Short and Stout

In golf's increasingly bigger-is-better world, the Lilliputian par 3 rarely gets its due. But as this collection of tiny one-shotters shows, a hole doesn't have to be long to be lovable.

By Ron Whitten

Follow: @RonWhittenGD

March 2013

Golf architecture has succumbed to the long ball. Drivable par 4s and 290-yard par 3s are all the rage. A one-shot hole that is a delicate pitch to a daunting target has been all but forgotten. Not that they were ever that popular. The best took courage to design and courage to play.

We're talking about truly short par 3s, ones no longer than a football field, end zones included, 120 yards more or less. The 155-yard 12th at Augusta National is far too long for our purposes, as is the 137-yard island-green 17th at TPC Sawgrass. Fine holes, but not pitch and putts.

A great short par 3 is as rare as a Democrat on the PGA Tour. Here are seven examples. Most of them are the 18th-handicap hole at their club, a rating that shows just how much overemphasis is placed on yardage in golf.

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Golf Courses & Golf Travel /

Pebble Beach GL, Pebble Beach

No. 7, 109/106/98/94/90 yards

Land's End

Even shorter than the Postage Stamp, the seventh at Pebble Beach is the shortest hole in major championship golf, period. Depending upon the wind conditions, it can be a pitching wedge or a hybrid. When it was introduced in 1918 by designers Jack Neville and Douglas Grant, the downhill hole played to a massive green encircled by a sand bunker and flanked on three sides by Pacific surf. For the 1929 U.S. Amateur, Chandler Egan replaced the bunker with imitation sand dunes. The dunes were eventually dispersed by ocean winds. Sand pits now sit in their place. Over the last six decades, the once generous green has become an apostrophe, its present bunkers hinting at dimensions of the old putting surface.

Stephen Szurlej