The Sale of the Century : How the deal was done: After a decade of Japanese ownership, Pebble Beach is back in American hands-this time for good

Golf Digest, June, 2000 by Mark Seal

They will always be Pete, Dick and Clint, three Northern California kids who came of age at Pebble Beach.

Pete was a country club caddie, barreling up to Pebble with his buddies and sneaking on to play the fabled greens at midnight, reveling in what he calls the magic. "Whether you're religious or not, you realize this is some of God's great work," he says. Dick was a wild child on Easter break from Berkeley High School, falling in love with the place on a lost weekend best kept private, he says, "because I don't know how long they keep the police records." Clint was a G.I. when he first arrived in 1951, sneaking into Bing Crosby's Clambake show, "lookie-looing around" at Bing and Bob, Rosemary Clooney and Phil Harris as they entertained the golfers after Crosby's fabled tournament.

By the spring of 1999, Pete had become Peter Ueberroth, former Commissioner of Baseball, engineer of the 1984 Olympics, which transformed Los Angeles into a patriotic pep rally and left a $225 million surplus, the 1984 Time Man of the Year once considered a sure bet to run for the Senate, perhaps even the presidency. Dick was Dick Ferris, former president of United Airlines and current chairman of the PGA Tour Policy Board who, with Ueberroth as his partner, had expanded the Doubletree Hotel and Guest Quarters hotel group into a 1,400-unit chain. And Clint was, of course, Clint Eastwood, Oscar winner, American icon.

But in many ways they were still those illicit kids on the idyllic greens, which had, in the years since, been passed through multiple men's hands. When it was put up for sale by its Japanese owners early last year, Ueberroth, one of half a dozen salivating suitors, seized the opportunity to replant the American flag into the jewel of American golf by enlisting his two Northern California-bred counterparts, along with a powerful fourth: Arnold Palmer.

On Feb. 8, 2000, Ueberroth, Ferris and Eastwood returned to play Pebble Beach. Entering his 18th AT&T Pro-Am, Ueberroth (by the luck of the draw?) had won a place in Tiger Woods' foursome. Tiger roared to victory from seven shots behind, reducing the attending billionaires and movie stars, including normally taciturn Clint Eastwood-"I was there to give him his trophy," he says-into slack-jawed groupies.

"I was baseball commissioner," says Ueberroth, "and I never once got to catch a fly ball in the outfield. But to play with Tiger Woods in a tournament at Pebble Beach? That's way beyond anybody's imagination."

The moment was a coronation. After nearly a decade of Japanese ownership, Pebble Beach was back in American hands. Assembling a ferocious foursome of partners-Eastwood, Ferris, Palmer and himself, along with 132 individual investors ponying up a minimum $2 million each-Ueberroth had engineered an $820 million purchase of the Pebble Beach Company, including the famed U.S. Open venue, three other golf courses and two luxury hotels. Now comes the bigger challenge: to simultaneously preserve the prized property and position Pebble as the premier golf resort of the new millennium.

This is the land that humbled a billionaire, bankrupted a Japanese boom-time golden boy, and, most recently, sent an army of Japanese bankers back home with little to show for their seven years of superlative stewardship but their good names. "The Greatest Meeting of Land and Water in the World," Pebble Beach was the playground for an innocent time in America, built upon the most democratic of concepts-public golf-to which the longtime residents of "the Forest," the 5,300-acre Del Monte Forest that encompasses the resort, pledge absolute allegiance. Here, golf was designed to coexist with the natural splendor. Because that's the way "The Duke of Del Monte"-Pebble Beach founder Sam Morse-planned it.

"The father of the environmentalists," Morse, nephew of the inventor of the telegraph, arrived in 1915 to find what would become the Pebble Beach Golf Links marked off in 80-foot lots, destined to become a subdivision. Morse had been sent to liquidate the property by its owner, the Southern Pacific Railroad. Instead, he assembled a consortium to buy it for $1.3 million, banished the home sites to the hills, prohibiting homeowners from cutting a single tree without permission, and enlisted Jack Neville and Douglas Grant to lay out the Pebble Beach Links so as many holes fronted the shoreline as possible, creating a public course that could be enjoyed by anyone. "If I were offered $500 million for oil-well rights, I would not allow anyone to put an oil well on Monterey Peninsula," Morse once said.

The Forest still stands in delicate balance between nature and development, between progress and exploitation. Home to sensitive plant and animal species-black legless lizards, red-legged frogs, wood rats, rare bats, and a host of orchids, clovers and trees, most notably the noble Monterey pine-Pebble Beach presents as much of a challenge for developers as golfers. "You might consider developers here both blessed and cursed," says botanist David Allen, a former resident. "Blessed to be in a very unique environment, but cursed because the area complicates and confounds development."