I had a really neat experience today which I thought a few of you might get a kick out of. I was playing the 12th at Machrihanish, and the pin was in the swale at the very back of the green (for those of you who may know the green); I hit my approach shot pin high about 20 feet left of the hole, just above and to the left of the swale and in, I thought, a quite difficult position.
The conventional read on my birdie putt was that it went gently uphill at the start, then dove fiercely downhill and to the right in the last 10 feet. It called for exquisite touch and feel, dying the ball over the hump at just the correct point well to the left of the hole and having it trickle down the slope. Unsurprisingly, I didn't have this touch - I under-borrowed, and the putt rolled six feet by and to the right. (I did well to make the comebacker for par.)
I was still intrigued by the putt, so I went back and tried it again, just for fun. This time, I borrowed so much that the ball just about touched the fringe before dying down the slope - it was probably as good a putt as I could hit short of hitting the hole, conventionally speaking, but it still missed the cup and finished three-and-a-half feet past.
Now the part about the putt I'm omitting is that about four feet past the cup was the start of the far slope of the swale in which the hole was located. Still intrigued, I went back to attempt the putt for a third time, but this time, I aimed only half a foot outside the hole, and hit the putt much harder. Sure enough, the ball rolled well past the hole, up the far slope...and then trickled back down to the hole, finishing two feet away. I tried the putt this unconventional way several more times, each time finishing a foot or two from the hole and once even lipping out on the return trip down the far slope.
I was just delighted by this discovery. I've had putts in the past where I banged a ball up a hill near the hole just for fun, knowing it would come back down the slope, just to see if I could make it - but this was the first putt I've ever hit where a 180-degree turn was involved in the *optimal* course of action. I wonder if I'd have had the guts to hit that putt in tournament play. I wonder if anyone else here has faced a similar putt and gone for the intentional 180 the first time around?
I suppose the deeper truth about this discovery says something about why a lot of us love "quirk", for want of a better word. Ultimately, I think the reason we like to see and play different golf courses (instead of sticking with the same old thing, even if that "old thing" is one of the greatest courses in the world) is that there's a thrill implicit in discovering something new. And courses with quirk always offer the chance for new discoveries, no matter how many times you've played them. I wonder, even, if this isn't a good way to judge golf courses in general: once you've played a course 100 or 1,000 times, how many different discoveries along these lines are you likely to have made about it? Such a method would certainly go far in rating a course's "fun factor", and if there's one thing I think golf should be (but often isn't), it's fun.
Cheers,
Darren