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

Taiheiyo required a deposit of 5 percent of the purchase price, $40 million. Nonrefundable. "So if we weren't able to perform and put our group together, we would have lost that money," says Ueberroth, who, along with Dick Ferris, put the $40 million on the line. Serious dough.

By this time, Ueberroth had already come up with a kicker that would impress the Japanese as much as his Mount Rushmore of partners, an epiphany he'd experienced six months before he made his first phone call. He had started to assemble a group of individual investors, people bound not merely by their ability to chip in a minimum $2 million (and a maximum of $10 million, to guard against takeover artists), but who would also, according to Eastwood, "like golf, like Pebble Beach and have respect for the land and the place." Even today, Ueberroth describes the concept with a sense of wonder: "If you had enough investors so there would be no one dominant-no Marvin Davis, who could sell it-that would work. And it did."

Bank of America Securities was enlisted to handle the individual investors. On June 1, 1999, a black-bound prospectus titled Pebble Beach Investor Memorandum and bearing the Bank of America insignia began landing on the doorsteps of the richest, most passionate golfers in America. And the feeding frenzy began. Country clubbers began lining up for the chance to invest. Members of the Swallows Club-a group of heavy hitters who flock to Pebble for a tournament each fall-gobbled up units like so much birdseed. Within six weeks, 132 individual investors had signed up.

"I got 10 pounds of something," remembers John Moores, owner of the San Diego Padres who is building a house on the 18th at Pebble Beach, one of the few who declined to invest. "I don't know that this got the same amount of scrutiny that a normal business deal does, because people get pretty emotional about Pebble Beach."

The individual investors, says Ueberroth, are "almost without exception" friends of both Ueberroth and Dick Ferris. "It's a private list," he says, "but if you looked at lots of fields and said, 'Who is the No. 1 or No. 2 most successful person?' you would find them as one of the owners of Pebble Beach. If you asked, 'Who is the most important name in racing in the last 25 years?' you might guess Roger Penske [of Hertz-Penske]. If you looked at the best-known football player in the last five years, you might come up with John Elway. It's the same in [other] sports, in the investment community, in retail . . . " To that list, add former USGA president Buzz Taylor and Taiheiyo Club, believed to have purchased three units for a total of $6 million.

The identities of the others are being kept mum, but some certainly showed up at this year's AT&T National Pro Am tournament. "Billionaires on the Links" read the headline in The Carmel Pine Cone, and there they were, paired up with celebrities and pros in exuberant foursomes, the new era of Pebble Beach, arriving far more triumphantly than the Japanese had a decade earlier. Thundering onto the fairways, they're the titans of American business: presidents, CEOs and majority owners of GE, AT&T, IBM, KKR, Wells Fargo, Sun Microsystems, A.G. Edwards, Transamerica, Nordstrom, Charles Schwab-represented by Charles Schwab himself, whose house is being built on the site of the old fifth hole-men for whom $2 million would be a pittance, especially for a piece of Pebble Beach.