[PHOTO: Evan Schiller]

Few scenes on the PGA Tour come as welcomed as the surf and shoreline of Pebble Beach Golf Links, site of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am since 1947 (once known as the Bing Crosby National Pro-Amateur, or the Crosby Clambake). Pebble Beach marks time, a point on the dial so reliable and comforting it might as well be considered “America’s Course”. If Augusta National and the Masters signals the beginning of spring for golfers in the northern hemisphere’s cold-weather climates, Pebble Beach is the warm February spark that pulls Americans through their mid-winter blues.

For all the history, adoration and accolades Pebble Beach receives (it’s ranked 12th on Golf Digest‘s America’s 100 Greatest Courses list), it is not a particularly strategic golf course. The essential task for professionals and resort players is to hit precise tee shots, avoid the rough and keep approach shots under the hole on the small, tilted greens. One exception is the short par-4 fourth, where an array of staggered hazards demand more tactical thinking.

THE DESIGN https://www.golfdigest.com/content/dam/images/golfdigest/unsized/2021/Pebble_4th.gif

The fourth is the course’s shortest par 4 by 50 yards (you might call the par-4 third, at 394 yards, short – but we wouldn’t count this as driveable for most). The tee is set in groves of cypress and evergreens, and emerging from it onto the open shore of Stillwater Cove provides the round’s first genuine encounter with the Pacific. The key feature is a pot bunker in the left-centre of the fairway about 235 yards off the tee. Though the fairway is 50 yards wide at that point, the bunker shrinks its effective size, and the hole continues to narrow as it moves towards the green, pinched by bunkers creeping in further up from the left and the cliff on the right.

RECENT CHANGES

Before the 2010 US Open, Arnold Palmer Design Company modified the fairway, sliding the pot bunker towards the centre and bolstering the string of left-hand bunkers angling towards the green. The bottling configuration of the hazards demands that pros must think through the strategy of the hole and play to their strengths. Most lay back with irons and hybrids and attempt to hit the tiny, oval-shaped green with a 100 to 125-yard club, while others opt to blast drives into the teeth of the trouble, hoping to be able to pitch the ball on from short range. The fourth will yield birdies, but only if players can make the correct choice between aggression or discipline.

https://www.golfdigest.com/content/dam/images/golfdigest/fullset/2021/2/pebble beach fourth green strackaline.png
Green mapping: Courtesy of StrackaLine

A CLOSER LOOK AT THE PUTTING SURFACE

The second key feature of the fourth hole is the green, just 2,300 square feet (214 square metres), the second smallest on the course. And it’s ringed with bunkers. The tilt of the putting surface makes it receptive to incoming wedges, but the upper, rear hole location leaves little room to miss – shots that overshoot it leave chips that run quickly away from the players towards the front of the green.

HOW TO PLAY IT

The diminutive nature of the putting surface makes it imperative that players attack it with precision and control, which in turn influences how aggressive tour pros are with the tee shot. Because the target is so small, almost every incoming mistake results in a short-sided recovery, from either tangled rough or sand. Saving par from both situations is essentially even odds: in the 10 tournaments since 2015, only 40 percent of players in the AT&T Pebble Beach get up and down from the encircling bunkers, while 57 percent do so from the grass.