Restoring the 16th Green - Episode 1

By way of Dr. Alister MacKenzie, the famed golf course architect, and Marion Hollins, the female pioneer, player, developer and architect, not to mention Bobby Jones, who played in the opening day foursome and fell in the love with the work of MacKenzie and Hollins, Pasatiempo in Santa Cruz, Calif., is forever entrenched in the fabric of golf in America.

Dating back to 1929, this (mostly) public course has a rich history. But life for the course and club hasn’t always been easy. There have been economic struggles, agronomic downturns and there was a rather famous fight for reclaimed water, which was resolved in 2016.

And then there was this issue with the greens. All of them.

The club leadership knew it, Justin Mandon, the course superintendent knew it, and Jim Urbina, the course architect who had worked for a better part of two decades tweaking and restoring the course, but not the greens, also knew it. And through a thoughtful and rigorous process, all of the above convinced the members/shareholders of the club that the putting surfaces needed to go back to the future.

This is it, an in-depth look at what happened in the dirt of every green at Pasatiempo, but this two-part series is through the lens of what they did to restore the 16th green.

In Episode 1, it’s peeling back “the fat,” it’s looking at images from 1929 to 1931, it’s building what they refer to as “the model,” and it’s creating their “forever template.”