The North course sits on the cliffs above La Jolla like the younger sibling who never asked for the spotlight and somehow got the better view anyway. William F. Bell laid out both of the Torrey Pines courses on the site of a former military training centre, and both opened in 1957. Ever since, the South has carried the heavier name. It held the US Open in 2008 and again in 2021, and its silhouette is the one people picture. The North has had to be something else. It is the course that shares the PGA Tour's early season Farmers Insurance tournament with its sister, and the rest of the year it belongs to the people who simply want to play golf by the sea. It belongs to a great many of them. The City of San Diego owns and runs the place, and in 2024 the North absorbed some 94,000 rounds. Locals can walk it for $50 on a weekday and $66 on a weekend, a kind of civic generosity that feels almost unreal given what lies beyond the fairways. There are not many municipal courses where an ordinary day ends with the Pacific spread out below you. The story of how the North became what it is now has a small ache in it. When the South was renovated early in the new millennium, a similar plan for the North was cancelled, and the course waited more than a decade for its turn. When the go-ahead finally came, Phil Mickelson's design firm was heavily involved in shaping the remodelling plan. But state law meant his company could not be hired to do the work, and the contract went to Tom Weiskopf. So the North of today carries two sets of fingerprints, one that dreamed and one that built. Weiskopf's 2016 work was a careful kind of editing. He cut the number of bunkers by almost a third and reshaped the rest. He widened the fairways slightly. He rebuilt the greens in bent grass and grew them by about a third, to an average of 6,000 square feet, and the larger complexes came out more intriguing than before. He also took out around sixty trees, and with them gone the ocean views opened wider still. His boldest move was to reverse the nines. Now the round begins at the northernmost point of the property, where only a couple of holes touch the cliffs. Much of this opening stretch runs north and south while the land falls from east to west, so the fairways carry a natural camber and the shots carry real value. It is quieter golf, hillside golf, and it is a pleasure to play. Then comes the turn. Cresting the hill on the 10th, you see the ocean all at once, a reveal held back long enough to land properly. From the 11th through the 17th the holes work along the canyon. The par three 15th is the most photographed hole on the property. It drops so steeply that the tee shot seems to leave the edge of the earth. The 16th answers it, an uphill par four along the cliffs to a green that Weiskopf lowered. That is the gift of the reversal. Whoever you are, and however the morning went, the closing stretch puts the sea at your shoulder and the light on the water. The South may have the trophies, but the North arguably uses its land in a more dynamic way, and it sends its golfers home smiling.