Plane emergency lands on Riviera CC's most famous hole

Is it weird to notice prominent golf holes?

This happened Friday in Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades neighborhood. The engine died on a small plane carrying three people, but the pilot deftly bounced it onto Riviera Country Club, site of the Genesis pro tournament every winter, winding up in front of the tee on the famous short par four tenth hole (315 yards).

Yeah, I know it sounds super Sailerish that I can identify a golf hole from a few seconds of news footage, but, really, it’s an extremely famous hole. E.g., Golf Digest ranked it ninth of the top 100 holes in the United States last year, and in 2020 Golf asked:

Course Rater Confidential: Is Riviera’s 10th hole the greatest short par-4 in the world?

A half century ago, L.A. Times sports columnist Jim Murray called it “a shameless little harlot.”

I sat behind the back bunker for a couple of hours on Sunday at the L.A. Open in 1974, back when there weren’t so many foreign events so all the famous names showed up to pal around with movie stars: Nicklaus, Palmer, Trevino, Player, Miller, etc. A promising youth named Tom Watson seized the lead, but then, insanely, 61-year-old Sam Snead made a huge charge to pull within one on the 17th before falling short to Dave Stockton’s career shot on the final hole.

Usually, there’s a gentle breeze off the Pacific into the face of golfers playing the tenth, but that day there was a howling Santa Ana wind from the north, so a majority of players tried to drive the green, 315 yards away. Tom Weiskopf drove it a mile over the green, about 360 yards, an unheard-of distance 51 years ago.

But out of several dozen pros, none could hold the tiny wind-dried green.

Two Scorsese movies involve planes landing on SoCal golf courses: Casino and The Aviator.

Nobody much talks about Scorsese’s comeback movie The Aviator anymore, but, wow, the scene where Howard Hughes attempts to land his experimental aircraft on the Wilshire Country Club …

An even stronger Santa Ana wind on January 7, 2025 burned down much of Pacific Palisades, including the house of a friend who is a member at Riviera. (He was remarkably sanguine about that, seeing it as an opportunity to downsize.)

The fire was halted a few blocks from the golf course.

I’ve often wondered if golf courses serve as fire breaks. In Altadena, which was also ravaged, the trees on the Altadena golf course burned.