Don't be short at the 149-yard "Waterfall."
The place is a cornucopia of the unconventional. Oakmont's famous Church Pews bunker has 12 pews; on one par 5, Meadows Farms has 18 of the evildoers. There's an island par 3, a major contributor to the 100,000 balls collected from Meadows waters each year. And a micro-green is squeezed onto a narrow peninsula at the end of a short par 4's razor's-edge fairway.
You'd swear a giant had dropped his pickup sticks at one green. It's surrounded by a ragged, jumbled wall of a hundred railroad ties tilted and leaning on end in a trench. The club's vice president of golf operations, Bobby Lewis, calls it "our Pete Dye-at-a-train-wreck hole."
Meadows has 28 holes: three nines and a warm-up. My favorites: Waterfall and Baseball. Waterfall plays 149 yards from the middle tee. You're not so much hitting to a green as to a clifftop. It's 80 feet wide with water falling 45 feet. Meadows called in from Acapulco with the idea. He had swum to a bar behind a waterfall and now wanted his own waterfall, with a cartpath and concession stand behind the water. (Stand now closed. Snake swam in.)
Baseball is a little par 3 disguised as a baseball field.
"Hardest hole I ever did," Ward says.
Tried it first with small, square bunkers as the bases and a circle bunker as the pitcher's mound in the center of the green.
Finally moved the green into the outfield. The tee shot flies over home plate and the mound, and past second base. Behind the green, a board fence carries vintage signs such as "Red Rose Farm Feeds." The warning track is a bunker curving from foul line to foul line. There's a scoreboard in right, a flagpole at the center-field fence.
"As a kid, I was a pitcher who couldn't hit," Meadows says. "But one day on that hole, instead of a wedge, I took a 6-iron. Hit it over the fence! My first home run!"
Hmmm.
Hadn't thought of that.
Next time, right at the flagpole.
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