At the very tip of the Monterey Peninsula, where the foothills of the Santa Lucia Mountains run out of room and the ground breaks into dune, pine and cypress, there is a golf course that most golfers will only ever see from the outside. Cypress Point Club has about 250 members, and a game there is hard to come by. The rest of us learn it the way you learn a house you were never invited into, by walking past slowly. The Green trail through the Del Monte Forest runs along the dune ridge above the sixth, seventh and eighth holes, then turns and wraps the third and fourth at Spyglass Hill. From Fanshell Beach you can stand within shouting distance of the 13th green and listen to the course breathe. It almost belonged to someone else. Marion Hollins, a high-society saleswoman for Samuel F.B. Morse's Del Monte Properties, first chose Seth Raynor. He made a rough routing in February 1925. Just under a year later, in 1926, he died of pneumonia, before construction had begun. People have wondered for decades whether he deserves a share of the credit. After the 2025 Walker Cup, the club will publish David Normoyle's centennial history, setting Raynor's plan beside what was finally built. Hollins then hired Alister MacKenzie. Later in 1926, on MacKenzie's first visit to California, Robert Hunter convinced the client to let him look at the land. MacKenzie and Hunter broke ground in late 1927. MacKenzie was at the height of his powers then: consultant to the R&A, newly rooted in California, and fresh from Australia and New Zealand, where three months of work had changed golf in that part of the world. You can feel his appetite in the routing. It wanders between open linksland and dark forest, then bursts out onto the Pacific for the 15th, 16th and 17th. The greens are smallish and seem to rise out of the earth on their own. The bunkers have ragged edges that echo the gnarled dunes and twisted trees, a wildness that vegetation and careful keeping have tempered but never erased. And then the 16th. Two hundred and thirty-one yards with the Pacific as the hazard, often into the wind, it has been called the best hole in the world, and the worst, if a third ball goes into the sea. Hollins gave critical input on its shape. For anyone who would rather not take on the ocean, there is a way left, a carry of about a hundred yards to a partly hidden fairway, and the hole is played as a par 4. It is the cruelest shot in golf and also one of the most generous, and both are true at once. The 18th carries its own double life. Jimmy Demaret called Cypress Point the best 17-hole course he had ever played, as if the last hole were a mere walk home. But stand on that tee and the walk turns hard. The drive is blind over cypress to a narrow fairway that doglegs uphill. A large tree closes off the left side of the green, bunkers wait on the right, and the green slopes from back to front. Some will always call it a quiet road back to the clubhouse, but anyone who has hit that drive will tell you it is more than that. Hollins and MacKenzie were not finished with each other. Together they built Pasatiempo in Santa Cruz, and at its opening she introduced him to Bobby Jones. Soon Jones asked MacKenzie to design a course on the site of the old Fruitland Nurseries in Augusta, and that ground became Augusta National. Out on the Green trail, though, with the wind coming off the water and the cypress leaning over the fairways, it is easy to believe that the best of what they shared stayed here, on the edge of the sea.