Santa Ana Country Club, the oldest golf club in Orange County, is celebrating 100 years at its location at Newport Boulevard and Mesa Drive in Costa Mesa’s sphere of influence.
The club has a distinguished history of hosting celebrities, Hollywood stars and some of the biggest names in golf, including Ben Hogan and Sam Snead, who played the course regularly during World War II when Hogan was stationed across the highway at the Santa Ana Army Air Base (now the Orange County Fair & Event Center).
Santa Ana Country Club was Hogan’s home away from home and Snead, stationed at Camp Pendleton, would come up to play Hogan in private rounds. Imagine what kind of interest, media and otherwise, a Snead-Hogan skins match would stir up today?
Hogan once shot an 8-under-par 64, which stood as the course record for several years. Decades later, PGA Tour star Fred Couples shot 63 to break the course record, and later tied by John Burckle.
The Yankee Clipper, Joe DiMaggio, also teed it up regularly during WWII, when he was stationed at the Army air base.
On Oct. 25, 1942, one of the grandest days of golf transpired at Santa Ana Country Club, a gala and golf exhibition to benefit the Army Emergency Relief Fund, highlighted by A-list Hollywood celebrities such as Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Oliver Hardy, Fred Astaire and Mickey Rooney, as well as Hogan and golf great Babe Didrikson Zaharias.
According to the publication “The History of Santa Ana County Club,” SACC member Dr. Stan Norton said that halfway through the back nine, Crosby was having an off day and told his caddy to play for him. Later, when SACC member Riley Huber asked Hope how he liked the course, Hope deadpanned “remind me to play it sometime.”
The club opened in 1901 with a golf course in the Peters Canyon area, two miles southwest of Irvine Regional Park in Orange. It was called the Santiago Golf Club. It was one of 43 golf courses built in California that year, a nine-hole course with fairways of native soil, not grass and oil-soaked sand “greens” about 30 feet in diameter.
The club moved to the spot that is now the Castaways in Newport Beach in 1912 and renamed itself Orange County Country Club. It was a bold move by the club, which was trying to keep up with the growing demand of longer yardages and more golf clubs emerging in Southern California. The 160-acre location on the Newport Bluffs overlooked the Newport Bay and the club spent $5,000 to build a clubhouse, which included lockers for “300 to 400 ladies and gentlemen, as the women are to have a limited membership,” according to an April 1914 article in the Newport News.
By the early 1920s, golf was experiencing radical changes to the landscape of its courses throughout the country, mainly the conversion to grass on the fairways and greens, and Orange County Country Club wanted a piece of the action.
The bluffs at the Castaways lacked sufficient water supply for an irrigation system to accommodate a grass golf course. After club members decided on its current location, in which a water irrigation system could be built, what followed was a beautiful golf layout by Scotland’s John Duncan Dunn, the original course architect. Since then, the course has been updated and remodeled several times.
Dunn’s original layout included a six-hole ladies-only course, but it was never built, and as club lore has it, remained a source of controversy for many years.
If golf course superintendents and agronomists understood water irrigation in 1923 the way they do today, the club would have never moved from the Castaways to its location on Newport Blvd. next to the 55 freeway.
Imagine what it would be like if the club remained at its picturesque spot high above the cliffs at Upper Newport Bay, with views of the ocean and bay?
In 1923, the club moved to its current location and renamed itself again, this time to its present name, and the club, along with its golf, continued as a social-scene sensation in the Roaring ’20s.
Richard Dunn, a longtime sportswriter, writes the Dunn Deal column regularly for The Orange County Register’s weekly, The Coastal Current North.
