Sam Reeves, center, is an unofficial Cypress Point custodian.
Darren Riehl/GOLF.com; Gary Lisbon (R)
PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — Cypress Point Club is named for a tree unique to the spit of land that juts out from the showboat peninsula here. That is the club’s origin story, Sam Reeves, an unofficial club custodian, will tell you: The land, its trees, the ocean air that hugs all of it.
Sam — newly 91 but in his life view you could half-believe the inverted numbers — has been crossing fairways and paths with the kids playing here as they get ready to play in the Walker Cup. The Walker Cup is golf’s purest team competition, pitting 10 American amateurs against 10 from Great Britain and Ireland. In other words, the Walker Cup is the Ryder Cup, with far better manners and viewing opps.
WATCH “CYPRESS POINT’S HIDDEN BEAUTY” HERE:
In recent days and weeks, when Sam was not hitting up visiting team players for putting tips, he was talking to them about trees and their roots, land, ocean water, the world’s fresh water supply, which makes all of life possible. Also, Samuel F.B. Morse, the man who brought golf here. Sam is drawn to visionaries. I consider Sam one myself and have written about him before. A visionary, and a friend.
Last month, Sam was chatting up the American Walker Cupper Michael La Sasso, as he was playing a practice round. La Sasso is the current NCAA champion who plays at Ole Miss. Sam asked him a bunch of questions about himself — he’s always doing that — and when Sam started talking about Cypress Point La Sasso was hanging on his every word, totally engaged. I happened to be there.
“How about that kid?” I asked Sam when La Sasso finally returned to his task at hand, the practice round.
“Love him,” Sam said. “Love him!”
That’s part of the joy of Walker Cup golf. You get to see these often-rising golf talents in an intimate way. Cypress Point this week will put all of golf — real golf, joy-of-the-game golf — in a tidy box for us.
Cypress has been the host club for one other Walker Cup, in 1981. Jodie Mudd and Hal Sutton were on the American team. Ronan Rafferty and Philip Walton were on the GB&I team. Raferty and Walton, both from Ireland, were later Ryder Cup players. The last Walker Cup I attended was at National Golf Links, in 2013. I went with my friend Mike Donald, and we had a hugely great time. Parked on the side of the road and walked on in. Justin Thomas was on the American team. Matt Wallace played for GB&I. Does it matter who won? Not to me.
But to save you the trouble: The Americans won that year, 17-9. Over the years, the U.S. has won 39 Walker Cups, GB&I has won 9 and the 1965 Walker Cup ended in a tie.
One day last month, when a few American players were getting in an early Walker Cup practice round at Cypress, my colleague Darren Riehl, camera in hand, and I had the chance to tour the club with Sam as our guide. The video in this article — featuring Sam and two of his favorite Cypress Point caddies, a young woman pro at the club, a veteran club F&B man, the retired football player Harris Barton, various others — I think captures the club in all its sui generis intimacy. There’s no course quite like it, though a course up the street from it, Pacific Grove, does come to mind. There’s no club quite like it, though a club 200 miles down the coastline, the Valley Club, also comes to mind.
Sam started playing the course about 60 years ago. The game has changed but the course has not, not really. The land holds the trees, and the trees hold the land. You get to be 70, 80, 90, you start seeing the delicate balance in everything. Sandy Tatum, the former USGA president and a longtime Cypress Point member, was asked once what the club should do in the face of the assault weapons elite players now deploy. “Nothing!” Tatum said. George Still, the club president, told me recently, “We know the course is obsolete for the distances these guys hit the ball now. But this is match-play golf. It doesn’t matter.” Excuse the shouting and the repetition: IT. DOES. NOT. MATTER.
At the 1981 Walker Cup, Sam’s longtime caddie, Vince Lucido, was caddying for a GB&I player, Peter McEvoy. McEvoy was playing Jay Sigel, an American golf legend who died earlier this year. On the drivable par-4 8th hole, a dogleg right with a green in a dune near Sam’s house. Sigel won the hole. With an 8. “It was like a scene from ‘Caddyshack,’” Vince told me the other day. Match-play golf!
I have a dream that the AT&T Pebble Beach tournament will join forces with the PGA Championship and be played annually as a 54-hole stroke play Wednesday-Thursday-Friday qualifier, with 16 players qualifying for weekend match play at Cypress. You’d have 16 Saturday morning, eight left Saturday afternoon, four on Sunday morning and one last man standing — your PGA Champion —Sunday night at Cypress. You talk about a star ready for its closeup. Enter Cypress, stage wherever.
“This site was so good even you and I couldn’t have screwed it up,” Sam once told me in his distinctive drawl. He left Thomaston, Ga., in the mid-1950s and took his dripping-syrup drawl with him. The course, in this telling, was waiting to be discovered, as Michelangelo found David in an abandoned block of marble. Sam Reeves is a man who sees connections everywhere. His way of looking at the world is contagious.
The course is credited to Alister MacKenzie, with others playing significant roles. MacKenzie, a doctor and an Englishman, and Bob Jones, famously a lawyer from Atlanta, designed Augusta National together. Jones was on the first Walker Cup team, in 1922. Sam, in the 1930s and ‘40s, grew up idolizing Jones and the spirit of amateurism he represented. Walker Cup golf is all about golf. You can breathe again.
Sam shared all of this with Darren and me the other day. We were talking about trees and Cypress trees in particular, and this lightly edited answer gives you an insight into Sam, and how he feels about Cypress Point:
“Most trees will die of natural causes, just as people die of natural causes. That’s nothing to be overly sad about, it’s just reality. But trees should be cared for just as people are cared for. They should be respected.”
We talked about his life in golf. Sam played in a U.S. Amateur, he’s won a bunch of club titles at Cypress, and near the end of our day together, he said this:
“Golf is competitive, but then you get more into it and come to understand that golf is connectional.”
I didn’t even know that was a word. It is. A spectacular and fitting one.
Michael Bamberger writes for GOLF Magazine and GOLF.com. Before that, he spent nearly 23 years as senior writer for Sports Illustrated. After college, he worked as a newspaper reporter, first for the (Martha’s) Vineyard Gazette, later for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He has written a variety of books about golf and other subjects, the most recent of which is The Second Life of Tiger Woods. His magazine work has been featured in multiple editions of The Best American Sports Writing. He holds a U.S. patent on The E-Club, a utility golf club. In 2016, he was given the Donald Ross Award by the American Society of Golf Course Architects, the organization’s highest honor.
