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California Golf - Southern California
No other State or golf destination has such a wide variety of golf styles, courses and scenery. The California golfer can play Torrey Pines, set on the beautiful Ocean Cliffs in La Jolla, then travel 1 1/2 hours to Palm Springs and play some of the best desert course available such as PGA West, Westin Mission Hills and La Quinta.
California Golf - History
It is to Redlands and Riverside that we look for the first formal golf courses in Southern California. Riverside was riding the crest of the agricultural wave that came from the introduction of oranges to the area. The first orange trees were planted in 1871 and a decade later there were more than half a million citrus trees in California, almost half of which were in Riverside. The navel orange was introduced to the United States in Riverside and, notes the city's web site, the development of refrigerated rail cars and innovative irrigation system made Riverside the wealthiest city per capita by 1895.
The first caddie strike in Southern California occurred at the Pasadena CC in July, 1898. The caddies demanded higher pay, and the Los Angeles Times reported, " . . . they claim that 15 cents a round is too little money to run all over a twenty-acre lot chasing golf balls and carrying the sticks. The price paid in Oakland is 10 cents a round, and the links are longer, but that makes no difference to the Pasadena youth, who is to heathy -- or to proud -- to work for anything less than what his conferees in other cities get."
Many of the club's members joined Annandale Golf Club when it was built in 1906, and when the Midwick Country Club was founded in 1912, it sounded the death knell for PCC and eventually the club closed. But before that, it had played an instrumental role in founding and shaping the SCGA, and a club member, John B. Miller became the second SCGA president in 1900.
With a population of 85,000 in 1897, it seems strange that Los Angeles had not yet been bitten by the golfing but that was about to change. One of those with whom Grindlay often played was a Santa Monica sporting goods merchant and tennis enthusiast named Edward B. Tufts and, after Grindlay threatened to leave Southern California if a better course wasn't built, Grindlay, Tufts and two of Grindlay's pupils, Hugh W. Vail and E. Conde Jones, organized a voluntary organization, The Los Angeles Golf Club, in December, 1897.
The four men leased a 16-acre parcel at the corner of Pico and Alvarado which had the dual advantage of being close to two trolley lines and also to the fashionable West Adams district, where many well-to-do people resided. In a mere five days, a nine-hole, 1,913-yard course was laid out and built, with the four men using picks, shovels and rakes to clear debris and construct the holes.
The course became known as "The Windmill Links" because of a burned-out windmill, 12 feet by 16 feet at its base, which served as the club's first clubhouse. Like all virtually all courses at the time, the greens were made of oiled sand (they were often called "skins" which may account for the name of the popular game) and each was 22 1/2 feet in diameter. "With Grindlay supervising," writes Robert Windeler in The Los Angeles CC's centennial book, "Tufts and Jones reamed out the holes with butcher knives and sank newly emptied tomato cans, six inches across by six inches high, as cups in the exact center of each green."
History Source: SCGA
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