I loved being a national member at Wolf Run. It was two hours from the house, so when my game was on it was easy to make the trip up for a day or for a weekend and humble myself. If my game was off, I could go play down the street instead. I would not have wanted to play Wolf Run on even a weekly basis, but it was fun to visit five or six times a year.
I play with the imagination of Bubba Watson, the power of Lydia Ko, and the skill of Leslie Nielsen. Wolf Run demanded some really difficult shots, and five or six times a round I would pull one off. I will remember forever some of the shots that I and others hit out there. The first time I flew the corner bunker on 5. The 30 handicap friend of mine who carried the creek on 8 from the tips and smiled for the rest of the weekend. Ken's butterfly-with-sore-feet 2nd shot to hold the tabletop on 17. And the list goes on... and gets far less triumphant.
The course's targets were almost always too small. Sometimes comically so. But if you could get past that, there were some really interesting strategic questions that it posed. How valuable is an improved angle of approach on 1? Can you carry the bunkers on 10? Is the tee shot on 8 a driver, 3w, or 60* today?
I liked that you really had to account for what the ball would do after it landed, and a little local knowledge made the targets at least fractionally bigger even if they were still ridiculously small. The par 3s all presented opportunities to hit a shot that fed 20+ feet toward the hole after landing, and I still think 6 is the best redan I've played. I eventually figured out that the secret to a good tee shot on 15, for me, was to hit about a 200 yard-carry punch-draw with a driver that caught the downslope and fed down to the very end of the fairway, leaving just a short iron in. I could hit that shot... sometimes.
Of course, I'd often screw it up and find myself out in 17's corridor with no idea what to do next. But I was a wildly inconsistent golfer who was used to being in positions that no one else had ever visited. I'm used to searching for lost balls and hitting out of the woods and occasionally looking like I've never played golf before. For me, a bad day striking the ball at Wolf Run could be chalked up to "I didn't play well, and the course is really hard."
When I think of reasons to quit golf, I don't think about the fact that I shot 105 in the club championship at Wolf Run a few years back. I had company! And we took solace in the fact that we hung in and finished the round when we could have walked off on 10, thrown our car keys at a 12 year old cart boy, and yelled at the bar staff to get us a sandwich to go. Because Wolf Run did that to people too...
When I think of reasons to quit golf, I think instead about things like the fact that I missed the fairway on 13 at Ballyneal during one of the better rounds I've ever played. Even a good player can look like a hacker at Wolf Run, but only shitty golfers hit in the native on 13 at Ballyneal while playing their best.