Riviera Country Club

Riviera Country Club opened in 1926 on a piece of Pacific Palisades canyon land that George Thomas and his collaborator Billy Bell routed in a way that reads as deeply unconventional even by 2020s standards. The course descends into a canyon at the second hole, plays through canyon-bottom holes for most of the front nine, climbs back out at the eleventh, and finishes on the rim with the 475-yard par-4 eighteenth that plays directly into the natural amphitheater of the clubhouse hillside. Thomas built the course with the founding membership of the Los Angeles Athletic Club — Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Mary Pickford were among the early backers — and Riviera quickly became the host venue for what became the LA Open and is now the Genesis Invitational.

The course plays around 7,322 yards par 71 from the championship markers, with kikuyu fairways — a tough, dense warm-season grass — and a slope in the low 140s. The sixth hole is the architectural signature: a 199-yard par-3 with a bunker placed in the middle of the green itself, the only such bunker on a major tournament venue in American golf. Thomas placed it as a strategic feature, not a maintenance accident, and the hole has become one of the most-photographed in West Coast golf. The tenth hole is a 315-yard drivable par-4 that has decided more PGA Tour rounds than any other short par-4 on the regular tour rotation.

Ben Hogan won the 1948 U.S. Open at Riviera — the championship that gave the property the nickname Hogan's Alley — and the 1995 PGA Championship was played on the same routing (Steve Elkington over Colin Montgomerie in a playoff). Riviera hosts the Genesis Invitational every February, and the course's role as a tour venue is one of the longest continuous host relationships in American golf.

The Southern California Mediterranean climate keeps Riviera playable year-round. The kikuyu turf plays slow off the lie compared to bent-grass fairways and rewards specific ball-control patterns that visitors who only play the course occasionally consistently underestimate. The course is private and access is members and accompanied guests only.