Photo: USGA/Fred Vuich Oakmont’s eighth hole played at 301 yards for the fourth round of the 2025 US Open 39 difficult thing to have a hole where you’re standing back hitting a wood at a par three.” So professionals, it seems, don’t generally think that hitting woods into par threes is a good thing. Yet, through the history of the game, there have been one-shot holes that demand a wooden club, even a full driver, and they have been among the most highly regarded in golf. To cycle back to Justin Thomas’s quote mentioned above: the legendary sixteenth at Cypress Point in California now plays to 243 yards, only ten yards longer than it did when originally built by Alister MacKenzie. It might now be a four iron for Rory McIlroy, but in the late 1920s, and notwithstanding the famous story of Marion Hollins convincing MacKenzie the hole was feasible by putting a ball down and hitting it to the proposed green site, it would have been an allout shot for the vast majority of golfers. Similarly with one of the most famous of CB Macdonald’s template holes, the Biarritz. Though the hole acquired its name because of the shot over the Atlantic at the Biarritz club in southwest France, the chasm was never the crux of the hole for Macdonald. Rather, he wanted the Biarritz to test the golfer’s ability to control distance and direction with one of his longest clubs, hence the swale in the green and the flanking bunkers: the idea was that the ideal shot should land on the front part of the green, run through the swale and come to a halt near to the pin. There is debate as to whether the front section was ever intended to be green at all; certainly, it does not appear as though the architect intended it to be used to locate the hole. Most surviving Macdonald-Raynor Biarritz holes are still plenty long to this day. Possibly the most intimidating, and most famous, is the ninth on the Yale University course, 235 yards of fear, where the tee ball must carry a lake in order to find the green. Architect Rees Jones, who attended
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