He owns a home at Pebble, too. I wish he would adopt me.
Between my senior year and graduate year I took a road trip across the country with a couple friends. It always amazes me how fortunate we were on this trip. Never significantly lost, never hit traffic, no accidents, no tickets. We had a momentary car scare in Hannibal, MO (loose engine mount) but the car heroically pushed on before finally breaking down in Carmel, CA of all places. We had driven through some god-forsaken parts of the country* only to breakdown in one of the most beautiful spots in the entire country.
We rented a car for the day to drive around 17 mile road. We saw the lone palm and Pebble's 18th then remembered that some new member of the fraternity grew up out here. We track down his number and he's in town. He takes us to the Spanish Bay restaurant, puts the dinner on his Dad's tab, then takes us out for the night. Turns out this guy has never played golf. Has no interest. He lives minutes from 3 of the best golf courses in the world and it never occurred to him to play. He only seemed partially aware of how lucky he was to have access to these courses. Baffling.
Not long after, he came down with some strange liver disease that kept him out of school for a year. He returned a completely changed person. He dressed properly, could engage people socially and decided to take up golf.
* my favorite was some bombed out portion of Nevada. It proudly advertised the fact that it was a nuclear bomb test site and looked the part. Totally barren. Looked like a scene out of a post-apocalyptic western. As I recall, we had two hotel choices: a best western and an unnamed motel with a clown motif. There was a 20 foot tall worn wooden clown waiving you into the parking lot and life size clown pin ups on the door to each room. I can only imagine that this was the city's attempt to attract horror film production. Best Western was normally outside our budget for lodging, but we made an exception.
