Good/Great Courses with the Worst UPHILL hole(s)?

[Evan_Green]

As a corollary to the other thread I started on courses with best collections of uphill hole(s), how about this one - what good/great courses have the worst individual or collection of uphill holes (e.g. they may be good/great courses in the aggregate - but the way they handled the uphill segment(s) are a weakness - either by the nature of the land, the routing, or the hole design)?


You are welcome to go ahead and discuss average courses with especially poor uphill holes, but I think that would be less interesting because there are plenty of those...

[Sean_A]

Well, Rihc mentioned Painswick as a good (I think exceptional in the truest sense of the word) course with a good set of uphill holes.  I will nominate it for two of the worst uphill holes...1 & 5.  Both are essentially very steep vertical assualts.  The 5th is at least a very short par 3, but a hole grandma simply cannot play as either one gets up or the ball is lost in the rough...not that hitting the ball on such a harsh grade would be possible for most very competent golfers let alone grandma.

Ciao 

[Doug Hodgson]

The 11th at Beaconsfield In Montreal....The course is a pretty good Willie Park Jr/ Stanley Thompson layout, but I couldn't believe my eyes when I got to the 11th fairway


18 at Scarboro in Toronto.  This is one of many fine courses in TO, and quirky in some ways, but 18 is one of the weirdest holes I have ever seen.  First you have to hit your drive pretty well to carry a very busy roadway and the high fences on both sides.  Then you see the green up at the top of a long steep incline.  There is a collar of light rough that runs across the fairway just in from of the green.  Without it, any shot that landed just a few inches short would roll back down about 100 yards or so....


There is a hole early in the back nine at New Haven CC, the 12th as I recall.  This is a fine Park Jr course, and the hole would be a fairly challenging uphill par 4 if not for the green, which is so fast and tilted that certain putts just cannot be prevented from rolling off the green and back down the fairway

[Thomas Dai]

• The 16th at Royal Dornoch and the 17th at County Sligo are two holes on great/good courses that I’m not keen on. The 13th at St Enodoc, the 5th and 12th at Royal Porthcawl plus the 11th at Tralee and the 13th at Nairn as well. Others will probably disagree. Atb

[Rich Goodale]

Thomas


I've only played 2 of them, and I agree with you on both 13 Nairn and 16 Dornoch, with some caveats.  As for Nairn, my first few times I hated the fact that they chose to head up to the hill and into the trees away from the course, particularly given that they had lots of extra linksland to play with.  More recently, however, I have come to respect the challenge of 13 and also the fact that 13 created a need for a downhill 14 to get back to the links, and it is a superb long downhill par-3.  As for Dornoch, the hole was necessary to get from the lowest part of the linksland back up to the raised beach part of the course (1, 2, the tee on 3, the first part of 17 and the 18th) in one fell swoop, in order to get back to what is now 18 and then down again to the lower links which are now the Struie.  16 was #10 or #11 in the first 70+ years of the course (in today's routing, from the 6th green through to the 11th fairway was built in 1946).  The tee shot is one of the finest and most difficult one on the course, and even though the green is not visible from the fairway and is primitively flat, the hole is the hardest hole to birdie on the course, at least for me.  In the many hundreds of time I've played Dornoch I've had four 3's on the 14th (Foxy) and only one on the 16th.  Finally, the 16th has the virtue of allowing an early path to the clubhouse if you game is finished or it starts to rain.....

[Joel Pear]

When I was a kid growing up in the D.C. area, my brother and I, and two friends, would take the K4 bus and get off at the stop just past 16th Street on Military Road.  From there, we would hike up the brush to Rock Creek Golf Course.  It was a Muni in the truest sense of the word.


The Greens fee was probably $5.00, the tees were dirt and rock hard, and the grass was sparse.  I think the course still exists, but has been altered.  On the back nine, the 12th hole (I think, could have been the 13th) was a long straight uphill par four with trees on both sides of the fairway.  It played about 400 yards, but in the mid 60's, it seemed forever!  The regulars called it "Cardiac Hill."  We were teenagers, and were huffing and puffing when we got to the green.


Was it a good/great course?  Could have been with some proper maintenance.  It was, however, the first 18-hole course I played, and that made it special to me.

[Ira Fishman]

Primland is a very good course.  The 13th is a bad uphill Par 5--very long and steep with perhaps the largest green I have ever seen.  The green actually is kind of fun but in a mini-golf course way.


Broadmoor West is a good course.  The 8th is a undistinguished short Par 5.  Once again steep and not strategic.  And I say this having once had an 8 footer for Eagle (which of course I missed).


Ira

[Mark Pearce]

The Colt Course at Close House has several very good uphill holes (2, 5, 7, 11) but the 10th is not one of them.