In Due Course

The invitation furnished simple directions. Head west on newly paved Beverly Boulevard, dubbed “America’s finest four-lane highway.” When nearing the “countryside,” turn left on Capri Drive and proceed one block. Ample parking is available for your Model T coupes and roadsters. Follow signs to the first tee, and please excuse the clubhouse construction.

Seventy-five years ago today, a few prominent Angelenos were invited to christen the Los Angeles Athletic Club’s expensive foray into golf, the Riviera Country Club. Much has changed since June 24, 1927, but one thing remains the same.

The drive from downtown still takes 45 minutes, only the four-lane street is now Sunset Boulevard.

Riviera’s midday opening was modest by L.A. Athletic Club standards. When Frank Garbutt and William May Garland resurrected the club in 1912 by creating a 12-story downtown facility, 25,000 men and women traveled by horse-drawn carriage or car to a lavish three-day reception. The club grew rapidly, producing national champions in several sports, including Olympic gold medalists Charley Paddock in track and Duke Kahanamoku in swimming.

Combine the sporting accomplishments with a membership roster of celebrities and tycoons, and the L.A. Athletic Club’s status soon rivaled that of the famed New York Athletic Club and Olympic Club. However, unlike those clubs and their illustrious 36-hole golf facilities (Winged Foot in New York and Olympic Club Lakeside in San Francisco), Los Angeles Athletic Club members were limited to rooftop play on a nine-hole putting course and driving net. Until June 24, 1927.

Despite excitement over Riviera, founders Garbutt and Garland opted for a private thank you to architect George C. Thomas Jr. Thomas had been reluctant to take on the project at first, but eventually relented and, as was his custom, provided his services for free. Four renowned golfers inaugurated Riviera that day in a relaxed 18-hole better-ball match.

Garland, Garbutt and many of their fellow athletic club friends were transplanted Easterners who led an inner circle of business and civic life in 1920s Los Angeles. Their mission was to develop L.A. into a thriving community greater than anything found in the East. Their vision included grand architecture, support for the burgeoning film business and, most of all, world-class recreational facilities.

Tense beginnings

With the Pacific as a prominent backdrop, Garland, Garbutt and Thomas posed for photographs on the first tee high above the treeless design. Each spoke briefly about the course and expressed hope that Riviera would provide great golfing pleasure for years to come. Thomas then struck a ceremonial tee shot from the spot where every modern golf legend from Bobby Jones to Tiger Woods has since teed off.

There had been tension from the start between Garbutt and Thomas, though no remaining differences were evident this beautiful June day. Thomas had passed up repeated offers to design Riviera until the fall of 1925, three years after Garbutt persuaded the LAAC board to release more than $265,000 to fund the land purchase. A former World War I Army Air Corps captain, Thomas surveyed the Santa Monica Canyon terrain from his single-seat plane. When asked by the athletic club what he thought of the site near its Uplifters Ranch retreat in Rustic Canyon, Thomas replied that the course would not amount to much. But, he said, “It would be good enough for the Los Angeles Athletic Club.”

Eventually, prominent athletic club members intervened, and Thomas was cajoled into carrying out the design. To make the project worth his while, Thomas expected unlimited resources to transform the coastal sage scrub and rock-strewn site into something special. Thomas insisted that construction engineer and budding architect Billy Bell be hired.

Thomas and Bell were fine solo architects, but when combining their talents, the pair crafted ingenious designs, including Bel-Air Country Club and the Ojai Valley Inn & Spa. Billy Bell was a former superintendent-turned-construction guru who commuted from Pasadena daily, crafting the sprawling, baseball glove-shaped bunkers that remain Riviera’s trademark.

Thomas was the visionary and design strategist who appeared once or twice a week during construction. He was just as interested in deep sea fishing with Zane Grey off Catalina Island or hybridizing roses on his Beverly Hills estate. Thanks to an inherited family fortune, Thomas took only select projects and never charged for design services. For the Griffith Park courses he designed in 1923, Thomas financed their completion when the city of L.A. ran out of funding.

The proposed Riviera club was part of Garbutt’s grand dream to build a chain of clubs stretching from downtown to the sea. An avid boxer, yachtsmen, handball expert and auto racer who designed his own car, Garbutt amassed a fortune through royalties derived from inventing innovative oil drilling tools.

As Riviera’s construction moved along at a normal pace, the energetic Garbutt drove from his 35-acre Silver Lake mansion for frequent visits. He persuaded the LAAC board to fund additional manpower and machinery to speed the construction process. The price tag for the project, including the clubhouse, was about $1 million, a huge sum at the time.

Garbutt insisted on making design suggestions even though he was not a golfer. This forced Thomas and Bell to devise a plan to chat continuously whenever Garbutt visited the site, making it difficult for their non-golfing friend to enter design-related conversations.

Rave reviews

Because the clubhouse was still under construction, the invited guests and opening foursome had convened on the members’ tee down the hill. With members of the press and dignitaries such as U.S. Sen. L.C. Phipps of Colorado looking on, the 6,910-yard course was turned over to the city’s finest for the exhibition match. Two amateurs, Paul M. Hunter and George Von Elm, took on local pros Vic D’Alberto and Willie Hunter.

Paul Hunter was a former state and Southern California amateur champion; Von Elm, who became one of the first to join Riviera, had become the second-most famous amateur golfer in America when he stunned Bobby Jones in the 1926 U.S. Amateur final at Baltusrol. That same year, Jones became the first golfer--amateur or professional--to win the U.S. Open and British Open in one season.

D’Alberto, from Los Angeles Country Club, was announced by match referee Scotty Chisholm as “rather crownless at present.” Willie Hunter was the 1926 British Amateur champion and later Riviera’s “Pro Emeritus.” A mainstay at Riviera from 1936 until his death in 1968, Hunter played in every Los Angeles Open from 1926 to 1961.

With striped ties tucked into their white dress shirts and flamboyant checkered socks exposed by their beige plus-fours, the foursome initiated Riviera with three birdies on the par-five first hole. But D’Alberto and Willie Hunter dominated the match, winning, 5 and 3, and carding a best-ball 67 to Von Elm and Paul Hunter’s 71. The lowest individual round was 73.

In his post-opening day review for the athletic club’s Mercury magazine, Chisholm suggested that Riviera’s second hole was “one of the greatest par-four creations in the country.” Chisholm made no reference to the 238-yard par-three fourth hole that Ben Hogan later called “the greatest par-three hole in America.”

Nor did Chisholm write anything about the par-three sixth with its bunker set in the middle of the green. Perhaps with the $800 memberships ($10 a month dues) and $2,500 dues-free lifetime memberships moving slowly, Chisholm avoided any descriptions that might intimidate prospective members.

A friend and photographer of golfing legends Old Tom Morris, Alister MacKenzie and Hogan, Chisholm predicted a rich future for Riviera’s short par-four 10th: “I believe golf architects will copy [the hole] throughout America because of its uniqueness of design.”

Jack Nicklaus has ranked the 10th and 18th holes among his favorite 18 in major championship golf. Nicklaus, who came close to several tournament wins at Riviera, frequently says the 10th has inspired some of his designs.

In the next morning’s Herald Examiner, columnist Maxwell Stiles wrote that the course was “artistic in design” and that Riviera “was Southern California’s newest and in many ways finest amphitheater of golf.”

George Clark, a gallery member for the opening and an athletic club official said: “I hope to see the day when the landscaped sides of the canyon will be dotted with spectators looking down upon the players in the $10,000, maybe more, Los Angeles Open tournament, being played over two 18-hole courses of the Riviera golf club.”

Forty-one Los Angeles Opens, two PGA Championships and one U.S. Open later, Clark’s prognosis for Riviera as a storied tournament venue is blemished only by the expectation for a second course at Riviera, which was scrapped not long after opening day. In its place evolved the Riviera Polo Club, a playground for Will Rogers, Walt Disney, Elizabeth Taylor and host to 1932 Olympic Equestrian events.

But it was the kilt-clad Chisholm, later famous for his 18th-green announcements at the Los Angeles Open and a cameo in the movie on Ben Hogan, “Follow the Sun,” who prophesized Riviera’s place in the world of golf.

“It will prove to be, mark my words, the training grounds of future champions whose names will emblazon the golfing records of two continents and bring credit and glory to the state of California,” Chisholm wrote. “Some may curse it, but they will remain to love it, because, like Old St. Andrews, it beams over with character. The name Riviera will be known throughout the universe of golf as the Pine Valley of the Western coast.”

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RIVIERA COUNTRY CLUB

Opened: June 24, 1927.

Course: Championship setting--6,946 yards, rating 74.3, par 71.

It’s a fact: Riviera was host of the 1948 U.S. Open won by Ben Hogan, the 1983 and ’95 PGA Championships and the 1998 U.S. Senior Open. It’s the annual site of the Nissan Open.