Insider's Guide: Monterey Peninsula Country Club

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Bob Zoller can still see Mike Strantz. When Zoller, the superintendent of Monterey Peninsula Country Club for almost 30 years, walks the Shore course, he sees the late architect sitting in his utility cart in the middle of an unfinished fairway, staring into the distance.

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"He would be there just zoned out, looking at where a green would be," says Zoller. "I realized right away that instead of talking to him, I should just leave him alone and not break his concentration."

Strantz brought his unique brand of intensity to the venerable course's redesign even prior to being awarded the assignment. "Before we even selected him, I bet Mike put in more than 40 hours, walking around, beating a path out there and trying to get a feel for the land," Zoller says. "He came to the presentation with an idea in mind already."

The six-person committee was enraptured by his presentation and his ideas for the layout, which Strantz had sketched in stunning detail. His drawings showed a complete rerouting, with most of the course facing south toward nearby Cypress Point and Spyglass Hill. The original design had faced north from the 5th hole on, offering a middling backdrop of Santa Cruz, typically shrouded in peninsula fog.

In January 2002 the Monterey Peninsula Country Club committee chose Strantz. Around that same time, he also was diagnosed with an aggressive form of tongue cancer. Nevertheless, a year later he moved into a rented house on what would become the 15th fairway.

While its sister course, Dunes, was built in 1926, the construction of Shore came more than three decades later, after developer Samuel F.B. Morse turned the land over to Monterey Peninsula Country Club's membership for $1. The condition of the transaction was that a golf course would have to be built within two years. On a shoestring budget of $164,000, Bob Baldock and Jack Neville hurriedly built Shore, straightforward layout with flat fairways supported by a hard clay base that softened considerably in the rainy season.