Design Notebook: Was No. 5 at St. Andrews Once the Greatest Par 5 in the World?

Greetings and welcome back to Design Notebook, where we’re not ready for the Olympics to be over. How about some team match play at Morfontaine?

In this edition of DN, Garrett Morrison begins gearing up for next week’s Women’s Open at St. Andrews by rediscovering the 19th-century fifth hole at the Old Course. Garrett also offers some tidbits on renovation work at Pebble Beach, Kansas City CC, and Sleepy Hollow (the Cleveland one, that is).

The Old Course’s Great Lost Par 5

By Garrett Morrison

Each shot on the par-5 14th hole at St. Andrews has attained iconic status: the drive between the boundary wall on the right and the four pot bunkers known as “the Beardies” on the left, ideally reaching the broad expanse of fairway called “the Elysian Fields”; the second shot over (or short of, or into) the Joker’s smile that is “the Hell bunker”; and the pitches, chips, and splash-outs from short of the green, which must navigate the viciously abrupt upslope at the front of the putting surface. In 1920, Alister MacKenzie wrote that the Old Course’s “Long” hole “is probably the best hole of its length in existence.” Many of today’s top golf architects and architecture minds would agree.

At one time, however, the fifth hole at the Old Course, which plays parallel to and in the opposite direction of the 14th, was considered its equal. Perhaps even its superior.

The current fifth, “Hole O’Cross (Out),” is different from the version that golfers praised in the 19th century. It is a fine but comparatively innocuous par 5 traversing undulating ground. Old Tom Morris created this hole in the early 1870s, when, under orders from the R&A, he widened the fairways and greens at the Old Course to allow for clearer, safer out-and-back lines of play. Prior to Morris’s work, there was little differentiation between the corridors of adjacent holes at St. Andrews; players used the same fairways, greens, and pins going out and coming in.

The pre-1870s fifth hole, therefore, was simply today’s 14th hole played backwards. Players teed up somewhere near the pin on the fourth/14th green (discrete teeing grounds were another Morris innovation) and played to a pin on the fifth/13th green. The area occupied by the current fifth fairway was wild ground, covered in gorse and linksland grasses. This means that, in playing the old fifth hole, golfers had to reckon with features now exclusively associated with the 14th: the Hell bunker, the Elysian Fields, and the Beardies, in that order.

The primary evidence we have of the characteristics of “Hole O’Cross (Out)” before it was widened is an 1836 map of St. Andrews drawn by W. and J. Chalmers. My colleague Cameron Hurdus used this map to create his own rendering of what the hole might have looked like in the Old Course’s one-track period.

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Were the Elysian Fields this wide? Maybe not, but Cameron identified the meandering ledge that now separates the fifth and 14th fairways as a natural-seeming border.

The ledge that separates the fourth and fifth holes at the Old Course (Fried Egg Golf)

In any case, what a par 5!

First, players had to confront the Hell bunker, which was much larger and gnarlier in the mid-1800s than it is now. To carry it from the vicinity of the fourth/14th pin with a feather-filled or gutta percha ball would have required an excellent strike. This tee shot clarifies the true sense of the fairway’s name: one must prevail over Hell in order to reach the Elysian Fields.

The Hell bunker and the old fifth tee (Fried Egg Golf)

If the drive was straightforwardly penal, the second shot was intricately strategic. After a successful tee ball, players had a number of options. They could stay well short of the Beardies, leaving a long third to a green on the other side of some sandy, broken ground. Or, if they had the requisite power, players could shorten their approach by challenging the Beardies, either by finding the 40- to 50-yard gap between them and the out-of-bounds wall, or by playing as close to the bunkers as possible along the right edge of the fairway. (It’s unlikely that players would have been able to reach the green in two shots in the days before the Haskell ball.)

Considering how exciting this hole must have been, I’m not surprised that some longtime St. Andrews golfers objected to its transformation at the hands of Old Tom Morris. James Balfour, in his 1887 book Reminiscences of Golf on St. Andrews, wrote, “This hole is more altered than any other on the Links and sadly destroyed…. Altogether, this used to be the finest golfing hole, certainly on the Links, and probably in the world…. Now the play is quite different.” Regarding the size and position of the Hell bunker, Robert Clark, author of Golf: A Royal and Ancient Game, remarked in 1874, “Hell indeed still exists, but one’s ancient awe of it is much mitigated. In the altered condition of the course, nobody needs to go in it unless he likes, and even if the perversity of a drawn ball [from the fifth tee] takes you there, your damnation is by no means as dreadful as it used to be.”*

It’s striking to read these complaints today, given that Morris’s widening of the Old Course is now regarded as one of the most important moments in the history of golf course design. This project founded the “strategic school” of golf architecture. While the larger fairways and greens did, as Robert Clark argued, allow players to circumvent hazards instead of challenging them, this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. As John Low, Tom Simpson, and Alister MacKenzie began to articulate in the first decades of the 20th century, skilled golfers could not just give the Old Course’s bunkers a wide berth and expect to score well. Risk was a choice, but one you had to consider making if you wished to beat a strong competitor.

Incidentally, MacKenzie’s most memorable visual representation of these principles—his drawing of the many ways to attack the “Long” hole in his 1920 book Golf Architecture—includes Morris’s fairway expansion as an alternative corridor. Where Balfour and Clark saw too much leniency, MacKenzie saw possibility.

MacKenzie's drawing of the 14th ("Long") at the Old Course

This doesn’t mean, however, that we should dismiss Balfour and Clark’s criticisms as unsophisticated. Indeed, as Cameron and I discovered in reconstructing the mid-19th-century fifth hole at the Old Course, they were probably right that Morris’s rerouting effectively wiped out one of the best par 5s in existence.

Too often we’re satisfied with characterizing a certain golf course redesign, renovation, or restoration in black-and-white terms—as either 100% good or completely poor. The truer assessment, in golf architecture as in most things, will almost always contain a few splashes of gray.

*These extracts appear in Peter N. Lewis’s Why Are There Eighteen Holes?: St. Andrews and the Evolution of Golf Courses, 1764-1890. This excellent book was one of the main inspirations for my investigation of the old fifth hole at St. Andrews. Another was Scott MacPherson’s magisterial second edition of The Evolution of the Old Course.

Chocolate Drops

By Garrett Morrison

The other Sleepy Hollow area eyes renovation: Canadian architect Ian Andrew has submitted a master plan for restorative work at Sleepy Hollow Golf Course, a municipal course in Brecksville, Ohio, designed by Stanley Thompson in 1924 (not to be confused with Sleepy Hollow Country Club, the much-photographed Macdonald-Raynor-Tillinghast course on the Hudson River). Andrew’s plan calls for extensive tree removal, fairway widening, and bunker restoration. If given the go-ahead, the project would take a number of years to execute. Clearly, though, this is a big step in the right direction for one of the highest-potential municipal facilities in the United States. Andrew is the industry’s leading Thompson expert and the author of In Every Genius There’s a Little Madness, a survey of Thompson’s designs. He’s the right architect to guide Sleepy Hollow, which Andy and I identified in 2021 as one of “America’s great remaining golf course restoration opportunities,” back to its original, brilliant form.

Ian Andrew's plan for Sleepy Hollow (OH)

KCCC goes Green: In recent years, Kansas City Country Club has established that its course was likely designed by A.W. Tillinghast in the mid-1920s. Now the club has hired prolific restoration specialist Andrew Green as its consulting architect.

Pebble Beach completes another green overhaul: We missed this initially, but a few weeks ago Pebble Beach posted photos of its latest renovation effort: an expansion of the sixth green to its former dimensions. This project—like the recent expansions of the eighth, 13th, and 17th greens—was targeted at recapturing pin positions that encroaching rough and increasing green speeds had eliminated over the decades. This is a worthy enough goal, but I have to ask: does the Pebble Beach Company have a master plan? An overall vision or set of objectives? Because it seems like the PBC is just doing miscellaneous nips and tucks between $3,000 foursomes instead of actually trying to retain, or reestablish, the course’s greatness.

A Course We Photographed Recently

Fox Chapel Golf Club (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)—designed by Seth Raynor in 1925, renovated by Brian Silva in 2002 and Tom Fazio’s firm in 2020

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Quotable

“A really great hole should possess the qualities of the man who lives by his wits and sails near the wind, in the conduct of his business. But I would lay it down axiomatically that every golf course should provide equal enjoyment for every class of golfer; that each hole should provide a definite intellectual problem for the good player, and quite another for the long handicap man, who after all is the mainstay of the game. A simple matter for the architect!” –Tom Simpson