Pelican Hill Golf Club North Course; Newport Beach, CA

The North is one of two Fazio designs at Pelican Hill. The other, the South, is actually consistently ranked higher and having not played it I can't comment on the merits of this assessment, but I can say that both courses are exceptional for the dramatic 500 acre parcel of oceanfront land they share. Its possible the south enjoys slightly more varied terrain and therefore a more creative routing, but I found the North to be Fazio at his consistent best - stunning aesthetics and fair (if unremarkable) playability - so I'd be surprised if the South is really that much better.

Fazio's courses are so consistently faithful to a lifelong theme they are like a series of oil paintings called "variations on Augusta National." He seems to be fixated on capturing the essence of the National's acryllic hyper-reality - volcanic smooth terraces flowing into puddles of talcum white sand. There is no denying his mastery of golfing Feng-shui - his courses are as perfect as Japanese gardens - but in my opinion he could benefit from paying closer attention to the strategic detail and architectural playfulness that is as essential to his mentor's success as aesthetics. For all its coiffed allure, the modern incarnation of Augusta National is the least playable of Mackenzie's designs. I would love to see Fazio begin a new series of paintings called, "variations on Cypress Point" or "Variations on Royal Melbourne." Then I think he would go from being a masterful designer of golfing gardens to a master golf course architect.

With that said, the Fazio aesthetic could not be more perfectly suited to a site than this one. His two courses sit atop coastal headlands that have the feel of a "California savannah" - broad, semi-arid, grassy, plateaus dotted with sagebrush and California live oak and blessed with unobstructed, panoramic views of the Pacific. Water flows have etched and eroded these headlands dividing them with narrow, zigzagging chasms like sagebrush embroidered seams stitched into a lumpy down quilt. The great variety of contours and the striking contrast between valley and plateau is visually arresting, making for one memorable shot after another. Though the ocean is ever present, the holes are not right on the beach, they sit up on the inland side of the Pacific Coast Highway hundreds of feet above Crystal Cove State Park, so this is not a dewy, down-low, rugged coastal experience like Monterrey, but a lofty, sunny, mellow, meditative, quintessentially Southern California experience.


A golf real estate development of this scale would not be possible in population-dense Southern California today and was possible 15 years ago only because of the existence of the Irvine Company - the modern day stewards of the single largest privately owned piece of property in Southern California: Irvine Ranch. Purchased from the Spanish and Mexican governments in 1876 by James Irvine, the scope and scale of this property is awesome: it encompasses 800 square miles, touches nine miles of the Pacific Coast from Newport Beach to Laguna Beach and stretches twenty-two miles inland past the city of Irvine and up into the mountains adjacent to Cleveland National Forest where Monument Peak rises to over 6,000 ft. This truly is Southern California's last great coastal golf development.