I hadn't thought much of Del Monte before this past weekend, but my respect for the course has really gone up by quite a bit. The greens were fast and the hole locations were serious (lots of 3's and 4's from edges). If we got out of position or above the hole, we were sometimes fighting for bogey, let alone par. It's a legitimate test. At 6,365, par 72, the winning score for the Monterey City Amateur was only -4.
However, the 9th hole is not good. It's a non-functional hole in the middle of a lot of interesting ones. The summary is that there is nowhere to aim your drive where it isn't a matter of luck whether your second shot is blocked out by a tree.
The hole is 524 yards, par-5. The first 250 yards are maybe 10 feet uphill, and the remaining 275 are about 25 feet downhill. The typical wind is about 10 mph from left to right. Here's the view from behind the green:
But here's what's going on in the fairway. This is the view from the center of the fairway after a 275-ish drive. For reference, a good 100-yard layup would be at the flash of sand you can see in the middle of the picture:
So you might think that if a player challenges the left side of the hole (where there's OB about 15 yards from the fairway), he would be rewarded with a clear shot, right? Here's the view from where I hit my drive, about 270 yards and 7 yards into the left rough:
Actually, someone in the right trees is just as likely to have an open shot — but it's just a matter of complete luck.
This is messed up, right? How would you fix it?