Cypress Point Club

Cypress Point Club is a breathtaking oceanside masterpiece along the Monterey Peninsula's 17-Mile Drive, widely considered the most beautiful golf course ever built. Designed by Dr. Alister MacKenzie through dunes, forest, and rugged Pacific coastline, its famed 15th, 16th, and 17th holes along the cliffs represent the most spectacular stretch of holes in all of golf.

Cypress Point Club exists because of the vision and determination of Marion Hollins, a champion amateur golfer and a standout important figures in American golf history. In 1923, Samuel F.B. Morse — president of the Del Monte Properties Company (now the Pebble Beach Company) and the man responsible for developing the Monterey Peninsula as a golf destination — hired Hollins as his Athletic Director. A year later, Hollins convinced Morse that the rugged, cypress-studded headlands north of Pebble Beach were the ideal site for a private golf club that would complement the public course at Pebble Beach and further establish the peninsula as a capital of American golf. Hollins initially selected Seth Raynor, the renowned protege of Charles Blair Macdonald, to design the course. Raynor completed a rough routing before his sudden death in January 1926 at the age of fifty-one. His version of Cypress Point never advanced to construction. Hollins then turned to Dr. Alister MacKenzie, the Scottish-born physician turned golf architect who had already gained international renown for his work at Royal Melbourne in Australia and who would later design Augusta National with Bobby Jones. MacKenzie arrived on the Monterey Peninsula and recognized immediately that the property offered something no other course site in the world could match: three utterly distinct landscapes compressed into a single routing.

The formation of the club proceeded in stages. An initial design emerged in 1926, but construction was delayed until sufficient membership was secured. The club was fully incorporated in July 1927, and construction began later that year. On August 11, 1928, the first official round was played at Cypress Point Club. The George Washington Smith-designed clubhouse, a graceful Mediterranean structure, opened two years later on September 20, 1930. MacKenzie's genius at Cypress Point lay in his routing, which threads through three distinct environments with a narrative arc that builds to an unforgettable climax. The opening five holes wind through a dense Del Monte forest of Monterey pines, the fairways enclosed by tall trees and dappled shade. Beginning at the 6th tee, the course bursts into open, windswept sand dunes, and the holes from the 7th through the 13th play directly through these rolling, links-like landforms. Then, starting at the 14th, the routing swings toward the Pacific Ocean, and the final stretch of holes unfolds along dramatic rocky cliffs above the crashing surf. MacKenzie did not work alone.

Robert Hunter Sr., an author and golf course architect in his own right, served as MacKenzie's collaborator on the project, spending time on-site almost daily and bringing a scientific rigor to the shaping and construction. Hollins herself worked with MacKenzie hole by hole, and her most celebrated contribution came on the 16th. When some doubted that the carry over the ocean inlet to the proposed green site was feasible, Hollins silenced the skeptics by teeing up a ball and driving it to the center of the intended green — a shot of roughly 220 yards over churning Pacific waters. The 16th became a standout famous par threes in all of golf, a 233-yard shot across an ocean chasm to a green perched on a rocky promontory, with Monterey cypress trees framing the backdrop. The stretch of holes from the 15th through the 17th is often described as the greatest consecutive three holes in golf. The 15th is a par three played to a clifftop green with the ocean roaring below. The 16th delivers its iconic ocean carry. The 17th is a par four that crosses the sea twice, playing past a cluster of ancient Monterey cypresses to a peninsula green with waves crashing against the rocks to the right. Robert Hunter himself said of the 17th: "There is no better hole anywhere than this one which twice crosses the sea." The par-72 course plays to just 6,509 yards, modest by modern standards, yet its challenge is rooted not in length but in the variety of shots demanded and the psychological pressure exerted by the terrain. MacKenzie's design philosophy — that a course should offer strategic choices rather than brute-force demands, and that beauty and playability should coexist — finds its fullest expression at Cypress Point.

For decades, Cypress Point served as one of the host courses for the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am, later known as the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. From 1947 through 1990, the tournament rotated among Pebble Beach Golf Links, Cypress Point, and Monterey Peninsula Country Club, and the annual television broadcast of the oceanside holes at Cypress Point introduced millions of viewers to what many consider the most beautiful course in the world. After 1990, the PGA Tour adopted a policy requiring host clubs to demonstrate non-discriminatory membership practices. Cypress Point was dropped from the rotation in 1991 and replaced by Poppy Hills. Some accounts suggest that many members had already grown weary of the slow rounds, course damage from massive galleries, and creeping commercialism of the event, and that the Tour's policy provided a convenient parting. The club returned to competitive prominence when it hosted the 2025 Walker Cup, the biennial amateur team competition between the United States and Great Britain & Ireland, marking only the second time the Walker Cup was played at Cypress Point (the first was in 1981). MacKenzie, who spent his final years in nearby Santa Cruz, considered Cypress Point among his finest achievements. The course has been remarkably well preserved, with no fundamental changes to the routing or design philosophy since its opening. The membership has been deliberate stewards, maintaining the playing surfaces, protecting the native Monterey cypress groves, and resisting the temptation to lengthen the course to accommodate modern equipment. Cypress Point endures as a testament to what is possible when a visionary founder, a brilliant architect, and an irreplaceable landscape converge.