Hole #3:
http://golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,30677.0.htmlAre you all like me and have a few select holes in your mental inventory from your life and travels in golf that when you stepped on their tees the first time you just felt like you wanted to hit tee shots all day long? Well, if you are like me that way, this one might rank high on your list; it sure does for me.
(John Mayhugh is a really fine golf hole photographer but his photo from the tee doesn’t show this tee shot quite as well as Ryan Simper’s does probably because there is more sunlight in Ryan’s. To me neither photo shows the fairway and what’s out there visibly and otherwise and scale-wise as it appears to the player on the tee. Like many photos of golf holes both photos seem to sort of “reverse telescope” things to me).
The above is just a preface to introduce my opinion that this tee shot might be one of the finest I’ve ever seen in golf for both exhilaration and what I consider to be a whole host of really fine architectural principles and architectural concepts all rolled into one!
First, you are fairly high up above your target and as a number of golf architects have claimed, that alone can make a golfer feel stronger and more powerful. I think that’s true, and you really feel that on this tee.
Second, you’re looking down on a fairway that is set between tee and green on what I consider to be the ideal “diagonal” or axis for strategic golf (the old “bite off as much as you can chew” adage). It is, in fact, what some of the early architects and including architectural critic, Joshua Crane, called the “double diagonal”----eg you can run out of room on the outside (or far side) with a conservative line as easily as you can fail to reach the fairway on the inside or aggressive line.
Third, the aggressive inside line of the fairway on the left is basically blind as the rolling ridge covered with ball-eating grunge obscures it from sight.
And fourth, and perhaps best of all, at least to me, it seems you can see a piece of the green out on the left about 350 yards away right on that aggressive blind left tee shot line. I believe that kind of thing (the ultimate target, the green (on a par 4), being off-set and in view from the tee) psychologically pulls the golfer’s concentration and perhaps even his aim at it even if he instinctively knows that line is too aggressive!
Fifth, and last on the tee shot, and perhaps even better yet than the fourth above, if the golfer would only stop and think that despite all the foregoing that just fuels his inclination to bust the ball as hard and far as he can down that aggressive, blind, potentially ball-eating left tee-shot line, he really doesn’t need to do that because this hole is only about 350 yards long and anything into the middle of that fairway will not leave him much club on the approach anyway.
I just love these kinds of holes that I sometimes refer to as strategic or risk/reward “fakeouts”----eg for various reasons they seem to tempt and then sucker you into some huge risk on one shot when you really don’t even need it for the next shot.
Sorry guys, but my memory is a bit hazy and I don’t think I can remember everything about the approach shot and the green on this hole (I seem to recall basically hitting something lofted like a wedge in there all three times), other than the green is fairly big for a short par 4 and it has some pretty good slope coming from back to front and I think left to right. But what I think I remember pretty well about it is that the left side of the green is beautifully covered by a left side bunker or rise that sort of blinds the left side surface and best of all blinds the diagonal fall-off in the left rear which is hard to recover back onto the green from!