The Coachella Valley wasn’t always a golf destination, let alone golf vacationland. In fact, when the movie stars first made this their preferred playground and hideaway spot, the only “sports” that mattered were tennis, pool-time, lighting the drinking lamp well before 5 p.m., and what can best be termed as a game that called for secrecy and discretion, neither of which seem to have been liberally applied. The first course popped up early enough, in the mid-1920s—the still-standing nine-hole O’Donnell Golf Club in Palm Springs. It was a step, the first step, but years would roll by before there was another, and then finally another, and there wasn’t much in the way of a sprint until about the time some guy named Ike handed the office keys to some guy named Jack.
From the first post-war years into the 1970s, “Palm Springs” golf was private golf. This is the time that gave us the country clubs known as Thunderbird and Tamarisk and Bermuda Dunes and El Dorado. (You know, they held Ryder Cups at two of these, if you can believe it.) And the first clubs in turn provided a strong foundation for the Reserves and Vintages and Bighorns and Stone Eagles that came later.
Golf took the valley, in a very private way.
Then something happened. A man of the public who just happened to look Hollywood, play all-star, and knock elbows and likely a few tumblers with presidents and Rat Packers came to town. The hard-working down-to-earth son of down-to-earth hard-working Pennsylvanians took on the game of elites, gave his pants a hitch, and kicked ass, becoming arguably the greatest sport-transcending sports hero of all time. Arnold Palmer owned what we now call the Bob Hope Classic, winning five of them (in 14 years), and adding another desert victory in the tournament that evolved into the Bob Hope, the old Thunderbird Invitational. Fittingly, his last regular tour win was the ’73 Bob Hope.
Arnie marched through the desert, bringing the public with him.
By the ‘70s, and mostly decidedly by the mid-‘80s, Palm Springs and Co. could present a solid portfolio of public courses, and in time the valley was ready to check into a top-floor suite in the Pantheon of American Golf, and it’s still doing a pretty good job of hanging around with the Scottsdales and Carolinas of the world. Some locales have more courses. Some have more expensive courses, if you can believe that. Some even have more “better” courses.
We have weather. We have Arnie.
Depending on the state of the economy and what’s considered a golf course, there are 120 or so courses in the desert, from ramshackle nine-holers to the kind of places where the member-member looks like the Fortune 500. Most everybody who is anybody in course design has a project on the ground—Dye, Nicklaus, Arnie, Player, Hurdzan, Schmidt, and Curley (Faldo). Better yet, since most of us are regular old John and Joan Qs, the roster of notables extends to courses we can play. (Unfortunately we haven’t seen Tom Doak on the public side yet, there’s no sign of Jim Engh, and somebody please get on the horn to Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore.)
And it’s not just about playing the game. Golf fans have been treated to seeing the best of the best going back to when Thunderbird and El Dorado hosted Ryder Cups in the 1950s. Likely the second most important golf tournament in women’s golf is a desert mainstay—the Kraft Nabisco Championship held every spring on Mission Hills’ classic Desmond Muirhead track. Through various name changes and a throwback formula, the Bob Hope celebrated its 50th birthday in 2009. Silly and perhaps no more for the world, all but three of the on-hold-for-’09-and-maybe-forever Skins Games have been contested in the desert. At least one of the two major professional tours visits annually with some level of its qualifying tournament. Better yet, a number of courses used in these events are open to the public.
What follows is a listing of courses we think are notable, meaning worth your vacation time and your vacation dollar. It doesn’t come close to covering every publicly-accessible course in the desert because some just aren’t worth your time/dollars and, frankly, that’s what phone books are for. We like to think of it as complete, not exhaustive, and highly representative. We’ve tried to hit all levels of the price scale. We didn’t include courses that require membership or a secret handshake to get in. We’ve played all these courses, likely multiple times. Some are spectacular, coffee-table-book-cover-grade plays, some do exactly what they are supposed to do: deliver an enjoyable golf experience given how much someone wants you to pay for the privilege. All these courses are “comfortable” in their clothes, so to say. As for yardages, these guys mostly stretch to 7,000+ yards from the tees very few of us should play, and moving forward from there the stops typically come at some combination of two, three, or four of the following: 6700, 6,300, 6,000, 5,600, plus the really smartly designed courses have 5,200 or 4,900. And if it’s a short or executive course, we tell you; Full-length courses generally par out on either side of 72. But since we play against par does it really matter if the number is 71 or 73?
Price is elusive. Most courses have multiple rates—weekday, holiday, low-shoulder, hotel guest, whatever. There are huge, massive spreads between winter and summer pricing. Third-party services negotiate varying discounts even with the same property. It’s like trying to decipher the Pentagon’s budget. So for comparative purposes we list high season rack rate, the typical top-end weekend wintertime price you’ll be quoted by the course/see on the course’s Web site. This is typical high-season rack, so if the course in question offers a super special even-higher-on-this-holiday rate, it’s not reflected.
You’ve probably already surmised that there will be times and ways to beat those prices, even at the source, and you are correct. The listed rates are for comparative purposes and since golf is a game of Scottish origin most of us who play are pretty good at finding thrifty alternatives where they exist. Prices crater during summer, most to the point that the cost will be within the range of the lowest price category below at even the swankiest swank palaces.