Tour Guide: The Tiny Pebble Test and ‘Crosby Weather’ Horrors

Welcome back to Tour Guide, our new Club TFE feature on professional golf. Let’s take a drive over to the Monterey Peninsula, shall we?

Small Greens on a Big Stage

By Joseph LaMagna

Welcome to Pebble Beach week!

A bunch of the best players in the world congregate along the Pacific Ocean for what projects to be a…chaotic week of golf. The combination of Pebble Beach’s dimensions and a multi-course format often produces funky leaderboards. This week, a particularly ominous forecast lingers like a dark cloud over the tournament, which could very well infuse further variance into this golf tournament. In short, I think a wide range of outcomes is possible, and a variety of names could find themselves in contention on Sunday or whenever this tournament finishes.

How do you win at Pebble Beach and how might this week’s conditions impact the formula for success?

Pebble Beach is a short golf course with a large concentration of approach shots coming from inside 150 yards. Contrary to many other wedge-fests on the PGA Tour like at PGA West or Sea Island, Pebble Beach tends not to yield as low of scores as other courses of similar lengths. The tiny greens and frequently blustery conditions play into the hands of a golfer who can control his ball flight and who has a strong short game. Expecting yourself to hit every green and drain a barrage of 12-foot birdie putts is not realistic at Pebble Beach. Executing short game shots from intelligently-positioned spots around the green is crucial to success in this tournament.

In thinking about this concept in action, the second hole immediately comes to mind. Here is how Justin Rose played the second hole in his final round last year en route to winning the tournament.

He left himself an easy up-and-down from the green side bunker and executed the sand shot for a tap-in birdie. Easier said than done, but that is the formula this week.

Another piece to keep in mind at Pebble Beach is that the rough is typically kept short and manageable. This helps the amateurs teeing it up alongside tour players. We don’t need to watch sandbaggers like Larry Fitzgerald thrash around in thick rough all day. Historically, the penalty for finding the rough at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am hovers around 0.15 strokes, which is about as low as it gets on the PGA Tour. Inaccurate drivers can find plenty of success on this golf course. In the three editions of this tournament between 2018 and 2020, Phil Mickelson snagged a trophy and never finished outside third place. Pebble Beach is an ideal setup for a player like Mickelson or Jordan Spieth, crafty players who are adept around the greens. They get away with not being the straightest drivers on the planet.

Given the cold, rainy, windy forecast, I expect a slightly different test than in previous years. The course should play longer than it does historically, and there will likely be an increased importance on short game. More than anything, though, this tournament screams variance. It’s an 80-player no-cut event featuring the top players on the PGA Tour, so it’s not exactly like you’ll see a bunch of names you don’t recognize on the first page of the leaderboard, but I fully expect some elite golfers to struggle and for some longshots to get in the mix. Anything can happen this week.

A player I’m high on entering this golf tournament is Matt Fitzpatrick. Historically, Fitzpatrick has not always been the best long-iron approach player, which gets somewhat masked at Pebble Beach. He’s accustomed to playing overseas in choppy conditions, and he has the skill set on and around the greens to post solid scores at Pebble Beach. His results here have been a mixed bag, but a T-6 at the 2022 Pebble Beach Pro-Am and a T-12 at the 2019 U.S. Open at Pebble offer hope for what could be in store for Fitzy this week.

Memory Lane: The Tour Goes Soft

By Brendan Porath

The notion of “Crosby Weather” for the PGA Tour’s annual stop at Pebble Beach (and the surrounding area) is a well-established phenomenon. When the Tour arrives, the wind blows and the skies open up, often for several days at a time. Ken Venturi once told Jaime Diaz how Cary Middlecoff walked off Cypress Point during the tournament because the wind kept blowing his ball off the tee. Pebble pro Peter Hay sent him back out with the reply, “Show me in the rule book where it says you have to tee up the ball.”

It’s looking ghastly this week again! But despite decades of piss-poor weather across the many iterations and title sponsors of this event, it has been canceled outright only once due to weather: 1996. With Phil Mickelson going for his third straight win and just two shots off the lead, and others like Tom Watson and Nick Faldo contending, the Tour called it.

It was the first time on Tour since 1949 that a tournament could not be completed due to a washout, and it is the only cancellation in the tournament’s history. There have been many alterations on the fly, with the pro-am portion getting cut down mid-weekend, the Tour portion being shortened to 54 holes six times, and once to 36 holes when the Tour rules allowed that to be official. Unfortunately that rule could not be put into effect in 1996, when three courses were in play and rules required 54 holes to be completed in order to make things official. Every player had to at least play each course once.

A washed-out bunker at Pebble Beach

The 1996 elements did not seem particularly extreme by “Crosby Weather” standards, or at least enough to force an entire cancellation. But there was one hole that conspired with the rigidity of the Rules of Golf to create a major headache. A week of rains leading into the event forced the Tour to play the first two rounds under lift, clean, and place, but everything was on schedule as of Friday night with 36 holes wrapped. Then more overnight rains crushed all three venues – then Pebble, Poppy Hills, and Spyglass – and Saturday proceeded without a single shot. The courses became playable again, save for the 16th hole at Spyglass. That’s where standing water, or what some would later pejoratively refer to as a “puddle,” on the left side of the fairway combined with the hole design to prevent “full and complete relief” under the rules. The only dry ground close to this trouble spot (but not nearer the hole) was in the rough, and obstructed by branches, creating a result of incomplete relief. This is why play was called on Saturday, and it did not get better, or good enough, on Sunday. From a Diaz game story:

Although more rain had fallen during the night, winds in excess of 30 mph had cleared the sky. Faldo took a mental reading and declared that it would be a tougher day than the final round of the 1992 U.S. Open, when the average score at Pebble Beach was 77 and change. The prospect of the pros being buffeted hither and yon was enough to raise hopes that this was a tournament, 54 holes or not, that could be saved. Watson was particularly primed. “I’m very eager,” he said. “I’m looking forward to winning. I just hope they don’t cancel the golf tournament.”

But that’s what officials did. An army of blowers and squeegees had the area along the 16th improving on Sunday when a heavy squall undid all the work. Faced with the hopeless task of saving the day, and a Monday forecast for more rain (it turned out to be a beautiful day), officials from the tournament and the PGA Tour, despite pressure from television, decided to cancel the entire event. “We couldn’t play under the casual water rule strictly,” said David Eger, the Tour’s vice president of competition. “The Tour has stayed firm about playing under the Rules of Golf.”

About the untenable drop location in the rough, Eger added, “Obviously, that’s just not golf.” Hmmm.

The players, by a significant majority, were miffed about the decision, including the contending Watson. Johnny Miller lamented being unable to “slop” around for an “entertainment tournament.” Venturi seemed to think it went against the fiber of an event played in some of the worst conditions.

In the current era, one trouble spot canceling an entire event, or jumping the gun ahead of what turned out to be a beautiful Monday, would create an outrage tsunami and cries of scandal. A more creative solution would likely supersede or get around some rules of golf impediment. In 1996, however, it left Jeff Maggert, riding solo first, with the same paltry $5,000 payout as the last-place guy he beat by 26 shots in just 36 holes. But that’s better than some of the ams who paid the $3,500 to play and never even made it to Pebble.

One Shot from Last Week

By Will Knights

A near albatross from 286 yards!@Parker_Coody lipped out for a 2 @FarmersInsOpen 😲 pic.twitter.com/ySPb9G9eFH

— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) January 27, 2024

Parker Coody and his identical brother Pierceson are two of the most promising young talents on the PGA Tour, so I shouldn’t be surprised when one of them hits a brilliant golf shot. But this driver off the deck stopped me in my tracks last week. Shotlink data (not the broadcast data) showed a ball speed of 163 mph, an apex of 68 feet, and 276 yards of carry. Oh, and it was a perfect tight draw.

Now, anyone who has attempted a driver off the deck knows how hard it is to get the ball in the air, let alone to hit a high draw. The tendency is to have a steeper angle of descent to avoid hitting the ball fat. The steeper angle typically means the face is more open, and voila, you hit a cut (or a slice). Instead, Coody found plenty of depth with his downswing and hit an absolute missile. He was the only player to hit the ninth green in two during the final round, and he converted the four-footer for eagle.