The Right Kind of Mean Golf Course
With an apology, of sorts, to Mr. Pete Dye.
I have long preferred golf courses that can pose a good test, but are also forgiving. It’s nice when a course is tough with good challenges if your game is working. And if it isn’t, you might not score well but you aren’t likely to get fully ejected. The “width and angles” approach to golf means cutting down trees and allowing golfers to approach from lots of different ways, not just targeted down a tiny fairway surrounded by death. #subscribed
It’s what makes most all of Bandon Dunes so much fun, why I liked Pinehurst No. 4 more than Pinehurst No. 2, and Royal Dornoch is in my mind the best golf course I’ve played to date.
Conversely, there are courses that seem to think that being good means being hard. These are usually very much target golf, where if you can’t hit with some distance and accuracy, you’re boned. Locally, The Bridges and Stonetree (both Johnny Miller designs, by the way) are like this. LOTS of Florida golf is all about water hazards, tiny strips of fairway and huge bunkers. Target golf can be fun - look at Top Golf! - but it’s not my bag, baby.
My prime example for this on a national level is PGA West (Stadium). That course made me sure that designer Pete Dye was just a butcher, taking relish in keeping mid-or-worse handicappers in gigantic bunkers lined with railroad ties, rinsing drives in ponds or creeks we simply can’t cover, and so forth. I’d played a few of his other courses prior, and had just as little fun.
Much of this, of course, was that because we played from the back Black tees, which I had no business doing. This hole haunts my dreams.
Forget the fact that from the very back tees, this is a 255-yard par 3 that is almost entirely over water. Even from the regular tees, it’s almost 190 yards. There’s a bailout if you go left which shortens things, and that doesn’t make it any less scary.
There’s a reason tees are supposed to be dictated by your handicap, and this hole is a prime example. From 255 yards, only very good golfers can hit a ball that distance and with enough accuracy to not find the water. More than anything, playing this course convinced me to always try to play from the tees befitting my handicap.
But I also decided that Pete Dye didn’t make courses I’d like, and that hard courses are inherently not fun. Both of these things are wrong.
Taking Mr. Dye out of it, there are fun courses that can leave you battered and bruised. I played Carnoustie a few weeks after the 2018 Open, in a sideways windy rain … and predictably, got my ass handed to me. It was a delight I’d love to try again
I’m sure everything worked out GREAT here. And note that the sand is wet - and also that there are two other pot bunkers just behind the one I’m in, which are just ahead of some gorse. And yet, it was so fun.
And as detailed here, last week I played two absolute stern tests in Erin Hills and Whistling Straits (Straits). And they were two of the most fun rounds of golf I’ve ever played. Just because they were hard - legitimately good swings sometimes ended up in one of the many bunkers, or rolled into some fescue. But despite being hard, those courses are (for the most part) fair, creative and fun - even when your score is not where you’d hope.
Pete Dye, of course, designed the Straits, so credit is due there. And I also played Royal Hawaiian in Oahu last spring and it was immediately a favorite, and also a Dye course. Please accept my apologies.
(On the other hand, the tricked out meanness of both Blackwolf Run courses makes me sure I wasn’t COMPLETELY off my rocker.)
It strikes me that with Carnoustie, Erin Hills and Straits, there was another factor in play - I had caddies for all three rounds. I don’t usually do that - it makes an expensive course even pricier, and it’s not needed on a lot of the courses I play. (Plus, a bad caddie can really make a tough round harder. This hasn’t happened to me often but I have seen other friends suffer through it, and that’s no fun at all.) But a good caddie? Someone who can point out where to miss, or can look you in the eye and tell you to hit sideways out of a bunker instead of wasting a shot trying to go straight at the hole? Those rounds almost become a team event with you and your caddie managing the round, and they can be SO much fun.
Check this out on Trevor - I got super lucky that day (another guy in our crew had an alternate caddie who clearly came straight from the pub. Not quite as great.)
Also, sometimes it’s fun to fail a test - if that test is a wild and unique experience on the golf course. The right attitude matters - on Pinehurst 2, I talked it over with my caddie about expectations and quickly understood I wasn’t going to post a personal best as the course asks a golfer to shape his or her shot in a way I simply can’t do. So, the goal was to have fun and to try and post a score I could live with. And, I did. At Erin Hills I broke 90, and at the Straits I … had a great time. I can’t even remember what I did at Carnoustie, except put balls into the burn on both 17 and 18 after parring the 16th hole. (Prior to that, it’s a bit of a blur.)
Tough golf doesn’t HAVE to mean a miserable round. With the right approach, mindset and expectations, it can be as rewarding as anywhere. I’ll still lean more to the “width and angles” approach for most courses - but I think I’ve learned not to run away when a sterner test is out there.
What are some of the hardest golf courses you’ve ever played - and was it fun, in its own weird way?