Spyglass Hill Golf Course - California, U.S.A.

Spyglass Hill Golf Course is Robert Trent Jones's storybook course on the Monterey Peninsula, a fantasy world of silvery sand ridges and secluded fairways shadowed by the Monterey pines and cypress of the Del Monte forest. Robert Louis Stevenson visited Monterey in 1879 and Spyglass takes its inspiration from Treasure Is/and. Each of the holes is named for a character in the novel, including Billy Bones and Long John Silver. Spyglass also brings to mind another Stevenson novel, Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The first four holes loop around the exposed shelves of sand along the coast. Then the landscape changes dramatically and indelibly when the course darts into the woods, with long, narrow holes climbing to greens cut from the forest, and herds of deer nibbling on the fairways. The result is a swashbuck1ingly tough course. As Jim Murray put it: "If it were human, Spyglass Hill would have a knife in its teeth, a patch on its eye, a ring in its ear, and tobacco on its beard."

Riviera Country Club - California, U.S.A.

Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades is the most famous of the series of Southern California golfing gems designed by George C. Thomas and built by his construction superintendent Billy Bell. The site of the annual Nissan (formerly Los Angeles) Open on the PGA Tour, Riviera became known as Hogan's Alley after he won the 1947 and 1948 L.A. Opens and then also captured the 1948 U.S. Open at Riviera. The location shots for Follow the Sun, the 1951 movie about Hogan's life, were also filmed at Riviera. Laid out in the mid-1920s, the essential feature of the course is the barranca or ravine that figures on eight of the holes, while the fairways and rough consist of spiky kikuyu grass, which spread after it was introduced to stop erosion within the walls of the barranca. On the sixth hole, there is a small sand trap in the middle of the green. The 18th hole, which threads its way through a valley with the green perched below the Mediterranean palazzo of a clubhouse, is one of the most famous in golf. In 2004, Mike Weir duplicated Hogan's feat by winning his second consecutive Nissan Open at Riviera.