California Golf Club

About the club

For a course that featured Alister MacKenzie bunkers (added just two years after it first opened), Cal Club was never considered the equal of its near neighbors, No. 35 Olympic Club (Lake) or No. 33 San Francisco Golf Club. That’s partly because it was so claustrophobic, not just from dense trees, but from its truncated front nine reworked in the 60s by Robert Trent Jones after road expansion took two holes. Architect Kyle Phillips resolved the problem in 2007 by clearing trees and creating five new holes, including a new par-4 second in the old practice range and a new dogleg-right par-4 seventh atop a previously unused mesa in the middle of the course. Best of all, he reintroduced MacKenzie’s glamorous bunkers. Cal Club is now much closer to its top-ranked neighbors and continues its meteoric rise up the charts, jumping to its highest position to date.