On a gray day above La Jolla, players roll putts on the practice green at Torrey Pines in front of the gabled golf shop with its green pine emblem, and past the trees the land drops away to the Pacific. This is a municipal course, owned and maintained by the City of San Diego. It has also staged two U.S. Opens, and the PGA TOUR has come back every winter since 1968. Few places in American sport put a championship stage within reach of anyone who can book a tee time.
From the links of Scotland
The game that reached this mesa grew up on Scotland’s east coast, on sandy ground by the sea where golfers played out from town and turned for home. In 1744 the Gentlemen Golfers of Leith, known today as the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, wrote 13 “Articles & Laws in Playing at Golf” for a competition on Leith Links. They are the earliest known rules of the game. On October 4, 1764, the Society of St Andrews Golfers voted to turn the first four holes of its links into two, which cut the Old Course from 22 holes to 18. By the middle of the next century, the 18-hole round had become the pattern for courses everywhere. In 1834 King William IV became the society’s patron, and it took the name it still carries: The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews.
Camp Callan
Torrey Pines took a longer road to the game. As the Second World War approached, the U.S. Army leased 750 acres of Torrey Pines Mesa from the City of San Diego and built Camp Callan, an anti-aircraft artillery replacement training center. It opened in January 1941, housed roughly 15,000 people, and closed in November 1945. Its buildings were torn down and the lumber went into homes for veterans. For a time sports cars raced on the mesa, Carroll Shelby among the drivers. The last race was run in 1956.
That same year, a special city election set aside about 100 acres of the old camp for a public golf course. The rest of the land went to the State of California.
A father’s plan, a son’s course
The design was a family inheritance. William Park Bell came to California in 1911 and worked as a caddiemaster and a greenkeeper before turning to course architecture. He worked alongside George C. Thomas Jr. on the Riviera, Bel-Air and Los Angeles country clubs. Before his death in 1953 he imagined a course on the Torrey Pines bluffs, shaped by wind and sea. His son, William F. Bell, saw it built. The North and South courses opened in 1957.
Rees Jones remodeled the South in 2001, moving four greens and adding ten tees to stretch it from just over 7,000 yards to nearly 7,600. Tom Weiskopf rebuilt all 18 greens on the North in 2016. For the 2026 tournament, the South played at 7,765 yards, par 72.
The rarest pine
The course takes its name from Pinus torreyana, which California State Parks calls the nation’s rarest pine. It grows wild in only two places: the bluffs of Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve, just north of the course, and Santa Rosa Island, off Santa Barbara. The botanist Charles Christopher Parry, working on the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey, named it for his mentor, John Torrey, who never saw the place. The trees are protected. When about 30 had to come out during work on the South Course, they were transplanted, not cut, and the pine appears on the tournament trophy.
Ninety-one holes
The PGA TOUR arrived in 1968, when the San Diego Open, first played in 1952, moved to Torrey Pines as the Andy Williams San Diego Open. Weiskopf won that first edition. Phil Mickelson, San Diego’s native son, went on to win the event three times. Tiger Woods, whose father took him there as a boy to watch his first professional tournament, won eight PGA TOUR titles at Torrey Pines.
The most famous came in June 2008, at the South’s first U.S. Open. Woods arrived two months after knee surgery, playing on a left leg with stress fractures in the tibia and torn ligaments in the knee. On Saturday he eagled the 13th and the 18th. On Sunday he holed a 12-foot birdie putt on the 72nd green to tie Rocco Mediate, a 45-year-old ranked 157th in the world. Their 18-hole Monday playoff ended level as well, again after a Woods birdie at the 18th. On the 91st hole of the week, Mediate made bogey and Woods won with a par. It was his third U.S. Open and his 14th major. Within days he said he would have surgery and miss the rest of the season.
Father’s Day, 2021
Thirteen years later the Open returned. Jon Rahm had won his first PGA TOUR title at Torrey Pines in 2017 with an eagle on the final hole, and he later proposed to his wife there. Two weeks before the 2021 Open, a positive Covid-19 test forced him to withdraw from the Memorial while he held a six-shot lead. On Father’s Day, with his two-month-old son on the grounds, he curled in a birdie putt on the 17th to tie Louis Oosthuizen. Then he holed another on the 18th for a 67 and a one-shot victory, the first USGA championship ever won by a player from Spain. Rory McIlroy, the 2011 champion, had made a run on the second nine before he faded to a tie for seventh.
A new chapter
Torrey Pines has also shown it can host on short notice. When wildfires swept Los Angeles in January 2025, the Genesis Invitational moved 107 miles south from Riviera, the course the elder Bell had helped build, to Torrey’s South Course. Three weeks after a stomach illness ruined his Farmers Insurance Open there, Ludvig Åberg won the Genesis with a seven-foot birdie on the 18th, one shot ahead of Maverick McNealy.
In January 2026, Justin Rose led the Farmers Insurance Open from start to finish. He finished at 23 under and won by seven, breaking the 72-hole tournament record Woods had set in 1999. It was his second win at Torrey Pines, and the event’s first wire-to-wire victory since Tommy Bolt’s in 1955. In June the PGA TOUR announced a new name. The tournament becomes The Sentry for its 60th visit to Torrey Pines, with play January 27–30, 2027, and a Saturday finish.
The practice green in our photograph is due for change as well. The city is preparing a master plan for the course’s buildings. Its first phase calls for replacing the clubhouse, the maintenance facility and the practice putting greens, with construction projected for 2028 through 2030. The plan leaves the layout of the courses alone. The courses are watered with recycled water from the city’s system.
Visiting Torrey Pines
Torrey Pines Golf Course is at 11480 North Torrey Pines Road in La Jolla. Tee times are booked through the City of San Diego’s tee time booking page. Non-residents may book up to 90 days ahead, and players who arrive without a reservation can join a virtual waitlist. Current rates are on the city’s course fees page. Rental clubs and carts come from The Golf Shop at Torrey Pines, which also sells the course’s own logo goods. Guests of The Lodge at Torrey Pines can arrange tee times through the hotel. Tournament week tickets are sold on The Sentry’s official site, and each ticketed adult may bring one child 15 or under free. Next door, Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve protects the pines themselves. Check the park’s page before you go, because the reserve has been closed this fall for a utility project.
Out on the bluffs
Golf began on windy ground by the sea. Above La Jolla it still feels that way: wind off the ocean, rare trees on the cliffs, and a course anyone can play.