Source: Sacramento Bee
It has taken 115 years, but the land on which Joel Parker Whitney built the area's first golf course is finally being covered with houses.
In the name of history and hickory shafts, what took so long?
Sacramento Country Club, the area's second course, lasted only three years during its initial location in Oak Park before it was forced to relocate in 1904, its 35 acres divided into lots and sold for building purposes.
Since then, much has changed on the Sacramento golf landscape in the century. Nearly 100 courses have been built within 45 miles of downtown. Of those, 20 can be documented to have come and gone. The remnants of several are still visible, providing mystical reminders of good times and good games gone by.
Several courses were victims of the Great Depression and World War II. With money and time for recreation scarce in the 1930s and 1940s, several rough-around-the-edges courses sporting sand greens and serving the area's smaller towns faded back into the fields from which they were cut.
But the most prevalent reason for the demise has remained the same - the land became worth more on which to live than play. The most recent four to close - Lindale Golf Center in the south area, Lighthouse in West Sacramento, Lawrence Links in Antelope and Sierra Golf Course in Placerville - all gave way to residential development.
You can't play two rounds these days without talk turning to speculation about the area's next closure. Are there too many courses? Will the population catch up fast enough? Who will buckle under the competition? Which will become home to the next subdivision, El Dorado Hills or Champions?
A stroll down fairways past provides a few clues.
Night vision
Bert Bonanno was a bogey golfer and restaurant owner in his mid-20s in Pittsburg when inspiration struck.
"One day my buddy came by and said he had seen a pitch-and-putt golf course in Los Angeles," Bonanno said. "I asked him what the hell that was. He said nine holes, all par-3s."
Bonanno sold his business and built Sacramento Pitch and Putt on 10 acres in the relative middle of nowhere near what is now the Royal Oaks Drive post office off Highway 160.
He added lights for night golf and set up shop as the course's pro.
"I was an 18-handicapper giving lessons for $3.50 for a half-hour and never had a complaint," Bonanno said. He taught golfers how to chip and putt and hit a 9-iron, then shipped them to legendary area teaching pro Tom LoPresti at Haggin Oaks.
Bonanno opened the course in 1956 and sold it to a regular two years later. It changed hands and names a few more times before being abandoned in 1964. Office buildings now sit where the course once did.
The longest hole was 110 yards, the shortest was 45 yards. The pitch-and-putt concept was new, and so were the lights. There hasn't been a lighted course in Sacramento before or since. The lights led to a lot of post-summer sunset socializing.
The idea worked for Jim Conley. "We were all working stiffs," Conley, 70, said. "You could go home and have dinner with your wife and kids and then go have a beer and hit the ball a little bit."
The course also featured a popular miniature golf course. But, as fun as it was, it was just a break-even proposition, he said.
"We were too early," Conley said. "Arnold Palmer was just coming on strong. And location was a problem. People had a hard time finding us."
Bonanno's infatuation with course ownership didn't end in Sacramento. In 1986, Bonanno, now 76, built a three-green course in his front yard along 17-Mile Drive in Pebble Beach that made his home the most photographed in the area.
He sold the property in 2000 for $13 million. The irony is, the course may have to be destroyed and the land returned to natural vegetation if the new owner loses a years-long battle with the California Coastal Commission.
Gravel trumps grass
The closure of Perkins Golf Course in 1977 hit its regulars hard.
Marshall Cain, the course's pro at the time, was quoted in The Bee: "It was sad. A lot of club members stayed around until 11 o'clock (that night). They just didn't want to let go. We had a few players turn up (the next day), people knew it was closing, but maybe they just wanted to make sure. Yes, there were some tears."
Perkins was a nine-hole, par-27 built on 42 acres on Jackson Highway near Folsom Boulevard. It had a miniature course, a lighted driving range and a lively atmosphere. It's a big hole in the ground now.
Ownership of the property on which the course was built in 1957 was later purchased by Granite Construction. When the lease was up, the fun was over.
"Sacramento grows on gravel. And Perkins just happened to be sitting on an old riverbed," said Cain, 65, the pro at Bradshaw Ranch for that course's 16 years.
LoPresti and Frank Dolle designed and owned Perkins. They acquired Lindale early in that course's 1964-to-1985 run on Stockton Boulevard near the intersection of Gerber. Both hosted the annual Mercy Hospital Guild Hole-in-One contest.
Lindale opened as a compact 18-hole, par-60 course on 50 acres. LoPresti and Dolle converted it to a nine-hole course with a driving range. A gated housing development now occupies the property.
The private side
Other than Joel Parker Whitney's personal course in what is now Rocklin, the only two area private courses still not standing are the two versions of the Sacramento Country Club.
The first course opened in 1901, according to newspaper accounts provided by area golf historian Rick Lund. After receiving the boot from its Oak Park digs near the intersection of Park and 38th streets, a location provided in Dr. Milton F. Fenner's "History of Men's Golf in the Sacramento Area," the club built a new nine holes on the north side of J Street near the intersection of 46th later in 1904. It lasted until 1916 when, again feeling squeezed by city expansion, some of its more prominent members acquired enough property to build the 18 holes that is now Del Paso Country Club.
Descriptions of the first course are few. It had a picturesque clubhouse and, according to the Sacramento Union, the club "affords rational pleasures of the most commendable nature."
The new clubhouse at the J Street location was christened late in 1904. The course featured tees of hard-packed dirt mixed with a clay-like substance, the fairways were natural vegetation rather than planted grass and the greens were asphalt slabs 30 to 40 feet in diameter, covered with a thin layer of sand as described by Fenner.
The private clubs were Sacramento's only courses until Arcade Golf Course opened for public play in 1916. Sacramento was late to the game, with many Northern California cities constructing courses in the 1890s.
As for Whitney's course, it was reported to be small and built on a sliver of his 25,000-plus acres on which he grew citrus trees. Even though the course's upkeep apparently ended with Whitney's death in 1913, reports of it still being visible lasted into the 1940s.
And the rock where he had his picture taken in about 1900 while playing with his wife, Lucy, and daughter, Beryl? It's less than a half-mile from Whitney Oaks Golf Club - where Whitney is buried to the left of the 11th fairway - and soon to be enveloped within the Claremont housing development.
Grass trumps dirt
The grass was greener around town in 1933, and Arcade Golf Course fell victim. It appears to be the only Sacramento course to succumb because its competition offered better.
It opened in 1916 as the area's first public course and one of the first in the state. But while Del Paso planted grass in 1922 and Land Park opened as the area's first all-grass public course in 1924, Arcade stayed true to its dirt origins. Play waned on its parched fairways in summer months in the best of times, and when Sacramento Municipal Golf Course (later renamed Haggin Oaks) opened two miles away in 1932, it was a matter of time.
The course sat where the Children's Receiving Home and Renfree Field are now located. A routing of the course is on display on a themed tabletop in the Haggin Oaks restaurant.
The military way
Peer through the fence that encircles the weed patch that once was Lawrence Links, and you can sense the history. The creek dissecting the first fairway and the bridge crossing it are there. The bunkers are overgrown and even more menacing. The outline of the fourth green near the property edge is still visible under the daisies.
No. 4 is the hole Hugh Smith remembers most. Not for its 135 pond-guarded yards. But because its green was the target of Lonnie Winston hitting off the deck of the raised concrete porch between the buildings that made up the clubhouse.
Winston, so Smith's story goes, would challenge anyone that he could hit the green off the slab with any club. The favorite of the longtime pro was a wooden driver with an aluminum plate on the bottom.
"He could hit it on the green every time," Smith said.
Lawrence Links opened in 1968 as a military course affiliated with McClellan Air Force Base. It opened to the public in the mid-1990s after the base closure. It closed in 2003, its Antelope property soon to be overrun with homes.
Its challenging nine holes measured slightly less than 3,000 yards and featured three par-5s and three par-3s. Its conditions varied wildly from its early days of hardpan and chicken weed to top-notch for a period after a mid-1980s renovation and before its conversion to public.
Area construction contractor Carl Lawrence donated the bulk of the course's acreage in 1964 because it "was ideal for golf but not suitable for Lawrence's subdivision because a creek meandered throughout the property," according to documents compiled by self-appointed course historian and longtime women's club member Gloria Houston. Arnold Palmer, Gary Player and Jack Nicklaus attended ground-breaking ceremonies in 1965. The course was built almost entirely with volunteer labor.
Last month, a proposal to construct 320 homes on the property was going through the environmental impact report process. Twenty-two acres of open space are proposed.
The irony doesn't escape Linda Lawrence, a daughter of the course's namesake who lives in Carmichael. Her father, who died in 1974, never played the course, even though he received its first four memberships.
Lawrence Links became a reality only 18 years after McClellan officials first determined a course was needed to serve its military personnel because public tee times were so difficult to come by. The construction of a course at McClellan began with the grading of fairways in 1951. It was abandoned in 1952 after being deemed nonessential in the light of previous congressional criticism, according to Houston's documents.
18-holer goes bust
Mark Francis grew up in West Sacramento hunting and selling wayward golf balls with his brother along the fairways of River Bend.
"We'd buy a hamburger with half the money and put the other half in the bank," Francis said. "That's how we bought our first car."
It opened as River Bend in 1967. It was redesigned to accommodate home building that never took off, and the name changed to Lighthouse in 1990. It closed in 2003, the only 18-hole course of at least semiregulation length to be lost in the Sacramento area.
Where the sounds of ball-meeting-club echoed off the levee, it's now nail guns and Skilsaws. Homes are being constructed atop Lighthouse's old Nos. 3, 4, 5, 13 and 14. There's a park atop the No. 1 green. The clubhouse and pro shop are gone, the massive practice green is a mound of weeds. The range looks greener and grassier than ever, if that's any consolation.
The River Bend days were special, Francis, 51, recalls. The nearby Sacramento River was more accessible, kids played the course for virtually nothing and everyone was welcome. The sign screamed "Open to the Public" and really meant it, he said. A diverse mix of ethnic golf clubs to state employees called the course home.
River Bend and Lighthouse both measured about 5,500 yards, featured plenty of water hazards and played to a par of between 69 and 70. Both incarnations rewarded precision, the experienced players always advising to bring plenty of balls.
Larry Laronge was the assistant golf coach at Mira Loma High School in the late 1990s when a straight-hitting girl playing last on the ladder in a boys match against Natomas was the medalist. The boys were trying to drive the par-4s and spraying their share of shots out of bounds. She hit it down the middle and on the green.
"Lighthouse was for players, not hitters," Laronge said.
The key word: was.
As with so many courses, gone but not forgotten.
