45 “For my own designs, I generally build less than four par-five holes, because I think they reward the long hitter too much, and the long hitter already has a lot of advantages. I’ve only built a handful of holes that are usually not reachable in two, the best known of them being the fifteenth at Cape Kidnappers, 650 yards, where two cautious shots to stay in play could leave you a very long way in. Sure enough, though, in their second pro exhibition there the wind was howling at the players’ backs, and Sean O’Hair reached that green in two with something like a 6-iron. The annoying part was that right after that, they suspended play because the ball was ‘wobbling’ on the green – but really because none of those players wanted to play the last three holes back into the teeth of that wind. Doak hits on a key problem with unreachable par fives. The wider dispersion of length between average and elite golfer that has emerged over the past twenty years is inevitable a greater problem the longer the hole becomes. To take two extremes: for a veteran woman golfer with an extremely slow swing speed, a three-shot hole could easily be less than 200 yards: but for a young male professional or elite amateur, holes in excess of 650 yards are Photo: Jonathan Davison Photo: Getty Images/David Cannon Tom Doak notes that shorter hitters have tended to play reachable par fives, like the thirteenth at Augusta, better than longer hitters
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