44 distance to the hole that they choose to lay up at. A forced carry with no variation other than distance would be dull. There’s no one answer, but it is the same conundrum that all the rest of us face with pretty much every par five!” The young English architect Clyde Johnson says: “It does pose an interesting challenge, if stopping those guys from getting home in two is going to get in their heads! Length alone isn’t the answer to that. I can see what Tyrrell is getting at, about it becoming a par three, but not all par threes are created equal, and the key difference is that not everyone is starting from the same place. Making it interesting to get to the best starting point for that becomes the challenge for an architect in that case.” Tom Doak has thought about this issue for many years. “The first big article I did for Golf magazine in 1982 [when I was 21] was about all the par five holes that had never been reached in two,” he says. “There were about two dozen of them in the USA back then, although, of course, a place like Crystal Downs was never visited by Tour pros so its two long holes were both on the list. “One thing that comes from that is that these types of holes get us talking about the longest hitters, when in fact they are beastly holes for the 95 per cent of golfers with higher handicaps. For most people, any par five is a three-shot hole, and an ‘untouchable’ par five is probably a four-shot hole if you miss either of the first two. “As part of that article I interviewed a lot of architects, and the consensus back then was Augusta’s reachable par fives were the most dramatic type of hole, and most architects felt that you shouldn’t have any hole that players didn’t even think about reaching. Pete Dye would usually build one that was only rarely going to be reached, but I think he sort of agreed with Hatton – if it was really totally unreachable then players would just hit two lay-up shots, and that would be boring to watch. He wanted them to hit driver off the tee and be actively thinking they might have a slight chance. “What I noticed about that type of hole back in the old days was that short hitters played them the best. Hitting it in the rough off the tee made for a difficult slog and keeping in the fairway was paramount. None of the holes were really long enough that a great player would have more than a wedge third shot if they kept it in play on the first two, so the long players’ length advantage was pretty well negated, whereas on most par fives it is pushed right to the front. On the 562-yard seventeenth on Jonathan Davison’s Heritage course at Penati, Challenge Tour players only required an iron approach to reach the green in two, even into a prevailing wind
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