Acolytes of St. Andrews visit Montecito Club and Pronounce it Magnificent

The Montecito Club is unique – a sometimes-tiring adjective that doesn’t say a helluva lot. “How unique?” Thank you for asking. For starters, the MC’s Director of Agronomy is a guy named Tennessee McBroom, if you can imagine. McBroom is the soil and turf scientist whose Hulk-like green thumb has helped elevate the Montecito Club to its current status as Rising Quasar of the Golf Universe. McBroom takes the old school approach as a greenkeeper – garden variety hard work. It was his privilege to host the recent delegation from Scotland, as we’ll see. We’re joined today by Montecito Club’s General Manager Michael Orosco, one of those besuited guys whose crystalline professionalism and happy, barely contained energy are of a piece. 

Six gentlemen from Scotland’s St. Andrews Links – historical birthplace of modern golf and a 600-year-old destination for prayerful pilgrims of the game – arrived last week to see for themselves what all the Montecito Club fuss is about, and to bestow a sort of benediction. Following an evening at the embraceable culinary nirvana San Ysidro Ranch, the St. Andrews delegation came down to the sun-soaked Montecito Club and were stunned at what they found. Sandy Reid – Director of Greenkeeping at St. Andrews Links – made a particularly gratifying comment in the presence of his Montecito Club counterpart. One might describe Reid’s soliloquy as a golf course agronomist’s dream. 

“Everything was first class,” Reid said. “The attention to detail across every part of the Montecito Club – and at San Ysidro Ranch – was clear to see. Speaking as a fellow turf professional, I was blown away at the conditions and presentation of the course and surrounding grounds. It took me a couple of minutes of walking over the lawn before I realized it was real grass and not synthetic! I know all too well the challenges that come with trying to achieve and maintain such high standards.” 

High standards, indeed. The Montecito Club is a Jack Nicklaus Signature Course whose supreme playability derives from the new Platinum TE Paspalum turfgrass, and world class bentgrass golf greens. The Paspalum’s dark emerald-green aesthetic and significant reduction in recycled water usage is just the start. The grass has an upright growth pattern and allows the golf ball to sit up on MC’s single cut fairways and rough. Everyone loves a golf ball whose lie finds it delicately perched atop obliging greenery and just begging to be thwacked.

What brought the St. Andrews guys all the way out here from County Fife on Scotland’s east coast in the first place? “I think the word’s out now,” McBroom says in his polite murmur, his face betraying a neatly bottled elation. The guy in charge of the Montecito Club’s meticulously seductive 18-hole garden is, understandably, not easily ruffled. 

McBroom does, though, get a bit wound up talking about his team, and the guy in the wheelhouse who foresaw and actualized Montecito Club’s 2019 makeover. “We couldn’t do this without the vision and total support from Mr. Ty Warner and our great team of dedicated staff.” McBroom leans forward in his chair. “There are close to 40,000 golf courses on earth – 15- to 16,000 of them in the United States alone. Montecito Club is definitely approaching the pinnacle.”

The Holy Grail of Golf

I’m speaking with McBroom and GM Michael Orosco in the Montecito Club’s approachably palatial Great Room – the comfy-chair capital of the world. Right off the club’s main lobby, the cozily cavernous room features a vaulted, gorgeously appointed ceiling, gently suffusive lighting, and a glass wall whose improbable ocean views are nearly maddening. The gentlemen and I are talking about the golfing world’s equivalent of a State Visit from the Vatican.

“To have those gentlemen from St. Andrews come over here,” McBroom quietly exults, “…and such cordial guys, with such a down-to-earth appreciation for green keeping…” For a guy in McBroom’s position, the occasion was… validating. Given the Big Bang pedigree of St. Andrews Links, the “Home of Golf” since the 15th century, the visitors’ remarks carry a certain gravity.One can imagine the unflappable McBroom entering his domicile after work that day, closing the door behind him, and doing lamp-smashing cartwheels around the McBroom homestead for an hour. Or in McBroom’s more reasonable expression: “It was an extreme honor. They had a real appreciation for the very high level that we’ve created here as a world-class facility.” 

General Manager Orosco concurs. To McBroom’s soft-spoken agronomist, Orosco presents more like your best friend’s grinning, noogie-delivering big brother. Radiating blue-chip professionalism through his impeccable GM suit, Barry Goldwater spectacles, and starship captain comportment, Orosco is also a creature of incautious smiles and crinkling eyes. You sense that Mike’s laughter in a movie theater would be sudden and deafening. 

“St. Andrews are working with a group who try and see what some of the better properties are out there in the world,” Orosco says. “They were able to locate us with Toro having done the project out here many years ago. They’d heard nothing but great things and they came by and were in total awe of what we had going on.”

These two guys playing these roles in this crazy gem of a private club – it’s a marvelous thing. And I’m saying this as a man in timeworn, hastily-ironed Levi’s. When “hifalutin” is married to relaxed, neighborly humanity, the mixture glows. This arguably speaks added volumes about the aforementioned Ty Warner, whose taste-making proclivities and reported sense of esprit de corps have made his monuments to good taste – the Montecito Club, the Coral Casino Beach and Cabana Club, San Ysidro Ranch, Sandpiper Golf Club, the Four Seasons Resort/The Biltmore Santa Barbara – popular, globally venerated destinations. That unlikely combination – “impeccable warmth” – is indeed inherent to the Ty Warner vibe. 

“I’ve been in the private club business for 31 years.” Orosco says, “and never have I worked with somebody that’s given us the opportunity to improve things, utilizing his vision with everything. And he allows you to run it as if it was your vision. It’s amazing.” And – for the record – why all the excitement about the St. Andrews visit? McBroom and Orosco exchange a quick, knowing glance. The agronomist then greets this second moronic question with a second polite half-smile. “St. Andrews is the holy grail of golf,” he says. 

Saints Alive

We can trace the Golf Widow phenomenon to sometime around 1457 – the year James II, King of the Scots, was obliged to angrily ban the game of golf through an act of parliament. It seems the country’s golf-obsessed soldiery were too busy chipping out of the rough to stay abreast of the archery training they would need to maintain Scotland’s independence from England. 1457’s royal golf ban was about as doomed as you please. At the signing of Scotland’s (overly optimistic) Treaty of Perpetual Peace with England some 50 years later, James II’s grandson – Scots King James IV – would giddily lift the golf ban and buy himself a sweet set of clubs. 

In the golf realm, the Old Course at St. Andrews is considered the oldest golf course in the world. Montecito Club is a fledgling by comparison but is taking wing. The St. Andrews seal of approval can only add lift. Apart from the MC course itself – where the occasional mortal can still be seen angrily hurling a five-iron down the fairway – Montecito Club has a dynamic family ambience that is part and parcel of the MC magic. Between the guests and the staff, on a given evening it can all seem one indistinguishably happy mob. 

“That’s the Montecito Club in general,” Orosco confirms. “It’s the home away from home. It’s where you go spend your leisure time. And one look at this view – “he gestures at the glass wall and its implausible panorama – “and you float off into a peaceful place, around the people that you like. That’s kind of how we feel about everybody coming to the club. We want to take care of them.” 

McBroom leans in again. “Thanks to Mr. Warner’s vision this is one of the best clubs around, not just in the country but the world. And to have the St. Andrews guys come out and put an exclamation point on that – it’s pretty special.”