Spar for the Course

Another drive safely in the fairway, Frank D. “Sandy” Tatum puts his club down and returns to his point.

“Golf courses are losing their relevance,” says Tatum, 82. “This course is a classic example.”

This course? Cypress Point? Surely, Tatum, a former president of the U.S. Golf Assn., must be exaggerating. With its giant sand dunes, undulating fairways and dramatic views of the Pacific Ocean, Cypress Point Club couldn’t be more relevant.

But Tatum is not exaggerating. That is not how he communicates. He communicates with anecdotes, as well-placed as his tee shots, such as the one he tells at the formidable 12th, a dogleg right that Ben Hogan, according to Tatum, called his favorite par four in the world.

Three years earlier, he was playing Cypress with three members of the U.S. Walker Cup team. During the round, they required only wedges or short irons for their approaches to the green. It confirmed to Tatum that Cypress, as conceived by its designer, Alister MacKenzie, in the late 1920s, was no longer the challenge it was meant to be. It could be tamed. Worse, conquered. Today’s players, thanks to more sophisticated equipment and better conditioning, simply hit it too far.

“I was very depressed,” Tatum recalls.

Tatum arrives at his drive, and conclusion.

“I finally told them what I thought,” he says, “and I asked them if they understood what was going on in the game. One of them said that he couldn’t agree with me more.”

Agreement is one thing, change another, and that’s what depresses Tatum the most. He doesn’t see it happening. Not soon enough, at least. Not with the millions of dollars that manufacturers have at stake.

He has a right to make his case. Very few have given more to the game. As a boy in the late 1920s, he was smitten while accompanying his father down the fairways of Bel-Air Country Club. His first hero was Bobby Jones.

Tatum went on to star at Stanford, winning the NCAA individual title in 1942, but that was before there was any real money in professional golf.

Instead, he joined the Navy, landed a Rhodes scholarship and a career in law, which he still practices part-time in San Francisco.

But he never abandoned his other love, serving, most prominently, as the USGA head in the late 1970s. Encountering criticism over the way the Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck, N.Y., had been set up for the 1974 U.S. Open, won by Hale Irwin at seven-over 287, Tatum, chairman of the championship committee at the time, responded with an unforgettable defense. “We’re not trying to humiliate the best players in the world,” he said. “We are simply trying to identify who they are.”

Tatum, who can still play--he would shoot a respectable 86 on this typically foggy day on the Monterey Peninsula--has also identified a solution to the length problem.

It has to do with the golf ball, not the clubs, as many have contended in recent years. He is convinced there is a way for technology to limit how far the top professionals can hit the ball, perhaps to about 290 yards, while, at the same time, not reduce the maximum driving distance for the average player. If such a ceiling is not imposed, he claims, brilliant designs such as Cypress Point and Merion, outside Philadelphia, where Jones completed the Grand Slam in 1930, will become more irrelevant. “Something has got to be done,” he says.

Speaking of Slams, the topic of Tiger Woods comes up as Tatum reaches the 15th tee. Even if Woods had been able to pull off the Slam this year, Tatum does not believe the accomplishment would have surpassed what Jones did. “Jones had to win in a match-play format,” he points out, “and, in those days, the amateurs were at least as good as the professionals.”

Tatum expects a lot from Woods. He once wrote him a letter, hoping that, as an example to youngsters, he would finish his education before going on to the PGA Tour. He doesn’t know if Woods ever read it. He still believes that Woods, who left Stanford after his sophomore year, could do a tremendous service if he were to go back and get his degree in the fall during the tour’s unofficial season. Too many youngsters, especially underprivileged ones, according to Tatum, sacrifice their education, believing in the “delusion” that they will be successful in life if they only develop their athletic skills.

He is also direct when the discussion turns to Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, which, after undergoing renovations, is hoping to play host to a U.S. Open for the first time since 1948. Word on the site for the 2008 tournament is likely to come from the USGA in October.

Tatum seems more fond of the other Southern California candidate, Torrey Pines in La Jolla, which he played recently. Besides providing a better infrastructure, an Open at a public facility, on the heels of the visit to Bethpage Black, would be another symbolic tribute to public golf. “Los Angeles is a very blase town,” he adds. “San Diego would go bonkers over an Open.”

At various points during the round, Tatum’s game falters a bit. “Isn’t that pathetic?” he says after coming up short on a chip shot. “I can still hit it pretty well at times. I just can’t sustain it.”

But there is one thing he can sustain. His enthusiasm. For someone who, by his estimate, has played Cypress “thousands of times,” he never fails to appreciate its beauty and serenity.

“The adrenaline was flowing when I was in my car on the way here,” says Tatum, who owns a house in nearby Capitola. “Coming here affects me so much. I always feel like I’m playing it for the first time.”

Cypress certainly seems part of another era.

No beverage cart. No real estate development.

Only the game of golf, with all its possibilities and pitfalls.

About six months ago, Tatum was approached by the leadership of the club for his views on lengthening the course to keep up with today’s longer hitters. That’s what Augusta National and Riviera did, and what many others will surely do in the years ahead.

Forget about keeping up with today’s longer hitters, he said. They are the problem, not Cypress.

“I think it’s more useful to keep Cypress the way it is, to show it as an example of what has happened to the classic courses,” he says, preparing to line up another tee shot.

He swings away. The ball heads straight toward its target. Everything, for the moment, is perfect.