Pacific Grove begins in a way that seems to confess its own history, and then spends eighteen holes making good on it. The first tee sends you to a par three called Little Tombstone, and the second to a par three called Big Tombstone, and anyone who knows how golf courses usually open will feel the ground tilt slightly. A pair of par threes, then two par fours, then two par fives back to back at the fifth and sixth. It reads like a sentence assembled out of order, and in a sense it is. The course was not born this way. H. Chandler Egan, the US Amateur champion who had remade Pebble Beach with Alister MacKenzie in 1929, came back to Monterey soon after and laid out a modest nine for the small city of Pacific Grove. It opened on 9th May 1932. His routing started at the town's edge, climbed a hill toward the Point Pinos Lighthouse, and came home again, beginning and ending with par fives, the clubhouse sitting at the eastern end of the property. It was a municipal nine, unflamboyant, a place for the town rather than a stage. The land carried other lives. A railway ran straight through Egan's holes, and until 1957 the town's station and freight yard sat just north of what is now the fifth. The old track embankment still shows itself between the fourth and the seventh, a long low ridge that once carried trains and now carries nothing but shadow. And Egan's ninth green, the hole now played as the fifth, sits almost exactly where a baseball diamond used to be. Then came 1960, and Jack Neville. Another great amateur, Neville had designed the original Pebble Beach with Douglas Grant in 1919, and some twenty-eight years after Pacific Grove first opened he extended it to eighteen holes on land around the base of the lighthouse, leased from the US Coast Guard. A new clubhouse and parking lot went in between the old nine and the new, and Egan's course was turned around to meet it. His par-three fifth became the opening hole, and the odd, lovely stutter of the front nine was born from a building's need for a front door. What Neville found on the far side of the lighthouse was sand. His fairways tumble into the dunes, and here the course comes fully into itself. The front nine is parkland, hemmed by trees and boundary lines, gardened and a little constricted. The back nine is linksland, open to the ocean. Two architects, nearly three decades apart, two kinds of ground, joined at a clubhouse. It is one of the most distinctive and beautiful municipal courses in America precisely because it never pretends to be one thing. Neville trusted short holes. Of the six par fours on his nine, only Beacon View, the 383-yard fifteenth, runs past 350 yards. The short par fours at eleven, thirteen, and eighteen are among the most interesting holes on the property, the kind that ask a question rather than demand a distance. Above it all stands the lighthouse, which has been guiding vessels into and out of Monterey Bay since 1855, long before anyone imagined a golf ball crossing its ground. The best way to know this place is to give it a whole day. Play Neville's nine at sunrise, if the morning is not given over to maintenance. Go into town, eat, walk along the water at Lover's Point. Then come back in the early afternoon and play all eighteen, starting with the Tombstones, passing the old railway embankment, crossing to the sea, and finishing around sunset with the lighthouse still standing over the dunes.