The Story
Pasatiempo was willed into being by Marion Hollins — the 1921 U.S. Women's Amateur champion, athlete, and developer who had already helped bring Cypress Point to life. On the rolling hills above Monterey Bay she planned an ambitious sporting estate, and for its golf course she hired Dr. Alister MacKenzie, fresh from Cypress Point and not yet begun at Augusta National. On September 8, 1929, the course opened with an exhibition match for the ages: Hollins and Bobby Jones against British stars Glenna Collett and Cyril Tolley, with more than 2,000 spectators trailing them through the barrancas.
MacKenzie did something here he did nowhere else in America: he moved in. He built his home alongside the sixth fairway and lived there for the last years of his life, tinkering with the course until his death in January 1934. That means Pasatiempo received more of his direct, on-the-ground attention than Augusta National, Royal Melbourne, or Crystal Downs — courses he never saw completed. Of the 16th, he wrote plainly: 'I think the 16th is the best two-shot hole I know.'
The decades were not always kind — trees crowded in, greens shrank, bunkers softened — but Pasatiempo has been patiently restored to MacKenzie's vision. Tom Doak and Jim Urbina began the work in the late 1990s, and from 2023 to 2024 Urbina led the most comprehensive restoration yet, rebuilding every green and returning the bunkers to their 1929 shapes; the project was completed in December 2024. Since 1947 the course has also hosted the Western Intercollegiate, where college kids named Venturi, Watson, Woods, Spieth, and Scheffler tested themselves against MacKenzie before the world knew their names.
Today Pasatiempo remains a semi-private club that welcomes public play — a chance for any golfer to walk the ground MacKenzie chose for himself. The barrancas still cut across the back nine, the greens still tilt and tumble like nothing else in California, and the house by the sixth fairway still watches over it all.