Why Pebble Beach still rocks
Mickelson Off to a Slow Start Early
The AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am is sort of like a cross between a PGA Tour event and a member-guest that pretty much no one I know is rich or famous enough to get into. It's an absolute hoot, played on three courses -- two of them great -- and has an atmosphere surrounding the event that more closely resembles a team-building business seminar than a golf tournament.
If Pebble Beach -- the tournament, not the course -- needs a slogan, it might very well be, "Fore, right!" Certainly, the 180 pros playing this week will hear that phrase more times over the course of four days competing on the Monterey Peninsula than they will any other time this side of the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic.
One of my favorite little pastimes at the tournament is to stand on the tee box at No. 2 at Pebble and watch how the professionals on the par-5 stare intently back down the first fairway rather than look ahead while they wait for their fairway to clear. They all know that one of those "Fore, rights!" could mean getting conked on the head with an errant shot.
There is a good reason the Pebble Beach tournament has a little bit of chaos in its execution: It's in the genes. This is an event that was created so that a bunch of Hollywood types could play the game they love and party their brains out on one of the most beautiful spots of land that money -- lots of it -- can buy. This tournament was founded back in the day when no self-respecting rich guy living the good life would be caught without a cigarette in one hand and a martini in the other.
As unofficial statistics go, this might be the PGA Tour event that has had the most names. It started in 1938 as the Bing Crosby Professional-Amateur and in 1953 was renamed the Bing Crosby Professional-Amateur Invitational, apparently to keep the riffraff out. That is except for the riffraff that was invited.
Then, in 1956, tournament organizers clearly decided they need to come up with a name that would be so long, only it and the winner's name would fit into the first paragraph of any newspaper story. So it was rechristened the Bing Crosby National Professional-Amateur Golf Championship.
It took three years for Bing to realize that name made the head hurt about as badly as it does on the morning after the night before. So in 1959 it became the Bing Crosby National. That name was too good -- and too succinct -- to be true. In 1964 the event became the Bing Crosby National Professional-Amateur.
That's the name that stuck the longest, lasting until 1986 when Der Bingle was replaced by Ma Bell and the tournament became know as the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, which it remains today, except for the fact that anyone over the age of 40 refers to it simply as The Crosby.
And just for the record, the guys who won in the first year of each of the six names were Sam Snead (1938), Lloyd Mangrum (1953), Cary Middlecoff (1956), Art Wall (1959), Tony Lema (1964) and Fuzzy Zoeller (1986). I'm not sure what that means other than the fact the tournament has had a pretty impressive list of winners over the years.
That list of winners has been added to regularly by a group of guys with California ties, perhaps meaning they are used to putting on West Coast greens, or they have that "Hey, Dude" California calm to handle the party atmosphere of the week.
Mark O'Meara, who played his college golf at Long Beach State, has won the AT&T five times. Tiger Woods picked off the 2000 AT&T (the same year he won the U.S. Open at Pebble by a record 15 strokes), and native Californians Phil Mickelson and Arron Oberholser have won the last two.
And Bay Area native Johnny Miller won three times at the Crosby, the first and last coming 20 years apart -- 1974 and 1994. That last one was literally the last one. It was the final victory for Miller on the PGA Tour, and pretty much the last time he had anything resembling a putting stroke.
So what's this all mean? Pick a California guy to win this week. You can't go with Oberholser, the defending champion, because he is out with a bad back. Not sure you can go with Mickelson, either, since it's still looking like he left his game somewhere in the left rough on No. 18 at Winged Foot. Forget Tiger, he doesn't do celebrity outings anymore.
That adds up to one clear choice: Paul Goydos wins for the second time this year. He was born in the Golden State and still lives there. Don't like that? Then go with Vijay Singh. He grew up on an island only a few miles offshore -- Fiji. OK, a few thousand miles offshore.
Why Vijay? He's won here before (2004) and was runner-up on two other occasions. He also has as his amateur partner Ted Forstmann, the investor who met Vijay in this tournament 15 years ago and has helped make him a very rich man.
Maybe Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Phil Harris have been replaced by Bill Murray, Ray Romano and Kevin Costner, and maybe the partying is done a little more out of the public eye than in the past, but the Pebble event remains a uniquely entertaining stop on tour -- whether you think of it as the AT&T or the Crosby.
Ron Sirak is the executive editor of Golf World magazine.
