Housing-development golf has gotten a bad name in California recently, and for good reason. We shouldn't forget, however, that some of the greatest Golden Age courses in the state started out as real-estate ventures. Bel-Air Country Club, nestled in the canyons above the University of California, Los Angeles campus, is a good example. In the mid-1920s, oil magnate Alphonzo Bell founded the club as part of Bel Air Estates, an upscale residential community catering to the film industry’s elite. Bell hired George Thomas to design the course, and Thomas’s associates Billy Bell (no relation to Alphonzo) and Jack Neville assisted on the project. Completing Bel-Air required audacious feats of engineering, including building a swinging bridge, an elevator, and multiple tunnels. When it opened in 1927, the course was Thomas’s first L.A. masterpiece, soon to be joined by Riviera Country Club (1927) and the renovated North Course at Los Angeles Country Club (1928). This trio still stands as perhaps the greatest single-city showcase of one golf architect’s mastery. In the decades after World War II, Dick Wilson, Robert Trent Jones, and Tom Fazio made changes to the course, but Tom Doak undid much of their work in his 2018 restoration.
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Take Note…
Always tell the press exactly what’s on your mind. In a 2015 interview with Ran Morrissett, Tom Doak impulsively told the truth when Morrissett asked him which courses would most benefit from restorations. Doak would later say that he normally demurs on this topic; he’d rather not make enemies of the current consulting architects. In this case, however, he called out two clubs: Dornick Hills, a Perry Maxwell design in Oklahoma, and Bel-Air. His answer found its way to Bel-Air’s green committee, which promptly invited him to visit. Doak’s firm also finished a restoration at Dornick Hills last year. The moral of the story: spilling the beans to nosy journalists is a wise career move.
Dig it out of the dirt. Doak’s Renaissance Golf Design team discovered the dimensions of several bunkers at Bel-Air simply by digging down and finding old bunker sand. It seems that the certain mid-20th-century construction crews had, in some instances, just built on top of Thomas and Bell’s features instead of stripping them away first. Thank goodness for their laziness.
Appointment viewing. The 2023 U.S. Women’s Amateur will take place at Bel-Air Country Club August 7-13. Set your TiVos accordingly (people still have TiVos, right?). And if you live in the L.A. area, go to at least a day of the tournament. The U.S. Women’s Am is one of the best in-person viewing experiences in the game.
The Idol. Speaking of TiVo, this new HBO series starring Lily Rose-Depp and The Weeknd was partly shot at The Weeknd’s house, not far from Bel-Air’s 11th tee. Fried Egg staffer Cameron Hurdus says The Idol is his favorite show of all time, surpassing even Breaking Bad and The Sopranos. (Note: he does not say that.)
