After I finished my first ever round at Pasatiempo Golf Club, I got to my car, sat down, took a deep breath, and said “man, that was exhausting.” Not physically, but mentally. I’ve never thought so hard about every shot I took during a round than I did that day.
I mean this all as a compliment to Pasatiempo, not a complaint. Every hole requires some thought to figure out how to play it properly. Long and straight isn’t always the answer. And the greens at Pasatiempo are out-of-this-world, both in their beauty and their difficulty. Any loss of focus will put you at a high risk of bogey or worse.
This can be credited to the great Alister MacKenzie, who designed Pasatiempo in the 1920s during the golden era of golf course design, when golf was meant to be a scenic game of chess, not an artificially difficult game of checkers. It’s a unique challenge that is hard to find anywhere else in the country, even in golf-saturated Northern California.
A little course knowledge will go a long way before you play Pasatiempo for the first time. Here’s what I took away from my experience.
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