Monterey Peninsula is widely right now as the Mecca of Golf in the United States and is home to some of golf‘s greatest treasures including Pebble Beach Golf Links, Cypress Point Golf Club, Spyglass Hill, the PGA Tour’s AT&T National Pro-Am, the Northern California Golf Association headquarters at Poppy Hills Golf Course and Monterey Peninsula Country Club. The USGA has held the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach on five different occasions and this summer (2019) will be hosting it’s fifth on the Centennial anniversary of Pebble Beach. The 1977 PGA championship was also hosted at Pebble Beach; the list of accolades go on and on.
Pebble Beach Company also is home of one of the strongest caddy programs in the United States with over 300 professional caddies that work as independent contractors for the company spread out over four golf courses: Pebble Beach Golf Links, Spyglass Hill Golf Course, The Links at Spanish Bay and Del Monte Golf Course. The Pebble Beach company takes great pride in fostering and maintaining one of the best caddy programs in United States. According to Tim Tipton, who has been caddying at Pebble Beach for over fifteen years now, all caddies are required to complete an initial face-to-face interview, a background check and a one-week training program on and off the course. And here is a little tip for those of you playing the Pebble Beach Company golf courses and looking for the best caddies: book an early tee time as there is a pecking order or seniority in the caddy shack and the most seasoned veteran caddies get to go out first!
The Pebble Beach Company caddy program is a very special institution for CaddyTips, as both co-founders used to be employed there. In 1994, Darian Shingu began caddying out at Spyglass Hill; Darian was an accomplished junior golfer winning the AT&T Junior of the Year Scholarship Award any playing four years on the competitive Stevenson varsity golf team (One of which included an MVP season). Through out the 90s and early 2000s, Darian caddied hundreds of times at Spyglass Hill, Pebble Beach, Spanish Bay and Del Monte. In 1996 as a summer job while home from college, co-founder Benn McCallister got a job caddying at Spyglass Hill. He would spend the next several summers caddying alongside with Darian. Typically after caddying for nearly 5 hours, they would throw their clubs in the back of the car and go play golf until the sun set at places like San Juan Oaks, Poppy Hills, Carmel Valley Ranch and Pacific Grove Municipal Golf Course. It was during these early years that the foundation of CaddyTips was established. The two would take notes on golf courses and share them frequently with each other creating booklets and tips on how to shoot their best scores.
Needless to say, Pebble Beach hold a very special heart very special place in the heart of CaddyTips . Between the two of them, Benn and Darian have revised the tips for Spyglass, Pebble Beach and Spanish numerous times as the magnum opus of their work with CaddyTips. Both of them credit their early years and knowledge that they gained in the Pebble Beach Company caddy program as the core of their golf course knowledge and strategy and also consider this period of time the genesis for the CaddyTips concept. Both co-founders will be attending the 2019 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach blogging in creating unique content for CaddyTips aficionados. Stay tuned!
