What it was like
Most people walk past the fence at Morley Field for years without registering that the chain baskets on the other side of it are a piece of the sport's real history. That course has run continuously since the early seventies, which makes it one of the oldest anywhere on earth.
The tournament runs two days across amateur divisions that start at genuine beginner and climb through Advanced, Open Am, and the Masters age brackets, all of them playing the same full course: wooded fairways, elevation that opens up on you without warning, and the narrow technical lines that have been humbling San Diego throwers for five decades.
The field pulls from a player pool reaching out through Orange County and into the Inland Empire, and locally this is the tournament that opens the competitive calendar. Registration runs through the PDGA. Spectating costs nothing, and the course belongs to the public the rest of the year.
Drag along the friend who thinks this is a party game. Hand them a driver on a wooded fairway.