The Missing Links (Golf in Cabo)

by Turk Pipkin

(This story ran in Texas Monthly under the title, "Greens With Envy.")

Since our earliest ancestors crawled out of the primordial ooze to whack one-celled amoebas up and down the shore, the perfect golf vacation has involved sea-side golf on that sandy strip we call linksland. It’s not hard to see why when you consider the spectacular views, the sweet smell of the ocean, and for a few blessed hours, that all the nuisances of modern life are replaced by one of man’s oldest games in something akin to its original setting.

Unfortunately today’s ever-growing legions of linksters have descended like lemmings upon the world’s most favored sea-side courses, driving greenfees to ridiculous levels (a staggering $250 at famed Pebble Beach). And at Scotland’s hallowed St. Andrews, when an occasional summer tee time does appear it is likely to be swept under by a rising tide from the east who’s yen for golf can scarcely be weighed in pounds.

But at the tip of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, in an area called Los Cabos, there are some fine new alternatives to the old favorites that are truly cause for vacation. Along a 20-mile coastal strip between San Jose del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas, there are now five courses with 90 holes of fun in the sun. And three of these tracks are of championship caliber, one designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr., and two by the Golden Bear himself, Jack Nicklaus. Best of all, summer is considered the off-season in Los Cabos, and both hotel rates and green fees are substantially cheaper than in the winter when snow birds from the U.S. and Canada migrate in by the thousands.

It was shortly after the normally reserved Nicklaus called his Cabo del Sol project “the best piece of golf property on earth” that I decided to check things out myself. Flying non-stop on Continental from Houston to Los Cabos airport, I took a shuttle to the cliffside Finisterra hotel in Cabo San Lucas. The laid-back marlin-fishing village I last visited seven years ago has since grown into a bustling party town, but the ocean and the famous arch at land’s end are just as beautiful as ever.

Fishing was once the only real draw in Cabo, but in a world full of golfers, that was not likely to long remain the case. The first nine hole course, Campo de Golf del Cabo, opened in laid-back San José in the early 80’s. But the game arrived big-time in 1992 when the stunning Jack Nicklaus designed Palmilla Golf Club was opened by the Hotel Palmilla. Secluded on its rocky point among a small forest of tall, lush palm trees, the Palmilla retains its essentially serene and pampered atmosphere: after a round of golf, you can enjoy a perfectly sublime lobster bisque lunch at the veranda bar overlooking rolling waves, and management has even resisted the temptation to install the modern inconveniences of phones or televisions in the rooms.

With the early morning sun glistening off the Sea of Cortez, I arrived at Palmilla by cab and was greeted in style by a platoon of attentive pro shop assistants. The foundation of golf at Los Cabos is the breathtaking natural beauty of the area. As you play Palmilla’s first holes up a long arroyo away from the clubhouse, you are bombarded by an array of sensory pleasures: the constant call of mourning doves hidden in the chaparral, the sights and smells of an incredible variety of desert plant-life blooming in a riot of tiny colors, and the mountains framing the background. On almost every hole your gaze is constantly drawn towards magnificent vistas of the deep blue sea outlined against fairways of velvety green. There is never any doubt about where to hit the ball for there is one constant guiding rule: hit it to the green grass and at all costs do NOT hit it into the thorn jungle on either side.

In the forgiving spirit of resort golf, the fairways are wide and distances well-marked on just about every man-made surface on the course. A word of warning however: on the first hole my ball came to rest next to a sprinkler head with two distance numbers on it. I chose my club on the assumption that the smaller number was to the front of the green and the larger the distance to the center or the back. Wrong. My well hit shot came up short in a deep sand trap and I was lucky to make bogie. It was not until the next hole that I discovered the larger distance was the yards to the middle of the green and the smaller number the meters to the same spot. Metric golf: an idea well before its time. Somehow I don’t think the American televised golf audience is quite ready for Ben Wright to whisper that Arnie has missed another of those pesky sixty centimeter putts.

Ultimately this course will open a third nine holes—the Ocean Course—and no doubt it will rival the Mountain and Arroyo nines which are now in operation. I found the Mountain to be the most visually striking of these two. The par five fourth is a sucker hole, and yours truly was the sucker. Utilizing one of his long-time trademarks, Nicklaus offers the golfer two distinct tee shots: the long way down a wide and safe fairway, and the short way with a long carry over a gigantic sand bunker. I ruined an otherwise good score on the side by taking the risky route without success, then knocking my second shot into the water by the green. Looking back on my mistakes I discovered that the hole is relatively easy if you play the conservative route . Like a golfing trompe l’oeil, Nicklaus tricked me into a major mistake in judgment.

The very next hole is simply one of the most lovely par fours in all of golf, with a tee shot crossing a deep arroyo to a slender fairway. The second shot doglegs to the right and crosses the same arroyo again to a green nestled so neatly in its desert surroundings that it seems all Nicklaus did was scatter a little grass seed here and there.

My second day of golf took me to the second Jack Nicklaus signature course in Los Cabos, the jaw-dropping, eye-boggling Cabo del Sol with six holes perched along the shore of Bahia de Ballena (the Bay of Whales), the rest of the holes winding through arroyos cut deep into the ancient rocks of the rugged Sierra de la Giganta mountains which form the lower Baja Peninsula.

“Nicklaus’ people say he’s spent more time working on these two courses than almost any of his others,” confides Brad Wheatley who is the golf pro at both Palmilla and Cabo del Sol, “which means he either really likes the courses, really likes to flyfish for marlin, or both.”

The care Nicklaus has taken is apparent at every turn. On numbers five, six and seven, his slight modifications to nature’s graces provide golfing access to a symphony of ocean, sky and shore. The 460 yard par 4 fifth, the most difficult hole on the course, forces a hard selection of how much canyon to overfly on the tee shot. Hitting my best drive of the day, my conservative route still left me 220 yards from home. A near-perfect five wood put me just off the green from where, with the sweet smell and cool ocean breeze filling me with a sense of pure tranquillity, I chipped the ball in for a birdie (“A pajaro,” in the lingo of Mexican golf, I was told).

Big red crabs scurry across the rocks of the tidal pools that surround the sixth green and there is even an old shipwreck on the point behind the green. I made a clever par on the long par 3 with a nearly impossible back-left pin position, then moved on to the shorter par 3 seventh where, inspired by yet more sand and surf, I nearly made an hole in one (“a hole in one,” in Mexican golf lingo, I was told). Even though I missed the birdie putt, I was one under on the first three hole ocean turn which, with the surf booming like a choir in the background, I could only think of as Hallelujah Corner, in deference to Augusta National’s long famous Amen Corner.

The course’s closing holes are also spectacularly situated on the ocean, and Nicklaus refers to them as “the two best finishing holes in golf.”

“Not long ago,” Brad Wheatley told me on the 17th tee, “ I looked down on the beach from here and saw what looked like a dozen golf balls laying in the sand. I went down to check it out and it turned out to be seventeen sea turtle eggs, which we reburied a little further from the surf. They should be hatching pretty soon.”

This is the first of three course to be built on this 2,400 acre tract with two miles of coastline. Desert wildlife abounds. Six Mexican eagles nest and hunt on the site as do foxes and bobcats who no doubt grow fat on the abundant rabbit population.

“We took extra special care not to disturb any more vegetation than necessary,” says course superintendent Randy Bobbitt, a native of San Antonio(?). “We moved a lot of plants from the fairways and then replanted them on the perimeter of the course after construction.”

The most notable among the wide array of native plants—on this course and the others in the area—are 300 year old Cardon, soaring multi-limbed cacti similar to Arizona’s saguaros. The Terote or elephant tree is a thick-trunked wonder of the desert which, using water stored in the hard sponge-like trunk, can live two years with no precipitation whatsoever. When rain does come to this dry region, the elephant trees trunk swells to store the water, shedding layers of thin bark in the process.

These courses give new meaning to the word ‘hazard.’ Excited by the smell of the ocean and hot on the trail of a good score, I blasted one of my drives twenty yards into the right rough — and I do mean rough. Momentarily taking leave of my senses, I decided to go after my errant pellet. Carefully following a small path, I took one mis-step and felt a sharp prick. Frozen in pain, I looked down to see a four-inch piece of cholla stuck to my sock and leg by dozens of long barbed thorns which hurt a lot more coming out than going in. Take plenty of balls and offer them to the spiny golf gods with glee.

The often steep terrain and frequently long distances from green to tee have unfortunately resulted in a no-walking policy at all of the courses in Los Cabos with the exception of the nine hole Campo de Golf in San José (which has green fees of only $15). At Palmilla and Cabo del Sol, Brad Wheatley is planning to add forecaddies, one per foursome at a cost of $5 per golfer, a small price to pay for someone who could probably rescue a dozen balls for a mid to high handicapper. Two rounds a day would net the forecaddies $40 a day, pretty solid wages by NAFTA standards.

From the Highway the Cabo Real Golf club doesn’t look like much. The one hole visible at this spot slides by a multi-story condo/hotel complex and it may be tempting to pass it by. Don’t do it, because this course is truly a diamond in the rough.

The original design work here was done by Texas architect Joe Finger, but when the competing Palmilla Hotel announced they were bringing in Nicklaus, Cabo Real decided they needed a bigger name. The son of Robert Trent Jones who adapted the expansive style of Augusta National to courses all over the world, Bob Jones the younger has designed many excellent Texas courses including one of his own favorites, Mill Creek Golf and Country Club in Salado, as well as Cottonwood Valley at Las Colinas where he created a Texas-shaped green with a creek in place of the Rio Grande and a bunker representing Oklahoma. That one bit of kitsch aside, Jones has long been considered a natural designer and his Spanish Bay Country Club in California and Whistler (F.C.?) in British Columbia are widely considered two of the world’s best courses.

“Mexico has more total seashore than the U.S.” says Jones, “and the future of golf there is huge. I had built courses at Ixtapa, Cancun and Mazatlan, but they didn’t have the potential of Cabo which has ideal terrain, absolutely predictable weather, and is great fun, too.”

Robert Trent Jones, Jr. approaches the design of a golf course as numerous works of art contained within their natural context. A story I once heard of Michaelangelo’s David has the artist explaining that he created the sculpture by starting with a large stone and then removing everything that was not David. So it seems with Jones’s Cabo Real. “Most of what’s there now,” says Bobby Jones, “is provided by Mother Nature: hazards, ocean, and cactus.” The art, of course, was in the sculpting.

Starting high in the hills, the front nine dives toward picturesque Chilem Bay, with a brief detour on the par four 2nd hole which features a green napping in the swayback saddle between craggy peaks. With nothing but sky behind the green, it looks as if any ball hit two feet past the pin will fall off the face of the earth. By contrast, the par three 4th hole offers nothing but blue water as a back drop with the whiteness of the ball in flight shining pure like snow as it sails homeward.

The marvel of this course is that it covers such a wide variety of natural terrain while retaining Jones’ innate understanding of classic golf course architecture. The undulations of the fairways create wonderful lines and shadings—and like the other courses in the area, the Bermuda fairways never need winter overseeding. The grain of Cabo Real’s rolling tiff-dwarf greens tends to run towards the sun, and usually to the ocean. “Usually, but not always,” warns Bob Jones slyly.

Around much of the course, the tee boxes are lined by tall red-top grass which waves in the breeze almost in parallel to the movement of the ocean below. Turning at the beach, where a flowering lupen akin to the Texas bluebonnet has been allowed to conquer much of the bordering areas, the course climbs back through a long arroyo to dramatic mountain tops in the distance.

The eighteenth hole even has a wide double green which wraps around a large pond like a shawl. A second course now being designed will also end at this green, reminiscent of several double greens at the Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland.

“It’s not a play it once golf course,” Bob Jones advised me before I saw his layout. “We want to engage you the first time; then the more you play it, the more you want to play it again.”

He was right. I do want to play his course again. Likewise the Nicklaus tracks and yet another other new course which was designed by the late Roy Dye. I am already making plans to return to Los Cabos with some of my regular golf buddies, but next time I intend to do things differently. Next time I’m going to take more balls.