A century of golf: How the sport became a defining part of life in the Coachella Valley

11/28/2024 11:00 AM

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. — It was one simple sentence in the Nov. 13, 1924, edition of the Banning Record newspaper in a column devoted to Palm Springs news.

"The Desert Inn golf course is being surrounded by a substantial stone wall, making a beautiful effect against the hillside."

That small nugget buried among dozens of other items on desert life is one of the earliest known references to the nine-hole golf course at the famed Desert Inn in Palm Springs. Located on the main road of the growing village of Palm Springs, the Desert Inn today is commemorated with a historical marker on Belardo Road in the downtown park across from the Palm Springs Art Museum.

That golf course, later known as the Mashie Course, disappeared in the 1960s, but is acknowledged as the first golf course in what is now regarded, 100 years later, as one of the golf capitals in the world, with more than 120 courses spread across more than 50 miles from Desert Hot Springs to Thermal in the Southern California desert.

"I didn't realize. I had heard about Palm Springs, of course, but never been down here for anything," said Al Geiberger, an 11-time winner on the PGA Tour and long-time valley resident originally from Northern California. Geiberger first came to the desert to play golf in 1958. "We played this little nine-hole course (O'Donnell Golf Club) where you played two sets of tees. And it was so nice, the weather, the mountains, the other courses. And it was a good time of the year, in the spring."

During the last 100 years, golf and the Coachella Valley have become practically synonymous. From celebrities to professional golfers to part-time residents to visitors, golf has been and remains a large part of the fabric of desert life.

"By the time I was 10, I had gone from pushing balls into the sprinkler heads in the front yard to playing golf and playing junior tournaments," said LPGA and World Golf Hall of Famer Amy Alcott, a three-time winner of the LPGA major tournament in the desert. Alcott's family often visited the Coachella Valley from the Los Angeles area.

"We were in the car and we would drive by the old Canyon Hotel and it was like first class,” Alcott said. “That was really happening. It was a classy place. (My father) took me in and went into the golf shop and he was not a golfer. And I think it cost $25 to play nine holes when most golf courses were about $5 or $6. And he paid and he drove me around in the cart and I will always remember that and the old Canyon Hotel."

In celebration of a century of golf in the desert, here's a look at how golf went from a scratchy nine-hole course in a meadow to the identifying activity of the Coachella Valley.

The Desert Inn Mashie Course was hardly the large and manicured golf course that golfers are familiar with today, featuring wide grass fairways, massive lakes and acres of sand.

Instead, the Coachella Valley’s first course was, Tom Keiley said, a meadow with some golf holes and a few tees etched into it. The course was so basic and so unmanicured that an existing tree in the meadow was allowed to grow in the middle of the seventh green. Keiley, the great-grandson of Desert Inn proprietor Nellie Coffman, grew up in a house on the Mashie Course, a house moved from Palm Canyon Drive to the course after World War II.

"It wouldn't be like you and I going out and playing nine," Keiley said. "It was going to the front desk of the hotel and grab some clubs and go out."

Next came two iconic desert golf courses.

Thomas O'Donnell, one of the richest oilmen in California, loved the Desert Inn, but wanted a better golf course. He partnered with Coffman to have her build a home in the desert mountains for O'Donnell in exchange for money to renovate the Desert Inn. O'Donnell then bought 33 acres of land at the base of the mountains just one block from Palm Canyon Drive. The oilman laid out his own nine-hole course in 1927. Ultra-private at first, O'Donnell eventually allowed golfers from the growing area to play the course. The course still exists just north of the Palm Springs Art Museum.

Another course in Palm Springs adjacent to the new El Mirador Hotel debuted in 1929, just months after the El Mirador and its iconic bell tower itself opened. The bell tower still exists as part of Desert Regional Medical Center on Indian Canyon Drive in Palm Springs. But the golf course was plagued by strong winds and never gained traction in the area before closing just a few years later.

Miles from Palm Springs, San Francisco businessman Walter Morgan built a hotel he called the Hotel La Quinta, now the site of the La Quinta Resort, giving the area a new name. With other recreational activities available, Morgan eventually added a nine-hole golf course, also in 1927, charging $1 per round.

After that, little changed in the desert golf scene until 1946. That's when aviatrix Jackie Cochran and her husband Floyd Odlum decided to build some golf holes on their ranch in Indio. Cochran's friend, Helen Dettweiler, a talented golfer who flew missions during World War II with Cochran, designed the course and oversaw its construction. She was the first head pro at the nine holes that still exist today as part of Indian Palms Country Club and Resort in Indio. Dettweiler would eventually be one of the original 13 founders of the LPGA Tour.

The boom sees desert golf explode

After a slow start, golf took hold of the desert in the 1950s. While the earliest courses were attached to hotels or, in the case of O’Donnell Golf Club, just a private owner, the new courses of the 1950s satisfied both a growing interest in golf as well as a burgeoning fascination in the desert as a part-time getaway for Hollywood stars or for others as a permanent residence.

The first of the new courses constructed was Thunderbird Country Club, built on the remains of a dude ranch and opened in 1951 as the first 18-hole course in the desert. Developed by amateur golfer Johnny Dawson, the course became a magnet for Hollywood stars Bob Hope, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, baseball star Ralph Kiner and his wife, tennis star Nancy Chaffee, and songwriter and actor Hoagy Carmichael.

Restrictive membership policies at Thunderbird, long since abandoned, in part led to the development in 1952 of Tamarisk Country Club, also in Rancho Mirage. Soon after, desert developers realized there was the potential for great growth with golf courses surrounded by housing in private clubs.

Indian Wells Country Club was added in 1956, followed quickly by Eldorado Country Club in 1957, more than doubling the number of courses in the desert in just six years. Two more notable private clubs – La Quinta Country Club and Bermuda Dunes Country Club – opened in 1959. The clubs that arrived in the decade redefined desert golf, attracting more celebrities and more high-end residents to the Coachella Valley.

Consider Ernest Breech, president of Ford Motor Company in the 1950s when he was a member at Thunderbird. When Ford came out with a new model in the 1950s, Breech decided to name it after his desert golf home, giving birth to the Ford Thunderbird.

Other courses like Shadow Mountain Golf Club in Palm Desert and what would become Palm Springs' municipal golf course, now the Legends Course at Tahquitz Creek Golf Resort, were also built in the 1950s.

The allure of the desert

Geiberger won two golf events in the desert in the 1950s – the 1958 Palm Springs Invitational, a men's amateur championship, and then defended the title in 1959. After the 1959 tournament, Geiberger was invited by friends to play a new course they had joined, and he discovered the allure of the desert.

"They took me out after the tournament was over, and we played Eldorado," Geiberger recalled. "We played the course and all I remember was the sweet grapefruit hanging from the trees. Being able to reach up during a round and pick a grapefruit, that was amazing."

"I remember the exact same thing playing Eldorado there, not in the tournament but in the practice rounds, you would do exactly that," said Terry Wilcox, who played in the Bob Hope Desert Classic 11 times. "Go over and grab an orange or a grapefruit or something. At that time, it was such a novelty to even think that you had seen an orange tree. We didn't have any of those in Oklahoma."

Pros and recreational players quickly discovered golf in the desert offered more than just 18 holes of play.

"As much as the wins I've had and the golf, it's the elements that I grasp onto ever since those days of driving down with my family, that are so important to the visceral sense of playing golf in the desert and winning in the desert," Alcott said. "There was always something about nature. The smell of the orange blossoms. It's the wind coming through the pass there in the desert. It's the way the air smells. There are certain things about desert golf, Palm Springs golf, that are as much a part of it as winning."

For Judy Rankin, World Golf and LPGA Hall of Famer and 1976 winner of the Colgate Dinah Shore tournament at Mission Hills Country Club, the weather, the sunshine and the palm trees were only part of the glamour of golfing in the Coachella Valley.

With so many pro events and recreational players at so many courses, Rankin always was struck by how much the desert was immersed in the game.

"There are many great golf courses and they are in the middle of cities or they are around the world and all this, but the desert is so full of golf, that overall, the desert is what I call a golf environment," Rankin said. "And I think so many of us that have played golf, do play golf, did play golf, whatever, whether hardcore for fun or hardcore for your career, we are so comfortable and kind of happy in that golf environment."

The celebrities bring sparkle to the golf course

Three high-profile golfers and tournament hosts – Bob Hope, Dinah Shore and Frank Sinatra – hardly tell the story of star-studded golf in the Coachella Valley.

Celebrities, whether from the entertainment world or the corporate world, have been part of the Coachella Valley since before golf showed up. Once the earliest courses in the desert opened, whether O'Donnell Golf Club in Palm Springs or the nine-hole course at the Hotel La Quinta, they drew high-profile players who began to shape the image of the Coachella Valley as a Hollywood playground.

Hope was among the golfers at O'Donnell in the 1940s, but so too were desert regulars like Jack Benny and the team of Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden, the stars of the Amos and Andy radio show that was broadcast at times from Palm Springs.

Ben Hogan was the biggest name in professional golf when he agreed to be the head golf professional at Tamarisk Country Club in Rancho Mirage in 1952.

By the 1950s, celebrities had become an integral part of the desert golf scene, with Hope, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Hoagy Carmichael, Phil Harris and others living at Thunderbird Country Club, while stars like the Marx Brothers, Danny Kaye, Jack Benny and others living and playing at Tamarisk Country Club.

The celebrity connection grew in the 1950s and into the 1960s with celebrities who lived in the desert playing in local pro-ams. Eventually celebrities from entertainment, sports and politics played on national television in the PGA Tour’s Bob Hope Desert Classic. The Nabisco Dinah Shore also had celebrities in its pre-tournament pro-am, and the Frank Sinatra Celebrity Invitational became one of the biggest celebrity events in the country.

In the desert, the stars not only mingled with other less-famous desert residents, but with the professional golfers as well.

"She was a huge star, and the thing about Dinah was if you knew her personally, she was exactly the same person she was on TV," Rankin said of Dinah Shore. "So what it really was, was the real Dinah was the person who people from afar got to know. She was exceptional in that regard.”

Wilcox remembers playing in the 1963 Frank Sinatra Invitational PGA Tour event at Canyon Country Club in Palm Springs and meeting Sinatra himself.

"That was quite a deal, too, to be able to come in and play in his tournament and actually meeting him and talk to him," Wilcox said. "He was quite the star at the time. Sinatra was a different kind of big star. He was the man."

The presidents find a playground

Dwight Eisenhower may have been the most famous president to play golf in the desert, but Gerald Ford brought a touch of the common man to both the presidency and desert golf.

"He was the former president of the United States, and people wanted to get up close to him," said Ernie Dunlevie, a long-time board member of the Bob Hope Desert Classic, now The American Express, in a 1998 interview. "They wanted to see him play lousy golf just like they did."

Ford elevated golf and the presidency to new levels in the desert when he played in the Bob Hope tournament in February of 1977, just days after leaving the White House. Ford became a fixture in the tournament and the desert, living in the winter at Thunderbird Country Club in Rancho Mirage.

"When we left the White House, we looked at Florida, but it was too damp for Mrs. Ford's arthritis," Ford said in the book "50 Years of Hope." "We looked at Pebble Beach. Again it was too damp and too windy. And we'd been coming here, we had friends here. So the climate and the friends, it seemed like a good place."

Long before Ford took over the presidency, the desert had been branded a playground of the presidents. That started with Eisenhower, who made two trips to play golf in the desert while he was in the White House. Like Ford years later, Eisenhower chose to live part-time in the desert on the 11th hole at Eldorado Country Club. His friendship with Bob Hope and his love of golf and the desert led eventually to the building of the Eisenhower Medical Center.

Through the years, other presidents played golf in the desert as well, often at Sunnylands, the private estate of former Ambassador Walter Annenberg. Those presidents ranged from John Kennedy to Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan. During his presidency, Barack Obama played at Sunnylands and later returned to the desert several times for golf at courses like PGA West.

The peak of the presidency and desert golf came on Feb. 15, 1995, when the world watched as three presidents – sitting President Bill Clinton and former Presidents Ford and George H.W. Bush – played in the first round of the Bob Hope tournament with Hope and defending champion Scott Hoch. Clinton would later return to the tournament, then called the Humana Challenge, for five years as host of the event.

"We were all playing bad, but we had a heck of a good time," Clinton told The Desert Sun in a 2012 interview about the famed 1995 round. "Scott Hoch played with us, and he played better from tee to green than I think I have ever seen anybody play."

The developers

Three golf developers in the desert helped push things to new levels in the Coachella Valley. And they seemed to be connected in a line of success.

First was Johnny Dawson, an accomplished amateur golfer who won the PGA Tour's 1942 Bing Crosby Pro-Am in Rancho Sante Fe and played on the U.S. Walker Cup team. Dawson developed Thunderbird, the desert's first 18-hole course in 1951. Through his connections with Hollywood as a member of Lakeside Country Club in Los Angeles, he helped to bring celebrities to the residential part of the development. Dawson later developed or played a part in desert courses like Marrakesh Country Club in Palm Springs, Seven Lakes Country Club in Palm Springs and Eldorado Country Club in Indian Wells.

"In 1960, I played a round with Johnny Dawson when I played Thunderbird (in the Palm Springs Golf Classic),” Geiberger said. "I didn't realize how big a name he became in the desert, but I learned about it. I knew he was a good amateur."

When Bill Bone of Sunrise Company, a developer of condominium projects featuring tennis and swimming pools, was asked to look at Marrakesh Country Club, a Dawson development, an idea struck Bone.

"I plotted building the kinds of homes we were building in our communities already around the golf courses and I realized I could sell homes on a golf course for the same price we were selling these little planned units, communities with a swimming pool and a tennis court," Bone told The Desert Sun in 2023.

The result, starting with Sunrise Country Club in Rancho Mirage in 1974, was a string of residential golf properties that exploded in the area in the 1970s, making second homes and retirement homes with golf affordable. Monterey Country Club, The Lakes Country Club and Indian Ridge Country Club – all in Palm Desert – and more recently Toscana Country Club in Indian Wells were Bone developments.

In the early 1980s, Bone was asked to help build homes for two former touring and club pros from Oklahoma – Ernie Vossler and Joe Walser – who worked for Landmark Land and pushed golf and homes even higher in the desert. Their jewel was PGA West, where they reached out to big-name course designers like Pete Dye, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, bringing demanding golf courses and televised tournaments to the area.

"Ernie was a big-time thinker. That's what Ernie was," said Wilcox, who worked for Landmark at Mission Hills Country Club. "He thought big. And he devised all these projects in his head, and he'd run them by Joe and Joe would put the finishing touches on them. Together, they were one hell of a team."

The tournaments attract the top pros

When people think about golf in the desert, it's easy to focus on the two long-time professional events in the area – The American Express on the PGA Tour and the LPGA major championship associated with Shore and played under a variety of sponsor names for 51 years in Rancho Mirage. But tournament golf dates back to 1935 and a two-day, 72-hole event that featured Hall of Famer Walter Hagen and Horton Smith, who earlier that year had won the first tournament at Augusta National that would later be called the Masters.

Total purse for the event was $2,000. A writer for The Desert Sun at the time said they could, "see in the tournament a splendid opportunity to obtain nationwide publicity for Palm Springs and to establish this resort and its courses on the ‘winter golf map’ of the country."

By 1952, Thunderbird Country Club was hosting an unofficial PGA Tour event. Three years later, the world watched as Thunderbird hosted the 1955 Ryder Cup between the United States and Great Britain and Ireland. The Ryder Cup returned in 1959 at Eldorado Country Club. That year ended the Thunderbird Invitational, but by the next year, the Palm Springs Golf Classic began at four desert courses, a tournament that lives on as the PGA Tour’s The American Express. Hope hosted that tournament from 1965 to 2000.

What Hope meant to the PGA Tour, Shore meant to the LPGA when she agreed to host a new women's tournament at Mission Hills Country Club in 1972. Shore brought instant credibility to women's golf, said Rankin, a Hall of Famer and vice president of the LPGA at the time.

"Huge. So huge I can't tell you," Rankin said of Shore's impact. "I really think, I've said this many times, she had the respect of the entertainment world, and she kind of brought that respect to our world, which was really important to us at the time. Because thanks to Colgate and a couple of other things, we were in a wonderful growth spurt."

One of the earliest PGA Tour Champions events also was played in the desert – The Vintage Invitational at The Vintage Club. It started in 1981 and featured winning pros such as Gene Littler, Miller Barber and Don January.

The Skins Game, which first came to the desert in 1986 at PGA West, practically invented postseason, or Silly Season, golf. It was followed in the desert by events like the Diners Club Matches and the Lexus Challenge for senior golfers and celebrities. There was even a popular made-for-television event played in primetime under the lights for three years at Bighorn Golf Club in Palm Desert. The Battle at Bighorn saw a revolving format that each year featured the No. 1 player in the world, Tiger Woods.

The surge and the future

As successful and important as golf has been in the desert, the sport has faced challenges in the last 20 years. In a trend that reflected the rest of the country, fewer people were playing golf, and four golf courses in the desert have closed in the last decade. Some questioned the amount of water used on courses during droughts, and many country clubs found other activities for golfers who just weren’t playing as much anymore. Only one golf course has been built in the Coachella Valley in the last 16 years, that being the ultra-exclusive Ladera in Thermal.

Then came the COVID pandemic in 2020, and somehow golf in the desert surged.

"The resurgence of it has really happened during COVID when people wanted to be outside and find things to do that they could be outside for," said Colleen Pace, chief sales and marketing officer for the Visit Greater Palm Springs marketing and tourism bureau. "And I think since then it has regained a lot of popularity. We're seeing a lot more multigenerational golf and kids golfing with their parents and dads and moms. All types of new kinds of ways golf can be enjoyed."

Unlike the 1950s and 1960s, when golf along with tennis were the main recreational activities in the Coachella Valley, golf now must compete with a wide variety of activities in the desert today. That includes casinos, sporting events and concerts at Acrisure Arena, music festivals and more, things that didn't exist in some cases even 10 years ago. But Pace said that still helps golf.

"The wide variety of activities have brought in the broad demographic of people who are now exposed to golf, who maybe wouldn't have been before," Pace said.

For now, just as has been true for most of the last 100 years, golf remains at the forefront of the Coachella Valley's image.

"The brand of golf for greater Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley is such a strong brand that it is something that it is known for worldwide," Pace said. "It is a very strong pillar of our destination, both for residents and visitors and groups and attracting tournaments. So there is a variety of different levels of what that means for the destination.

"We have kind of built the brand already, so now just kind of keeping on top of how it has evolved and changed and how people can experience it in a way that kind of works for them and their lifestyles," she added.