Olde Homestead Golf Club - Recent Thoughts on Scoring

The Chase of a Low Round

The front nine gave me two bogeys and a birdie, which felt like an honest accounting of how I was striking the ball. The back nine has been steadier. Two birdies on eleven and twelve, a bogey given back on thirteen, and a run of pars since that have kept the personal best alive in the arithmetic. Not comfortable. Present.

Sixteen is where my round gets decided.

The tee sits above the hole, elevated enough that the first thing I notice is how close the green looks. The card says 550 yards, stroke index two. The view and the number are not telling the same story.

The hole bends left. Straight off the tee is cornfield after 260, which removes that option before I have finished reading the yardage. The bunkers on the right do the rest of the work. They sit far enough up the fairway to make the aggressive line feel exposed and close enough to the preferred landing zone to make the lay up feel obvious. Stay out of the sand, find the fairway short of the trouble, and the third shot becomes a wedge to a receptive green. With two holes left and a personal best still in reach, that sequence looks like the only sensible play. I have stood on this tee before and made that exact decision. I know what it delivers.

A lay up short of the bunkers leaves a long approach into a green I cannot fully see from that position. The green complex sits above and beyond the angle the safe tee shot creates, and the flag disappears. The bunkers that pushed me toward caution have also taken away the sightline. Safety and visibility are not available from the same place on this hole, and the wedge I was promised when I chose to lay up has become a long, partially blind shot into a well guarded green.

The other play is the left tree line. Carry it, 260 or better over the corner, and the green opens up. The flag reappears. The angle into the putting surface improves and the bunkers that looked so threatening from the tee are suddenly behind me rather than in front of the green. The hole reads entirely differently from that side of the fairway.

Mr. Blaukovitch did not protect this hole with water. He protected it with geometry, and he used the bunkers on the right not as the primary defense but as the mechanism that creates one. Move the cautious player left and short, take away the view, and let the hole's closing angle do the work. The lay up on sixteen does not find disaster. It finds a different and harder problem than the one it was trying to avoid.

Standing on this tee, with the personal best still sitting in the arithmetic and two holes left to play it out, the bunkers look like the thing to avoid. They are the thing that makes avoiding them costly. The green is right there from up here. The card knows something the view does not.