Between the two
bunkers is a passageway, perhaps 20 yards wide, through
which a ball may be
skittered to the dance floor. This is part of the
genius of the hole. While the
11th rewards the player who can finesse
his way over the bunkers with a high,
softly landing shot, it also
leaves room for the less skilled player. Greg
Norman has made a
hole-in-one here, but so has Herb Kohler.
The challenge is
to
gauge the wind, which can blow up to 50 miles per hour or more from any
direction, determine where you want to land the ball (invariably
nowhere near
the flag), and choose the club and swing you think will
get the job done. One
day it may be a high fade, the next a knee-high
stinger. They say there’s a
local fellow who has been playing the Old
Course for the better part of 50 years
and has never attacked the 11th
hole with anything but a 3-iron. I guess I can
understand that, but
personally I’ve needed everything from 9-iron to driver.
(And on one
whimsical day, I made par with three putts.)
Most shots that are
pulled or hooked will find Hill bunker; most shots that are pushed or
sliced
will fall into Strath or worse, the enormous Shell bunker that
guards the 7th
hole, which shares a green with No. 11. The bunkers,
along with the steep
fall-off at the front of the green, tell you to
take plenty of club. On the
other hand, if your ball trickles even a
yard over the green it will tumble 15
feet down a bank and into a
hollow where you may find a downhill lie, a divot,
thick grass or all
three, and face a shot that must be hoisted to a putting
surface that
falls steeply away from you.
In a round of golf on the Old
Course you may never use your lob wedge until this hole, where you
might use it
three or four times. As Bernard Darwin observed, “Trouble
once begun at this
hole may never come to an end till the card is torn
into a thousand
fragments.”
This is the most elevated and exposed green on the course. (In
fact,
during the winter months, it’s the single green on the Old Course that is
occasionally given a rest, and everyone plays the hole from a makeshift
tee
behind the 10th green to a makeshift green in front of the 12th
tee.) As such
the swooping surface is typically the firmest and fastest
on the course. In the
words of Robert Trent Jones Sr., “at no other
place but St. Andrews would such a
slope be
countenanced.”
During the British Open, when the green is running at
10 or so on the Stimpmeter, only two hole locations are available—one
is in an
area smack behind the Strath bunker (where it is for three of
the four days).
The other—even more difficult to find—is on a small
plateau at the back right of
the green where a small pot bunker lurks.
The best adventures unfold when the
wind howls out of the
southwest—straight left to right across the green—so that
even a
well-struck shot, upon hitting the green, will bound and roll down the
hill to the 7th green, leaving an uphill, upwind putt that could be 200
feet or
more with 30 or so feet of break. At that moment, three-putting
is not a
possibility; it’s an achievement. It’s no wonder that it was
this hole that saw
Old Tom Morris
insert the first tin cup to
secure the flagstick and catch
and keep the ball.
Last year, in
an important annual stroke play event on
the Old Course, I birdied the
10th hole to go to one over par. My two playing
companions were one
over as well. When we left the 11th green, we were a
collective 14
over, yours truly notching a 7 without finding a bunker.
The
memory of that performance stung until recently when I read this
passage from
Alister MacKenzie’s The Spirit of St.
Andrews.
“Some years ago a friend
of mine was playing in the
Amateur Championship, winning his way into the third
round. At the 11th
hole, he put his tee shot into Strath bunker on the right
whilst his
opponent was in the Hill bunker on the left. There was a large crowd
following a pair, I think it was Blackwell and Hilton, who were playing
the 7th,
which crosses the 11th at this point, and the gallery deserted
Blackwell and
Hilton to see the fun. My friend and his opponent played
out of these
bunkers and into the Eden beyond the green, and back down
the steep slopes into
the bunkers again, and after taking 14 strokes
were exactly where they started,
but their positions were now reversed,
as my friend was in the Hill bunker and
his opponent in Strath. They
finally halved the hole in 17, amidst huge
cheers from the crowd.”
No. 11 presents not demands but options. It coaxes
and cajoles us,
makes us look like poor golfers while asking us to be better
golfers,
to think clearly and cannily, to choose the right shot and then hit the
right shot right. When we manage to do that—when our tee shot finds its
way to
the pin—we feel the kind of satisfaction that no mere strike of
a ball can ever
produce. That is what makes a golf hole special.
