Wacky, weird, crazy, dumb—call them what you will, silly holes help make good golf courses better
Great golf courses should have at least one silly hole.
– Frank Hannigan
In 10 words, the late USGA Executive Director summed up the misunderstood but essential twist to any course worth playing. A silly hole. Or two.
To borrow from another keen observer, the late Justice Potter Stewart, we all know one when we see it. Silly holes haunt our dreams the night before we play them. They make us go on the internet to understand what all the fuss is about. They excite us on the first tee knowing at least one crazy shot awaits; after the round, they’re the holes we all talk about.
What makes them silly? They are not necessarily well designed, and some make absolutely no sense even after 100 tries at cracking the code. Sometimes they’re way too long for the par they’re assigned or too short to play so dang hard. Their foolishness usually hinges on something found nowhere else on the course—or maybe in the world of golf. They’re scorecard wreckers, dream destroyers, and incontrovertible proof that the architect inhaled way too many fumes from his drafting pens.
Silly holes sport ridiculous boundaries, trees in the middle of fairways, rock outcroppings that should have been dynamited, bunkers resembling church pews, or the tiniest burp of sand that seems to catch every ball.
The wild and weird weren’t as much of either when everyone was far less obsessed with scorecards. Every ancient links seemed to have one and, thankfully, many still do. The silliest of them all—the Road Hole at St. Andrews—has more ridiculousness than any hole on the planet: a tee shot over a faux railway shed, a boundary line protecting a luxury hotel and historic pub, a green meant for a par five guarded by a tiny pot bunker that’s melted the dreams of golfing greats, some sea shell pathways for good measure, and, zaniest of all, an old road guarding the green. Somehow it’s all remained intact, even revered.
Early golf silliness more traditionally meant a blind moon shot over a giant dune that could not be moved. The Dell (no. 5) at Ireland’s Lahinch is still going strong despite the pure lunacy of sticking a green between two massive dunes. Scotland’s Prestwick, site of the first dozen Open Championships, has two greens tucked behind dunes that miraculously survived: The Himalayas (5th) and Alps (17th) must have seemed even sillier when golf clubs were made out of wood and the balls out of glorified Malaysian bubble gum. But those two gems are still crowd favorites in part because a round or two playing them will prove to any golfer that a blind shot can thrilling.
Sadly, two heavily discussed dune doozies that were regularly featured in early golf publications fell victim to uptight types—the first Tour pros—who thought courses should exist to penalize and protect an unwritten fairness doctrine. Therefore, the Maiden (no. 6) at Royal St. George’s and the Sandy Parlour (no. 4) at Royal Cinque Ports have been radically altered.
Therein lies the reason silly holes have faced an uneven trajectory: not everyone finds them amusing. Our stroke-play obsession is easy to blame, though in a weirdly counterintuitive way our fascination with recording every score for posterity has also taken some oddball holes and elevated their silly difficulty. But as match play faded from the biggest stages, legions of silly holes on both sides of the Atlantic fell victim to fairness over fun. To some golfers, an unblemished scorecard is more important than world peace. Thankfully, a group of brilliant Golden Age designers—followed by a modern madman—believed golf should have a sense of humor.
Your C.B.’s, A.W.’s, H.S.’s, G.C.T.’s, and Alister’s imported silliness after studying some of the wackier holes in Scotland and Ireland. It helped in those early days to not have massive earthmoving equipment or a bloated Rules book to justify the elimination of the whimsical. But after the Jazz Age, stuff happened in the form of a Great Depression and two World Wars and both architects and golfers began demanding that courses be tests rather than treats. Layouts appeared to have been crafted by drill sergeants. When golf design embraced a match-play mindset, players didn’t think about shooting their age or a new personal best. The card and pencil gradually eliminated the laissez-faire attitude toward silly hole features like nonsensical bunkers, giant mounds, boundary lines, old walls to carry, boomerang-shaped greens, and par fours that played like par sixes.
In 1974, when Frank Hannigan made his silly-hole declaration, golf was in one of its darker periods of design. Architects, green committees, superintendents, and other meddlers had ironed, pressed, and smothered the character from many grand old courses. Hannigan was then at the USGA (but not yet Executive Director, a role he would fill from 1983–88), where he penned a mammoth look into the life of A.W. Tillinghast for the organization’s publication, Golf Journal, after it was realized that four national championships would be at Tilly designs that year. Fifty years ago, Tillinghast was largely unknown and certainly not seen as the Frank Lloyd Wright of American golf architects as he is today. Hannigan played his golf at Somerset Hills, where Tillinghast designed a ludicrous take-off of North Berwick’s absurd Redan (no. 15). Irony alert: Hannigan told me he didn’t like the hole. Too silly.
Anyway, a love of Broadway and all things absurd fueled Tillinghast’s affinity for the preposterous. He often got away with pushing the envelope by surrounding his lunacy with classic holes of stout-but-playable quality. What many consider his masterpiece, Winged Foot West, strangely lacks that one outlandish hole. Nearby Baltusrol, however, ends with two par fives including the never-ending 17th, with a Tillinghast-favorite silly feature inspired by Pine Valley, a mid-hole half-acre of sand filled with everything but trap doors and snakes.
Tillinghast invoked humor to fend off detractors of his more featherbrained ideas.
“It must be remembered that the great majority of golfers are aiming to reduce their previous best performance by five strokes if possible,” he wrote. “And if any one of them arrives at the home teeing ground with this possibility in reach, he is not caring two hoots whether he is driving off from nearby an ancient oak of majestic size and form or a dead sassafras. If his round ends happily it is one beautiful course. Such is human nature.”
By the time he sketched out his uber-masculine Bethpage Black in the early 1930s—a course that could use a silly hole to liven up an otherwise straightforward excursion—the master imaginer of well-timed outlandishness had fallen on hard times and whimsy disappeared from his final works.
Silly holes were practically forbidden for several decades and it’s no coincidence that very few “great” courses were created between 1940 to 1980. The outlier was Harbour Town. Pete Dye’s 1969 defiant statement against clover-leaf bunkers, ponds, and brute force paid homage to the quirk he spotted on trips to Scotland. Cue the railroad sleepers.
No one before or since has taken the silly mantle and run with it like Dye. His island 17th at TPC Sawgrass—inspired by a comment from wife Alice—remains another Hall of Fame exercise in absurdity, though nothing like in its early days when the green wasn’t as receptive and the railroad ties were still crooked. Even after the heat he took following the 1982 Players, Dye never let up: Every course he designed includes at least one All-American exercise in hilarious stupidity. He loved nothing more than laughing at all the energy wasted over his troublemaking holes and defiance of design norms.
The 1986 sight of Tip O’Neill on national TV trying to get out of Dye’s 20-foot-deep “San Andreas” bunker lining PGA West’s over-stretched-par-five 16th occurred when golfers were still hitting persimmon off the tee. But the Speaker’s struggle to extricate himself and the slow-play gripes of Tour pros got the course ejected from the Bob Hope Classic rota. Thirty years later, with 30 yards of average distance added and 60 degrees of sand wedge loft now commonplace, the San Andreas is back. Of course, the pros can now reach it in two with an iron. But for the rest of us, the hole remains so outlandish that it overshadows the penultimate island green surrounded by massive ricocheting boulders.
Which brings us to the 21st Century demand for silly holes. Even if some of the love is motivated by posting about them on social media, who cares if golfers are laughing and debating the comedic possibilities? At big tournaments, the goofiest holes get a dedicated channel. The only thing missing from the Coffin bunker at Troon’s tiny Postage Stamp this summer was a laugh track.
Beyond the performative, silly holes that might scare, frustrate, or annoy also make the game worth all the trouble. Every round needs a blood pressure spike and some comic relief. A revised handicap system with score adjusting and other tweaks has reduced the importance of an 18-hole tally, eating away at some of the rage created after six-putting the two-level green with a bunker in the middle. And Pete Dye’s influence can never be underestimated in making the whimsiest holes cool again.
Because a silly game demands silly moments.
10 Silly Classics
These ludicrous holes take it right to the edge of sanity—but somehow work
17 Old Course at St. Andrews—The crown jewel has too many silly elements to list yet is almost guaranteed to be the first hole discussed after the round.
6 Riviera—A par three with a bunker in the middle of the green? Yet we accept it as totally normal as George Thomas’s bizarre idea nears its 100th birthday.
17 Ocean Course at Kiawah—The one-shotter over water is hardly revolutionary, but throw in Atlantic winds, surrounding bunkers, and memories of pros being brought to their knees, and one of Pete Dye’s more straightforward holes gets in your head. In a good way.
17 TPC Sawgrass—It’s absurd enough with the lake, railroad ties, and walkway, but the silliness reaches new heights with two huge tiers in the green and a surprisingly popular bunker for its size.
8 Royal Troon—It’s only 123 yards downhill and all right in front of the golfer, but five deep bunkers, infinity edges, and too much time to think about it shrinks a bigger-than-it-looks green to the size of a postage stamp (in our heads, anyway).
16 PGA West—What does comedy legend Pete Dye do with dead-flat desert terrain? He carves a 20-foot-deep bunker the length of a par five and names it after an earthquake fault.
13 North Berwick—A drive and a short iron over an ancient stone wall with an opening that sometimes comes in handy. And to rub it in, it comes right before a blind-second-shot par four hilariously called “Perfection.”
6 Bay Hill—A 180-degree-bending three-shotter that’s risen in the craziness collection by still serving up 10s while becoming drivable for the Bryson’s and Rory’s.
14 Coeur d’Alene Resort Golf Course—The green floats, can be moved around, and is only accessible by boat. It may be silly but it’s the hole most Idaho visitors can’t wait to take a crack at.
18 Whistling Straits—How to conclude with a bang on a course already stretched spectacularly along Lake Michigan? Give it 96 bunkers, incorporate a natural ravine, build a zany green (since toned down by Dye), and you have the silliest finishing hole in golf.
Please forward to Bob McIntyre for comment and editing !!!!
The Par 3 #9 at Quaker Ridge, “The shortest Par 5 in American Golf”& #9 at The Course at Yale come to mind as silly holes that mete the test.