The ground at Torrey Pines South has been asked to be many things before it was asked to be golf. From January 1941 to November 1945 it was Camp Callan, a military training facility perched on the bluffs above the Pacific. In the early 1950s cars raced across it, on a track that overlapped parts of what is now the South routing. Then the city of San Diego looked to the cliffs above Black's Beach, just north of La Jolla, and imagined fairways there. The place found the job it still keeps. The story of who built it begins with a father and ends with a son. In 1950 the city hired William P. Bell, the architect who had worked beside George C. Thomas at Riviera and Bel-Air, to submit a plan. He died of a heart attack before the project moved forward. His son, William F. Bell, took over the family firm and designed both the South and the North, which opened in 1957. Southern California has often preferred to hang the father's name on its courses, and Torrey Pines has been no exception, but the work on these bluffs belongs to the younger Bell. His architecture was plain and practical, yet his routing did something essential. It pressed the course against as much cliff edge as the land would give. From the start the South was the brawnier of the two, the championship course. Billy Casper, the local hero, renovated Torrey Pines with his design partner David Rainville in the late 1970s. In 2001 Rees Jones rebuilt the South for $3.5 million. He moved four greens, nearly doubled the bunkers, added ten new tees, and stretched it to 7,607 yards. Before the 2021 U.S. Open he returned for a similar renovation. In 2019 fairways and bunkers shifted on the fourth, ninth, tenth, twelfth and seventeenth, and every bunker was refurbished. What you play now, with its narrow fairways, thick rough, flanking sand and tiered greens, speaks more in the voice of the Jones family than in the voice of the Bells. There lies the tension that makes the South so arguable. The setting is close to perfect, with mountains to the north, the ocean to the west, and the rare Torrey pines, found in only a few places including Santa Rosa Island, leaning over the turf. Yet the golf sits beside the cliffs more than it plays against them. The bluffs are the view, not the problem. A more daring design might have turned that edge into a hazard you have to think your way around. Instead the South tests you the way a national championship tests you, by length and by rough, and leaves the Pacific to break your heart in a different way. It has broken plenty of hearts. Phil Mickelson won here in 1993, 2000 and 2001. Tiger Woods won four straight between 2005 and 2008. In 2008 the U.S. Open came to the South, only the second municipal course ever to host it. Woods, two months removed from arthroscopic surgery on his left knee, fought through the pain and beat Rocco Mediate at the first sudden-death hole of a playoff for his fourteenth major. The Open returned in 2021. Every July the Junior World Championship arrives, an event Ernie Els and Nick Price won here before they turned professional, and every January the tour pros come back with the cameras. For all that, the South still belongs to the city, and to anyone who gets lucky. Most tee times go out through a phone lottery at seven each evening, a week ahead, every caller with the same chance at a ring. The green fee is modest. The fog may roll in, the wind may rise, rain may come off the water. Below the cliffs, Black's Beach keeps its own clothing-optional customs. Up top you stand on an old army camp and a vanished racetrack, looking out at an ocean the holes never quite dared to use, and somehow it is still enough.