My favorite hole that I played this year. Along with the 5th at Machrihanish, "Punch Bowl," the best short-to-mid-range par 4 I've ever played (and I've only played West Bend once). If the standard for greatness is, "I want to turn around and play that hole again right now," then the 7th at WBCC meets the criteria.
It's a terrific hole -- visually interesting, full of strategy and options, demanding without being penal.
Wayne/Tom: Several of us played this hole during the Langford/Moreau Wisconsin tour this past fall. After our tour, Ron Forse gave a wonderful and detailed presentation on L/M's design and course engineering work. One interesting insight was that Langford -- a very good golfer and trained civil engineer -- developed incredibly detailed plans for his holes, including the amount of cubic feet of dirt he had to find and move to build his bunkers and esp. his pushed-up green pads. Langford didn't just find a bunch of dirt somewhere and build up greens; he took dirt from the area around the greensite, and used that to build them up. He often had hardly any dirt left over; that is, he took only as much dirt from the surrounds as he needed for the greensite build-up. The theory is that L/M's "look" -- heavily engineered, but perhaps less "manufactured" looking than a typical Banks or Raynor template hole -- appears more natural to the eye because the dirt displaced was in exact (or nearly so) proportion to the amount of dirt used for those signature pushed-up greens. Langford (in another indication of his remarkable skills as an architect) also dug up his dirt to enhance drainage around his greensites (with such pronounced pushed-up greens, you'd think L/M courses would have puddles around the base of those greens. But I've never seen drainage issues at L/M courses).
Tom:
It is truly a mystery where Langford found some of the fill for such pronounced, pushed-up greens. The Forse displacement theory makes sense for many of the L/M holes I've seen, but a few of them -- notably the one pictured here from Lawsonia (the boxcar hole, the par 3 7th, so named because it's rumored the green was built-up with the help of a buried train boxcar) and the 2nd green at West Bend, which I swear has a two-story drop-off on the backside -- defy that theory.
The most amazing thing at the 7th at West Bend, to my mind, is how Langford found the darn thing. It is quite literally cut out entirely from an old-growth hardwood forest. I've always thought it's one thing to visualize a hole that's relatively free of features, and imposing features such as fairways, traps, greensites and whatnot on it. It's another thing entirely to see a golf hole in the middle of a forest.