augusta are more dedicated than ever to reviving their ties to MacKenzie. The private Lake Merced Golf Club in Daly City near San Francisco spent millions of dollars to hire Gil Hanse and completely return to its MacKenzie roots with a comprehensive restoration/redesign that debuted to rave reviews Oct. 1, 2022. Down the road in Santa Cruz, the semiprivate Pasatiempo Golf Club is gearing up next week for an important project to restore all of its MacKenzie greens and bunkers to ensure their future. And last, but certainly not least, comes the welcome news that Haggin Oaks, a city-owned municipal facility in Sacramento, is ready to move forward with its own MacKenzie revival of sorts.
These are exciting times for MacKenzie lovers.
Reviving Lake Merced Golf Club
Stepping onto the 13th tee box feels like taking a time machine back to the early days of Lake Merced. The gorgeous 149-yard par 3 was lost when highway construction in the 1960s forced changes to the layout by a young Robert Muir Graves. Hanse used historical photos and newspaper clippings to revive much of MacKenzie's routing, bunkers and classic feel on a course that dates back to 1923. MacKenzie removed nearly 100 bunkers and redesigned every hole while working his magic in 1929.
Club historian Mitch Leiber estimates that the new 6,923-yard, par-72 Lake Merced is roughly 80 percent a MacKenzie original with numerous holes in similar footprints. The new-look Lake Merced looks and plays night and day compared to the hilly, narrow, demanding course that hosted six LPGA Tour events from 2014-2020. Hanse removed roughly 200 towering Monterey Pines and Cypress trees - the atmospheric rivers of winter 2023 have knocked down even more - to open up sight lines and playing corridors. Gone are the long uphill shots from the fairway that felt like a slog in the heavy San Francisco air, replaced by playful downhill approach shots at holes like 11 and 12 that are just as beautiful as they are fun. The deep bunkers built by Rees Jones during a refurbishment project in the mid-1990s have also been replaced by shallower ones in the artistic MacKenzie style. They're easy to find but also easier to escape. Members can now plan their attack however they're most comfortable, either by ground or air.
The 162-yard 16th hole is affectionately called "the Gil Hanse hole" because it's the only completely new hole he designed. His inspiration came from a visit to Cypress Point, another famous MacKenzie course on the Monterey Peninsula. The short 135-yard third is also an outlier, but the bunkering and wonderful greensites of each par 3 fit right in with the rest of the course architecture.
The Lake Merced driving range, which was steps from the clubhouse before, has been moved to a corner of the property, requiring a short walk or cart ride to reach. That's a minor inconvenience compared to the stunning new views of the course now available from the bar upstairs in the clubhouse. Members are thrilled with their shiny new toy, a playground as good as any in San Francisco. That's high praise considering the club's illustrious neighbors: The Olympic Club, TPC Harding Park and the San Francisco Golf Club.
Restoring Pasatiempo Golf Club
Pasatiempo Golf Club has always been America's most accessible Top-100-caliber MacKenzie course. Following next week's 2023 Western Intercollegiate, Architect Jim Urbina and Pasatiempo Superintendent Justin Mandon will lead an 18-month-long restoration that attempts to revive the course's MacKenzie roots. The work to restore the course's famous green complexes and bunkers will be carried out in stages by rotating closures of the nines one at a time. The project should be completed by December 2024.
The front nine closes April 13 and is scheduled to reopen Dec. 1. Next year's Western Intercollegiate - one of college golf's premier tournaments - will be contested on the restored front nine and the current back nine. After the 2024 tournament, the final nine will close in April and reopen in December. If only nine holes are open, public golfers and members will play the available nine twice for 18-hole rounds. Non-members are required to call the pro shop at (831) 459-9155 for availability and rates during the restoration.
Although the specific details are being kept private for the time being, a press release indicated the greens will be reshaped "per MacKenzie’s original design intent." Hanging inside Pasatiempo's clubhouse are replicas of 11 MacKenzie sketches of the greens (the originals are stored at the World Golf Hall of Fame). The restored slopes and movement won't entirely be copied from the sketches, however.
"They are useful in a sense you see what the original intent of the greens were but they differ greatly from what Robert Hunter and MacKenzie actually built," Mandon said.
Laser grades of the green complexes, opening day photos from 1929 and on-site evaluation of the original sub grades will help determine the green shapes that emerge from the restoration.
Revamping Haggin Oaks
Thrilled to announce that we are in process of developing master plans for two special historic public golf courses in Sacramento—William Land GC & the Alister MacKenzie Course at @HagginOaks. Looking forward to working with Morton Golf to realize these courses’ great potential! pic.twitter.com/x2tXvcYQxm
— Brett Hochstein (@HochsteinDesign) March 21, 2023
In one way, Haggin Oaks has a decided advantage when in comes to reviving MacKenzie's original work. It is the only MacKenzie course that still has original sketches of all 18 greens. Copies hang in MacKenzie's Sports Bar & Grille at the club.
The problem is there are so many obstacles to getting there. The original MacKenzie greens were deemed too severe and toned down during the course's early years. Then, around the turn of the century in 2001, a partial redesign of the layout moved some holes around and reshaped most greens (but not all). Getting back to something close to resembling the original greens and routing would require a major financial lift. Haggin Oaks is a municipal course owned by the city of Sacramento and managed by a third party, Morton Golf. Neither has the profound resources of a well-heeled membership like Pasatiempo or Lake Merced. California-based Architect Brett Hochstein is preaching patience as a master plan is still being sorted out.
"There are a lot of practical challenges facing us to develop this plan and figure out just what can be done," Hochstein said. "There are certain changes—such as shrinking property lines and flood functionality—that we are locked into and others that are just generally prohibitive. Still, there are numerous solutions that draw inspiration from MacKenzie and get us closer to his original design. Figuring out how close we can get will be the main challenge."
"In a perfect world, I would love to bring the routing back closer to its original layout, but there are are a lot of constraints in recreating those corridors since so much has changed—new trees, different shaping, lots of infrastructure, and the addition of functional ponds," he continued. "Plus the highway encroachment to the south, similar to what happened at Lake Merced. We are still very early on exploring different big-picture possibilities. The one thing we know is that MacKenzie drew up an incredible set of creative greens drawings, and finding ways to work from those will be key.”
What's the best Alister MacKenzie course you've played?
Comments (1)
Alister Mackenzie did not design Lake Merced. He made improvements to the bunkering and some of the layout. But to associate Lake Merced with true Mackenzie-designed courses like Augusta and Pasatiempo (and Merced's neighbor Green Hills in Millbrae) is a bit of an exaggeration.