Strantz’s Last Stand

— Cowboy Way

The seals were barking. Pinks and oranges and blues splashed across the sky as the sun continued its descent toward the Pacific. The salt air was crisp. Two cowboys sat on a massive rock, the perfect vantage point to take it all in. Sand caked their boots; sweat dried on their long, bushy hair. It was a well-deserved rest after a long day scouting the land that could be their new home. Finally, Mike Strantz turned to Forrest Fezler and laid out his wild idea.

They had already done the unexpected: It was a week before their presentation to the Monterey Peninsula Country Club board to bid for the contract to renovate its Shore Course, and they had spent their own money to come out early and explore the layout in person. None of the other, bigger-name architects in the running for the project had even considered such a thing. But Strantz believed they needed to walk it—to feel it—to confirm his radical plan to reverse the course’s original routing.

It was spring 2002, and Strantz was ready to take the next step in his burgeoning career. After building eight idiosyncratic but highly regarded golf courses, none west of the Mississippi, he wanted to see what he could do with a bigger budget on some of golf’s holiest ground. Riding his horse, Scout, while creating Tobacco Road and Bulls Bay in the Carolina woods was one thing. Building a course that could stand next to Pebble Beach and Cypress Point was quite another.

Despite the step up, Strantz was still committed to doing things his way. Which meant leaning on his studio-art background to paint a picture of what the Shore Course, which was in terrible disrepair, could become. When it came time for his presentation, he produced a series of watercolors of each hole. The board members were stunned not only by Strantz’s skill and artistic vision, but also by how the holes had been rearranged.

“The majority of the Shore Course is right across 17 Mile Drive and faces the ocean,” says Bob Zoller, who was MPCC’s director of greens and grounds for 44 years. “But in the original design, all the holes faced north. And there’s no horizon that way—you just see gray, foggy skies. But if you turn around and look to the south, you see Spyglass Hill, you see Cypress Point, you see this wonderful backdrop.”

Strantz’s watercolors flipped a layout that somehow ignored some of the most jaw-dropping views in the game to one that fully embraced them.

“I’m serious when I tell you that the original design had one shot hit toward the Pacific Ocean,” Zoller says. “And Mike showed up with at least 14.”

A quartet of golf’s best-known architects had flown to Northern California aiming to snare this plum job. They never had a chance.

“Mike walked in and his first question was, ‘Do I have to use the current routing?’” Zoller says. “Then he showed the watercolors and talked about why he reversed it. I honestly have never been in a committee meeting where there was less discussion or controversy about a decision. The chairman asked us all to comment on the five people we heard, and it was unanimous. It probably didn’t take 20 minutes to choose Mike.”

This was the commission Strantz had been working toward since he met Tom Fazio while working on the 

grounds crew at the 1979 U.S. Open at Inverness. It was a validation of his singular belief in how grass, trees, rocks and sand could be shaped into a living piece of art. He rented a house on what would become the 16th hole, overlooking the water, and dug in.

“We got going immediately,” Zoller says. “But of course that’s only the first part of the story. Then came the sad part.”

—Growing Up

The course Strantz inherited was always something of a necessary little brother. Monterey Peninsula Country Club, founded in 1926 by Samuel Morse and the same Del Monte Properties company that had created Pebble Beach in 1919, promised members two golf courses. The Dunes was laid out in time for the opening by Seth Raynor, who was in the area working on the design of Cypress Point. Land was set aside for a future Shore Course, but the club didn’t have enough members, and therefore cash, to build it. Finally, in 1957, the club worked up a meager amount to get the Shore off the ground.

“They chose a regional guy in California named Bob Baldock,” Zoller says. “And his scouting report was he could build you a golf course for whatever amount of money you had. I had the contract at my desk for years. It was for $167,000.”

Essentially, the club got what it paid for. While the Dunes became part of the rota for the world-famous Bing Crosby National Pro-Am and carried the sheen of a classic Raynor design, the Shore was a flat, unremarkable course with legendarily bad drainage. But, as Zoller says, “at least everybody knew it was on the ocean.”

That saving grace alone began to draw more members to the club. Despite its beginnings as a low-dues spot for members of the military and local shop owners, MPCC grew rapidly both in size and profile from the 1960s through the 1980s. In the late 1990s, the club hired Rees Jones for a major renovation of the Dunes Course. The success of that project motivated influential members to reconsider the Shore Course’s potential.

“In a relatively short period of time, we went from a club doing the minimal amount to really thinking big,” Zoller says.

And in Strantz, they found someone ready to meet their moment.

—Artist at Work

The diagnosis came like a hammer just a few months into the project: oral cancer. Aggressive.

“Here he is. He has the dream,” says Heidi Strantz Mortimer, Strantz’s widow. “To design his dream course. It’s just phenomenal. And yet he’s sicker than a dog. And we’re figuring out how to do chemo in Monterey and back home in Charleston [South Carolina].”

The 16 months Strantz took to reconstruct the Shore Course is a study in contrasts. He marched on site as a strapping, 6’4″ former hockey and football player with long hair and a mustache to rival Tom Selleck’s. Over the following months, he would lose more than 100 pounds and his famous locks. And yet the build itself is full of stories that have only enhanced his legend.

On just the second day of the project, Zoller spotted Strantz in his cart, parked on what would become the eighth fairway. Not thinking much of it, Zoller went about his daily chores. An hour later, he checked back and the cart hadn’t moved. An hour after that, Strantz was still rooted to the spot.

“I’m thinking, ‘What the hell?’” Zoller says. “‘Did he fall asleep? What could he possibly be doing there for two hours?’ I always viewed my job during these builds as a facilitator—try to help the architects and their crews get what they need. But what could he need? Was he OK? I had to go figure it out. So I get over to him, and there’s Mike with his sketch pad. He had perfectly drawn the cypress trees, the rock outcropping, the ocean and a green with bunkers for the hole. And I’m looking at it thinking, ‘That’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.’”

Then the paint showed up. Zoller was blown away by how much spray paint Strantz ordered. But it all began to make sense as, day after day, Strantz walked the land with his paint gun, following his drawings to the inch. After he painted a hole, Strantz’s hand-picked crew of shapers would tape his sketch to the window of their dozer and shape what they saw.

“I don’t mean plus or minus a foot,” Zoller says. “The dirt had to look exactly like the landform in the sketch.”

Strantz and Fezler built the course nonsequentially, three to four holes at a time. It became clear after a few months that the project would be a race against the cancer sprinting through Strantz’s body. The chemo treatments began taking their toll on him physically, but he never spoke about it. He was solely focused on his masterpiece.

“He suffered in silence,” Strantz Mortimer says. “We never really talked about it. It was almost like he thought if he ignored it, it would go away. The chemo would put him down for two days, then he would will himself to rise above it. And of course he’s losing weight—the clothes are just hanging off him. It was just really difficult to watch. But he was determined. It’s beyond my imagination how determined he was to do this golf course.”

Meanwhile, Strantz Mortimer set about keeping the family together. One of the main reasons why Strantz’s work remained so close to their South Carolina base was because he had missed so much time with his young family while traveling in his early career. For years, Strantz only took on projects close to home, even starting a tradition of bringing the whole family out to the job sites while he built courses. With one daughter in college and the other in high school when the MPCC opportunity arose, they felt like it was time to extend his design portfolio. But the cancer complicated everything.

Strantz Mortimer would go to California for two weeks at a time to help her husband through the latest round of chemo, knowing she would have to depend on friends to keep things afloat back home.

“We had a serious student in high school. We had dogs. We had horses,” she says. “I’m not sure how we all did it sometimes, but we had to.”

One of the most difficult moments for her was when Strantz asked her to cut his hair.

“He was known for that hair,” she says. “It was like a Samson kind of thing. But he said he was losing it anyway, so let’s just take it off. It was tough.”

And yet there were still happy times. During spring breaks and holidays, the full family would come out to the house overlooking the ocean.

“It’s some of the most beautiful country in the world,” Strantz Mortimer says. “And we got to see this incredible thing that he was creating.”

There were also moments of levity that only those who spend endless hours in the dirt can appreciate. Zoller still laughs about what happened on the second hole. At one point, Strantz had to go back to South Carolina for more treatment. In order to keep the project moving, Fezler stepped in to lead the build.

Fezler, a former PGA Tour player, shared Strantz’s rebel spirit. In 1983, he gained headlines for wearing a pair of shorts during the final round of the U.S. Open while he feuded with the USGA. He had since become Strantz’s closest friend and right-hand man. If anyone was capable of getting into the artist’s head to finish a hole, it was Fezler. So he and the team built it out.

“I think Forrest was pretty proud of himself,” says Zoller. “Then Mike gets back, takes one look at the hole and blows the whole thing up. It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. It really was a good hole, but it wasn’t what Mike had in his head. He might have been sick, but he was still a control freak about his vision.”

Through it all, the rock between the Strantz house and 17 Mile Drive remained a constant. When the day’s work was done, Strantz and Fezler would climb to the top and decompress with a bottle of wine. Strantz would take his wife there to watch the sun set.

The rock wasn’t just a safe haven. Strantz had big plans for it in one of the last holes he would ever create.

—The Strantz Experience

One sunny day, as the build was coming to a close, Zoller sidled up to Strantz with a question he’d quickly regret asking: What was the Shore’s signature hole?

“That was the worst mistake I could have made,” Zoller says. “Mike stopped what he was doing, looked at me sternly and said, ‘The art of this job is making sure they’re all signature holes.’”

And yet, over the years, No. 15 has separated itself. It could be the tee shot near the top of the property. Or the double-dogleg effect of the second shot as the fairway snakes down the hill toward the ocean. Members will tell you that the green complex, framed on the right by Strantz’s favorite rock and featuring infinity views of the water, rivals any in the area. But it’s not just one feature that makes it special—it’s the full scope of the hole.

“The 15th is one of the best examples I’ve seen of the Mike Strantz experience,” says Scott Kirkwood, MPCC’s director of golf. “It looks like a painting come to life, but it’s still all about the golf. You have to be strategic on every shot, and each one is a thrill.”

From the tee, the green is just visible through a line of cypress trees along the left side of the fairway. But the play is to shift north and drive it down the right side, which runs roughly parallel with the coastline. The Pacific and all its glory come into full view on the second shot. Depending on the distance in, players must then zag to the left, where the fairway curls up to the green. A direct shot at the green is into the prevailing wind and all carry, bringing bunkers and scrubby natural wasteland into play.

When the redesigned Shore Course was added to the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am rota from 2010 to 2020 and again in 2022 and 2023, No. 15 routinely gave the pros fits. In 2023, it was the third-most-difficult hole in scoring average, and none of the tournament’s top-six finishers made birdie on it.

In fact, some older MPCC members and caddies have devised a different strategy to play it that they’ve dubbed the “geezer gap.” Instead of playing tee shots up the right, many players aim at the line of cypresses. They would rather take their chances in the trees and have a more direct line at the hole than take on the distance of the second shot.

The rock on the right side of the green and the lone cypress shading it are in play only for the most wayward shots. For newer members and guests, the rock and tree make for breathtaking aesthetics. But for those who know how important that spot was for Strantz during the build, it also carries an emotional pull.

“Personally, the 11th hole [a par 3 with an elevated tee box and a staggering panorama of the ocean, the Dunes Course, Spyglass Hill and Cypress Point] is my favorite,” says Zoller. “When I pass, my family knows to spread my ashes on that tee box. I think it’s the prettiest place in the world. But man, 15 is close. It’s easy to see why people love it so much.”

—Lasting Monument

The words were mangled but clear. Strantz and Fezler were standing atop the 11th tee box, taking in the whole of their accomplishment. The course was essentially complete, with Nos. 11, 15 and 16, the final three holes, getting grassed in. By this point, Strantz had had most of his tongue surgically removed in a last-ditch attempt to stop the cancer. He turned to Fezler and spoke aloud what they both dreaded but knew: “This is our last hole together, old friend.”

In June 2004, Strantz, his wife, Fezler and Zoller were among the many gathered at the MPCC clubhouse to celebrate the reopening of the Shore Course. It was the social event of the season, and the guest list glittered with the area’s most important names. The plan was for Strantz Mortimer to read remarks prepared by her husband to the standing-room-only crowd. But when the time came, Strantz felt compelled to the dais.

“It was like a scene from a movie,” Zoller says. “Mike started walking to the front, and the entire place got quiet.”

Despite how painful the act of speaking was for him, Strantz battled for several minutes, his emotions pouring out through strained and croaked words.

“I’m not sure everyone understood every word,” Strantz Mortimer says, “but they knew exactly what he was saying.”

Zoller was among the many who were overcome by the moment. “There wasn’t a dry eye in the house,” he says.

A year later, in June 2005, Mike Strantz lost his fight. He was 50.

His final course remains a fixture in top-100 lists, a monument to his genius and a window into perhaps even greater heights had he not been taken so early. Beyond that, his impact on the people around MPCC is still palpable.

“He inspired me so much and made me want to be better at what I did,” Zoller says. “Getting to be involved with Mike Strantz was probably the greatest thing that ever happened to my career.”

After Strantz’s passing, the club’s leadership decided to put a plaque on the golf course to honor him. They came to Zoller and asked about the best place for it. Without hesitation, he replied, “The rock on 15. It has to be there.”