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Columns: Between the Hills and Strath 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. 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.

Columns:
Between the Hills and Strath
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. 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.