Crazy Golf
What’s the obsession with golf course
architects and their need to be ‘quirky’?

Tears For Fears once sang about a ‘Mad World’ – they didn’t know the half of it. I mean, how do you account for Americans electing George W. Bush (twice), a Sudanese man marrying his pet goat, and golf course architects coming up with a 288-yard par-3.

Okay, so the last of these examples isn’t quite in the same boat as the other two – I mean, come on America, what were you thinking? – but, even at that, a 288-yard par-3 hole, such as the one at Oakmont, would have been unthinkable only a few years back.

Not in 2007, however, when, rather than section the clearly-unhinged mind behind it, we reward it with the privilege of hosting the US Open.

To me, that’s a bit like giving toffee to a kid who has just offered ‘three’ as an answer to the question ‘how do you spell banana?’

It’s rejoicing in the illogical, exulting the downright stupid and, I beg of you, is that really what we want for our game?

I personally don’t think so, but I fear I may be in the minority, certainly if the current embarrassing glut of eccentric courses and holes is anything to go by. 

What’s worse, they’re fast becoming commonplace, new ones springing up with all the frequency of a seriously caffeinated Zebedee from the Magic Roundabout.

Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in China, is the worst offender. It’s also the world’s longest course.

How long? Only 8,450 yards – from the front. Oddly, it still manages to maintain a par of 72, due, largely, to its elevation. It sits 10,000 feet above sea level among Himalayan mountain peaks, so plays shorter than its yardage through the lighter air. But, come on, who wants to play in Boeing 747-style altitudes?

And what of the holes: a 735-yard par-5, a 525-yard par-4 and a 270-yard par-3. Enough to make you dizzy, and that’s before you factor in the altitude sickness.

Jade Dragon, however, is not alone in its quirkiness: its predecessor as the world’s longest course, the Geoffrey Cornish-designed Runaway Brook Country Club (now The International Golf Club) in Massachusetts, broke the 8,000-yard barrier by 40 yards in the late 1950s. One wonders quite what Mr Cornish was thinking – or drinking – when he laid it out. After all, it’s not as if players then had either the balls or the equipment to overpower the course.

It must have appealed to someone, though, because, soon after it opened, Dub’s Dread appeared in Kansas – all 8,204 yards of it.
The response from up in Massachusetts was swift: the International was stretched to 8,325 yards and, whilst Jade Dragon has surpassed it as the world’s longest course, it remains the lengthiest in the US. Music, no doubt, to the ears of big hitters but an altogether different noise – that of fingers being raked down a blackboard, perchance – to everyone else.