TEST

The Works Progress

Administration clubhouse perches on a rise at the east- ern edge of the course, near Highway One. Its popular watering hole/restaurant is the regular venue for Ro- tary and Democratic Club breakfasts. The parking lot is full of pickup trucks. If the buildings have been remod- eled since the 1950s, you would never know it. Public golf looks and feels like this in the seaside towns of Scotland. The Old Course at St. Andrews—at 600 years, the world’s oldest— starts and finishes in town, with its first tee and 18th hole adjacent to rows of 19th century university dormito- ries and public houses. At Sharp Park, the re- semblance to Scottish public golf is purely intentional. Dr. Alister MacKenzie, who designed the course at the height of his fame and

OF TIME

BY RICHARD HARRIS JR.

prowess in 1931, was an expert on Scottish golf. He was the consulting architect in the early 1920s at St. An- drews, where he assisted in designing the Eden Course, and was the first to map the welter of fairway mounds, swales, and pits on the Old Course. When Sharp Park opened in 1932, MacKenzie declared it to have “a great resemblance to real links land.” All of MacKenzie’s

design principles are much in evidence at Sharp Park, where the fairways are wide, the rough nonexistent and the entire property exceed- ingly beautiful. Notwith- standing, the course is challenging for persons of all skill levels, due to the heavy ocean air and ever-present sea breezes, subtle ground contours, and MacKenzie’s strategic demands and dra- matically mounded greens.

SPRING 2010 NCGA Golf 39

Although most of his courses were private, Dr. MacKenzie created the pub- lic course in Pacifica where today a remarkably diverse golfing clientele of all races, languages, social classes, and genders, at a rate of 55,000 rounds per year, enjoy the Good Doctor’s beautiful

SHARP PARK STANDS RESOLUTELY AGAINST

THOSE WHO WANT TO CLOSE THE COURSE

Sharp Park Golf Course sits hard by the Pacific, protected from the sea only by the earthen levee on its western border. Located in the middle of town, it is not an exclusive or private place. To the north and south are neighborhoods of modest homes. On a section of the California Coastal Trail atop the sea wall, bicyclists, strollers and dog walkers pass between the fishing pier to the north and the bare Mori Point headlands to the south, occasionally bringing their dogs and picnics down onto the 16th fairway.

links for a modest weekend greens fee under $30. The plans were drawn in 1930-31, and while MacKenzie was attending to business in Europe, his col- leagues Chandler Egan and Robert Hunter supervised

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