RSS
Home
San Juan Oaks a popular road-to-Pebble stopover
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
If there’s one California track that reflects its designer’s personality, or at least his public image, more completely than any other, it’s San Juan Oaks.
Soon-too-be Champions Tour staple and current Presidents Cup captain Fred Couples’ name is all over this rangy 13-year-old colt of a course, literally and figuratively. Woven through a lush, creek-crossed valley and tree-speckled hills between the historic mission village of San Juan Bautista and farming town of Hollister (a 30-minute drive inland from the Monterey Peninsula), it’s by turns laid-back and intense, languid and imposing. Knocking around San Juan Oaks’ mix of sneaky wetlands, shrub-soaked ravines and wide, welcoming fairways is, in essence, like getting in 18 with Fred himself. It even has a “bad back” nine — bad as in very, very good, with some major ups and downs that, with a little imagination, could be a metaphor for the PGA star’s temperamental spine.
The good Mr. Couples also leaves his mark inside the 19,000 sq. ft., mission-styled clubhouse — especially within the 40-seat private conference room in the form of photos, artifacts and a case-full of trophies. You almost expect to see the 1992 Masters champion stretched out on a sofa with a bowl of popcorn in his lap and his beloved ESPN on the flat screen, though he lives a couple hundred miles south, in Santa Barbara. You never know … he’s been known to show up out here in the hinterlands now and again.
“Fred had the average golfer in mind,” says Scott Fuller, San Juan Oaks’ longtime general manager. “He grew up playing a public golf course in Seattle, and one of his real goals was to make it playable for golfers of different skill levels. He opened up a lot of the fronts of greens; he doesn’t like a lot of forced carries on a public course. You can roll it up. The water is generally beside you, not in front of you. And he did a lot of bunker and tee placements for the average player, as well as the black tees for the really good players.”
In short, golfers leave with a sense that they’ve experienced a fair and engaging round. There are five sets of tees and distances from 4,100 to 7,100 yards, though during high season it plays shorter since, Fuller adds, “It was also designed to play hard and fast. In the summer it does. It’s still a nice course when the hills are green [in winter and spring], but when they’re brown, the course really stands out.”
So do the greens and bunkers. Like many of the south bay region’s most popular courses — Eagle Ridge, Pasatiempo, Poppy Hills, Spyglass Hill — San Juan Oaks sports big, rolling, sometimes tiered putting surfaces buttressed by generous, almost free-form nose-and-bay traps.
Still, San Juan Oaks definitely establishes its own character early on and builds the fun throughout the round. There’s a healthy mix of wide-open and narrow tee shots , nail-biting approaches and easy bailouts throughout the courseSince opening on Oct. 1, 1996, San Juan Oaks has filled a vital golf gap between the south Bay Area, Monterey Peninsula and Central Valley. The course’s character changes from season to season but its affordable price point and private club-like feel are attractive constants.
“We get a lot of East Bay players Central Valley players, and play from Monterey, Santa Cruz and Watsonville,” Fuller says. “Players from an hour and a half to two hours away will come here. In general, people on their way to Monterey make us part of the trip.”
Great golf in a relaxed setting? Sounds like it’s just what Dr. Fred ordered.
For more great golf travel in the West and beyond, visit Fairways + Greens Magazine.
View Untitled in a larger map
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
