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Between the Hills and Strath

St Andrews Old Course Golf Greatest Par 3

With a fiercely sloping green and a pair of dastardly bunkers, the 11th hole at the Old Course is one of the greatest par 3s in golf

By George Peper

I’d love to know the name of the moronic medieval shepherd who put “the Loop” in the middle of the Old Course.

There he was at the easternmost extremity of the linksland, standing atop a dune with a splendid view of the River Eden and the North Sea beyond. Having set forth from the edge of town, he had plotted a straight and narrow path through the sandhills, fashioning seven fine and testing holes of golf.

At that point, surely every logical bone in his crook-flailing body told him it was time to make an about-face and head home, along the same general trail he had just blazed.

Ah, and had he only done so, just consider the consequences! Golf would be a 14-hole game—seven holes out, seven in. A round could be completed in closer to three hours than four (or five), and two rounds a day would be no real strain. Par would be 56, so almost everyone would be able to break 100; millions more of us would break 80; and some of us would experience the visceral thrill of shooting our ages before collecting our Social Security checks.

That would have made so much sense, particularly for the Brits, who are so fond of the number: 14 days in a fortnight, 14 pounds in a stone, 14 lines in a sonnet. But no, instead of turning left and heading home, our shambolic sheepherder decided to turn right and tarry a bit, squeezing in a circuit of four more holes. In the process, he blighted the world’s most captivating golf course with three relatively pedestrian holes—a nondescript par 3 at the 8th followed by a pair of flat, short and all but featureless par 4s.

But let us also give credit where credit is due. For our good shepherd closed the loop with what is arguably the finest par 3 in creation—the High (or Eden) hole, No. 11.

Don’t take my word for it. Architects C.B. Macdonald and Alister MacKenzie both felt the same way, each of them cloning the green/bunker complex repeatedly. (When you watch the Masters this month, take a good look at the 4th hole.) It’s rather admirable, in fact, that MacKenzie’s collaborator at Augusta National, Bobby Jones, went along with this homage, considering that it was at the High hole in the 1921 British Open that the 19-year-old Jones suffered what he called “the most inglorious failure of my golfing life” when, after taking four shots to extricate himself from a bunker, he picked up his ball and walked off the green.

Jones may have been the most famous casualty of No. 11, but its list of dogged victims is centuries old and lengthens every day.

Ironically, it is probably the most straightforward and visible target on the course, without the inscrutable humps and hollows that front so many St. Andrews greens. Virtually unchanged in the last 200 years, it plays from a gently raised tee to a gently raised green. The distance to be covered is less than 170 yards, and everything is in plain view.

But there’s a lot staring back at you, beginning with a pair of bunkers called Hill and Strath. Hill, a massive 12-foot-deep pit at the left front of the green, is where Jones came to grief. Its name is thought to have been derived from the way its high front brow flows into the green, creating a fierce back-to-front, left-to-right slope. This is a hazard from which getting your ball out is only half the battle—getting yourself out can be equally challenging.

The other bunker is named Strath, after Andrew and Davie Strath, a pair of 19th century lads who ran with Young Tom Morris. (Davie had a particularly checkered history with this bunker.) Strath sits at the right front of the green. It’s less than half the size of Hill and not as deep—only about eight feet—but its sod-brick front wall is just as vertical, and it has a knack of engorging any ball that wanders near its perimeter.