Fear, loathing and success: The long par 3

     Few things puff up the chest of a golfer like hitting a par three green with a fairway wood.  And on that rare occasion when the instrument of accuracy is a driver, the feeling of accomplishment is almost too much to stand.

         I had that chance earlier this week at Simsbury, CT’s Tower Ridge, a Geoffrey Cornish design and public golf course a few miles from my home.  Tower Ridge is a tricky golf course that plays partly along the Farmington Valley floor and partly along the side of the Avon Mountain, upon which stands the Heublein Tower.  The founder of Heublein, the company that invented A-1 Steak Sauce but is more closely associated with its line of alcoholic beverages, built the tower as a personal and corporate monument (although local folklore hints that romantic liaisons may have been another motive).  The tower lurks over the entire golf course and gives the club its name (although the club was previously called Cliffside, equally appropriate).

From six stories up, some sense of geometry is called for in figuring out club selection on the 240-yard par 3 8th hole at Tower Ridge. (Note:  A photo taken earlier; the pin on the day I played was way back.)

 

        Tower Ridge hugs the Farmington River at one point and had been hit pretty hard by the remnant rains from Hurricanes Irene and Lee.  Some holes had been shortened significantly and cart traffic patterns were diverted as the course dried out.  But the titanic 8^th hole was unaffected since it plays along the midpoint on the side of the mountain, between an elevated tee and a long deep green 235 yards out and about six stories down.  Such an elevated tee on a par 4 or par 5 is a welcome sight since it adds 20 or 30 or more yards to a well-struck drive; but on a par 3, it wreaks havoc with club selection. (How did my high school geometry teacher say you figure out the hypotenuse of the isosceles triangle?)  The pin on the day I played was just a couple of strides from the back edge of the deep green, and I knew I could not get a 4-wood back there.

        Out came the driver, I made a good swing and away the ball went, high against the blue sky beyond and toward the green.  My eyes are not good enough to see that far on a sunny day, and as I snaked my way down the mountain, I feared I might have hit it over the back.  But when I drove up and the green came into full view, my golf ball sat pin high, about 15 feet left.  The putt, which I missed, almost felt like an afterthought.

        Although I like to play golf occasionally by myself, this was one of those occasions when I would have liked a witness.  How nice for me to have this blog where I can bore you, dear reader, with the details.  On the other hand, if you have ever hit driver on a par 3 and made the green, you probably know how I feel.

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        I had three witnesses to a different sort of outcome on a long par 3 at the Course at Yale yesterday, just a day after GolfWeek anointed the Yale layout the best of all college golf courses.  The long par 3 9^th at Yale is unique.  It can play nearly three clubs different depending on the pin position on the 50-yard deep green.  But it is not so much the enormity of the green as it is a feature at its core that makes it so lovable and loathsome at the same time.  To say the 9^th features a double-level green is to say Brigitte Bardot was a woman; the labels do not do either justice.

The 9th at Yale is frightening from the tee box, but the real fun begins on the green (see photo at bottom of article), especially if your ball winds up on a level where the pin is not, or in the deep trench that runs across the entire green.

 

        Stretching across the entire width of the Yale green is a deep trench, a hell from which a short shot to a back pin or a too-long shot to a front pin cannot escape, leaving a long putt up a 60-degree incline (and almost never a straight putt, either).  The only worse fate on the 9^th is if you should so totally miss your tee shot that it comes up short of the green and in the pond or winds up on one of the levels of the green where the pin is not.  Only a crazed miniature golfer could love the putt that remains.

        I found love in all the wrong places after I hit my rescue club shot

so thin off the tee that my no-spin ball scooted across the first level, down and then up the trench and onto the back level.  Now I needed to putt about 10 feet to the 60-degree down slope, then about six feet across the bottom of the trench before heading up another 60-degree incline, then 20 feet to the pin, beyond which the green fell gently (but treacherously) away to a false front.  A golfer’s brain is an odd thing, and I found myself more concerned about putting off the front of the green from 60 feet than I was about providing the ball with enough force to get it up the steep incline after it rolled down the initial one.

        You cannot practice these putts because there is no green like #9 at Yale.  Petrified that I might putt the ball off the green, I left my first putt in the trench after the ball reached the crest of the hill in front of the pin. (What a sickening feeling seeing that ball hang on the top of the slope for a mere second before falling backward and down.)  Three putts later -– including my missed third putt from 15 feet short -- I registered my first four-putt in over a decade.  If it was going to happen, the 9^th at Yale is a fitting place to wear the badge of dishonor.

        In the course of three days, I had played two long par 3s.  On the first, the longer of the two by 40 yards, it took me one shot to get to 15 feet from the pin with a club –- driver -– not known for easily controlled ball flight.  On the second, with a putter, it took me two shots from 60 feet to get to that same 15 feet from the pin. 

        What a game golf is…

Great Depression: The green at Yale's 9th hole. 

Photo courtesy of Scott Simpson.