From the first tee, the possibilities are wide open. You could slice your ball and land on Campus Drive West. You could hook it and spook the horses in the Red Barn. You could fail to carry Junipero Serra Boulevard and listen to the sound of your ball whacking against a guard rail (or, it’s happened, bouncing off the roof of a passing car). More likely, you could drive your ball 190 yards and watch it bury under the lip of the left bunker.
“You find out pretty quickly it’s not for beginners,” says volunteer starter Wendy Gayle. “It’s one tough course.”
And yet beginners come to test their mettle every day on the Stanford Golf Course, which celebrates its 75th anniversary in January. With student greens fees of $20—or 10 bucks for nine holes—Geremy Heitz can’t wait to tee it up, embarrassing moments notwithstanding. His second time out on the first hole, “I was so nervous that I let go of my club in the middle of a swing, and it flew up into a tree,” the electrical engineering graduate student says. “All these people were just standing there, staring.”
Demanding but fun, daunting but beautiful, the 6,835-yard, par-71 course is a bona fide classic. So said GolfWeek Magazine in 1998, when it named Stanford No. 87 among the world’s top 100 courses built before 1960. Designed in 1929 by William “Billy” Bell and George C. Thomas Jr., it remains one of the nation’s top university courses, ranking alongside Yale, Ohio State, Oklahoma State and Duke. And with its centuries-old oaks, weeping willows, black walnuts, pines, cedars and redwoods, whose birdhouses have welcomed generations of nuthatches and swallows, the course has the feel of a wildlife refuge. As play slows down at dusk, bobcats, coyotes, fox and black-tailed deer tiptoe through the twilight shadows.
No. 3 has had an extreme makeover. Its hydro-seeded green sits nicely protected in a spot opposite the old third-hole tee. Where golfers used to hit uphill toward the pin, they now drive downhill—and likely downwind—in the afternoon breezes. When construction began last July to widen nearby Sand Hill Road, No. 3 and No. 4 were reconfigured to take advantage of the terrain and restore the beauty and playability that was lost during earlier construction, says course veteran Grant Spaeth, ’54. The result, he says: “magnificent.”
Students, faculty, staff, alumni and their accompanied guests are eligible to play on the course for greens fees of $20 to $100. Guests of the University, who must be sponsored by academic departments, pay top dollar: $125. The course used to be the exclusive domain of members; today, students constitute 20 percent of all golfers.
It was once considered a long golf course, but equipment advancements in recent years—graphite clubs, oversized drivers and faster-spinning balls—have taken some of the sting out of the Stanford course and made it more accessible to less experienced players. “In the last 10 years golf has changed so much and balls are going so much farther for better players with higher swing speeds,” says course superintendent Ken Williams. “We don’t have the area to increase the length of the course, but it’s a great course for college players.”
Hazards abound. Water comes into play on more than half the holes. At the infamous No. 12, for example, players must hit over or around a huge oak tree in the fairway while also avoiding San Francisquito Creek. That hole has vexed no less than Tom Watson, ’71, five-time winner of the British Open. “I played that hole many times chipping out from the creek,” he says.
The course’s deceptive, undulating greens have challenged players in United States Golf Association junior championships, U.S. Open qualifiers and NCAA tournaments. “A lot of courses today are made for ‘feel-good’ golf,” says Don Chelemedos, general manager and head pro. “Resorts want you to come back, so their courses are designed to allow you to shoot low scores and not give you much of a challenge. This is a great golf course in the sense that it forces you to use every club in your bag.”
Despite some cosmetic changes over the years, the course still feels charmingly old-fashioned. Unlike contemporary sand traps that look like finely sculpted kidneys, Stanford’s bunkers have rough edges and splayed fingers that resemble worn baseball gloves. The fairways and roughs are dotted with benches and trees donated in memory of local players. The water fountain beside the 17th hole bears this sweet inscription: “50th wedding anniversary. Daphne & Rudy Munzer. With love from your family. June 29, 1996.”
Shhhh. Approaching No. 6 green. You’ve navigated one of the narrowest fairways on the course, around an overhanging oak, to be brought up short by a slender stalker. In the native grasses of the rough a blue heron is poised above a ground squirrel’s tunnel, waiting to strike.
Talk to longtime devotees of the golf course and it’s hard to tell which they’re more proud of—the course itself or its legacy of great players and champions. In 1932, Stanford sophomore Charles Seaver (whose son, Tom, is the Hall of Fame pitcher of the New York Mets) led the United States to an 8-1 win over Britain in the prestigious Walker Cup amateur tournament. Sandy Tatum, ’42, won the NCAA individual championship in 1942, earned a Rhodes scholarship and served as president of the United States Golf Association. Tatum’s coach, Eddie Twiggs, led the Stanford men’s team to five national championships between 1938 and 1946.
Mickey Wright, ’58, polished her game here as a student (at the time, Stanford didn’t offer women’s intercollegiate golf) before becoming four-time winner of the Ladies Professional Golf Association tournament and taking home four U.S. Women’s Open titles. Tom Watson, in addition to his British Open victories, won the Masters twice and the U.S. Open.
Eldrick “Tiger” Woods, ’98, drew galleries of 2,500 during the two years he played on the course in the mid-’90s with teammates-turned-pros Notah Begay III and Casey Martin, both ’95. “That team was extraordinary as players, but even more extraordinary as people,” says former men’s varsity coach Wally Goodwin. “They shared scholarship money to help each other out in tough times.”
The story of Goodwin’s recruiting of Woods is the stuff of legend among players and pros. The coach wrote to the 13-year-old phenom when he spotted his picture in a Sports Illustrated feature. Goodwin told Woods he would be “thrilled” if he decided to attend Stanford. The seventh-grader wrote back what has become a famous letter, with impeccable grammar and punctuation. “He said, yeah, he’d like to think about it, which was progress, I thought,” says Goodwin.
Today the women’s team attracts stars as well. In 2003, former Stanford All-American Hilary Homeyer Lunke, ’01, MA ’02, became the first intercollegiate golfer from Stanford to win the U.S. Women’s Open. And 14-year-old Michelle Wie, winner of last year’s Women’s Amateur Public Links Championship, has publicly expressed a desire to attend Stanford. “I think she’s a more advanced player than Tiger was at the same age,” Goodwin says.
women's golf coach Caroline O’Connor, who is starting her 10th season at Stanford, loves to drive prospective recruits out to the ninth hole. It’s a tricky par-4, with a huge bunker, a fast green and a water hazard. But O’Connor’s favorite spot is a fenced-off rock in the rough where Muwekma-Ohlone people used to grind their grains. “That’s pretty cool,” the coach says.
History is a player on this course. Campus archaeologist Laura Jones says that hearths, shell beads and pestles recovered from Muwekma-Ohlone settlements along San Francisquito Creek date back more than 5,000 years. “But, with the exception of the mortar stone, [the prehistoric sites] are all invisible,” she adds. Jones works closely with Chelemedos and Williams to minimize the impact to the many Native American sites that lie beneath the golf course, and an archaeologist is present whenever there’s digging—say, to repair an irrigation pipe.
“You’re doing archaeology and golfers are playing through, so it’s an extremely dangerous place to work,” says Jones, who has been hit three times by wayward balls in the 10 years she’s been on the job. “Hard hats are required and we’ve put up tents to protect ourselves from balls, but there are some bad golfers out there.”
The course also has a history as the trotting area for Senator Stanford’s stock farm, which was acquired in 1876—the same year the fabled Machrihanish Golf Club was founded in Scotland. An isolated seaside links on the Kintyre Peninsula, it is said to have the best first hole in Scotland, challenging players to tee off across a finger bay of the Atlantic at high tide. In 1899, Robert Edgar Allardice, a homesick Scotsman who headed the Stanford mathematics department, took a look at waterside options on campus and founded the Machrihanish Golf Club of California, aka the Stanford Golf Club. He laid out a nine-hole course near Lake Lagunita, with rolled dirt for greens.
By 1906, Stanford was playing host to a men’sclub championship, a women’s club championship and a mixed tournament. Stanford won its first intercollegiate golf match with Cal in 1911, and by 1920 golf was offered as a “gymnasium course.”
Construction on the current course began in May 1929, and the first ball sailed off the tee on January 1, 1930. Details like these have been painstakingly verified by unofficial course historian Gordon Ratliff, a retired SLAC facilities manager who read through years of microfilm stories from the Palo Alto Times and Stanford Daily, and collected them in Stanford Golf Clippings 1899-1931, published in 1996.
“Women students were pushing for a golf course in 1929, and they wrote letters to [University comptroller] Almon Roth,” Ratliff said in a recent interview. An avid convert to the game, Roth, Class of 1909, arranged for the required acreage to be set aside, and soon architect Thomas—who had designed the Los Angeles Country Club, as well as courses in Bel Air and Ojai, Calif.—had laid out the course, and Bell was managing the construction. It was Bell who saw the potential of San Francisquito Creek. “He looked at the course layout and said, ‘Hey, you’ve got tremendous features and the creek should be incorporated into the golf course,’” Ratliff says. Which is why, to this day, golfers hit from one county into another—from San Mateo to Santa Clara and back—every time they drive a ball across the creek.
the 14th hole is a beaut. Hitting toward a hillside planting of red and white impatiens, you hope your tee shot will miss the massive oaks on the right and land on the upslope across the creek. But what are those parallel white lines in the grass, spaced several yards apart? Turf paint from a recent cross-country meet. Golfers aren’t the only titleholders on the course—the cross-country teams, national champions in 2003-04, train here.
On a recent morning, varsity golfer Rob Grube was booking it up Links Road on his mountain bike. With 14 clubs in a bag slung across his shoulders, he was bound for the summit at the clubhouse. “Once you start up the hill, it’s really hard to turn back,” the curly-headed freshman says. “I’m told it’s a rite of passage all freshmen go through, but that could be the upperclassmen talking.”
The same day, on the back nine, varsity golfer Stephanie Lue played through two foursomes en route to an afternoon computer science class. Munching on beef jerky, she turned down offer after offer of rides from passing golfers in carts. “Thanks, but I’m walking,” she said brightly.
Chelemedos says 65 percent of today’s players walk, but Grant Spaeth recalls a time when almost nobody had a cart. Instead, they had caddies. In the late ’40s and early ’50s, he and his high school friends earned extra money hauling clubs for the members whose dues sustained the golf course.
The conditions he describes sound like heaven to anybody who has struggled to get a tee time or waited hole to hole during heavy play. “The course wasn’t very busy,” says Spaeth, whose father, Carl, was dean of the Law School and an avid golfer. “There were times you could go out there on a weekday afternoon and not see another golfer.”
Now booked solid most days, the course is so popular that the emphasis is on keeping folks moving. Jim Pansch, MS ’68, is one of 20 volunteer player assistants who cruise the course from the first tee at 6:30 a.m. to closing. He picks up wedges left behind in sand traps, and he hops out to repair divots with a mulch and seed mix he trowels from a five-gallon container on the back of his cart. If a foursome is running a little behind the schedule on his clipboard, Pansch will lob a cheery, “Please pick up the pace—appreciate it.”
The exception is when a U.S. president is holding up play. He and the Secret Service can putt at whatever pace they like, says Chelemedos, who recalls the times Bill Clinton played on the course when his daughter, Chelsea, ’01, was an undergraduate. “He had some swing issues, and a big slice.”
Finally, we're at the breathtaking 18th hole with its dramatic elevation change—a 100-foot drop from the tee to the bottom of the fairway. On a clear day you can see Mount Tamalpais, the San Francisco skyline, Oakland, the East Bay hills and the San Mateo and Dumbarton bridges. Tee it high, watch it fly.
The Stanford Golf Course may be the only place on campus where octogenarian alumni rub shoulders with 20-year-old students—and the next generation of golfers. On a brilliant October afternoon last fall, 3-year-old Andy Fisher was on the putting green with his dad, Brett Fisher, MBA ’92. He had come mostly for a promised hot dog, fries and chocolate milkshake at the Stanford Grill, but he commanded the green. Outfitted with a plastic putter and some Big Bird-yellow Titleists, Andy was practicing tap-ins.
After 75 years, beloved and nurtured, Stanford Golf Course is serving more people than ever. While there are plenty of Greg Norman and Ralph Lauren polos on display, baggy shorts, saddle shoes and backward baseball caps are just as common today.
It’s a natural and welcome evolution, says Spaeth. “The golf course is first and foremost a place for students and for friends of the University,” he says.
Including those who lose their clubs in a tree.
