From the archive: Whatever happened to the 15-inch cup?

In the case of the short-lived 15-inch cup in golf, Golf Digest served as the leading guinea pig. Or was it the biggest sucker?

In the June 2011 edition of the magazine, writer Jaime Diaz was tasked with documenting what was dubbed the Golf Digest WIDE Open at the Pine Needles Lodge & Club. “OPEN WIDE & SAY AHHHH!" was the headline for the piece. Sixty players of various skill levels gathered in North Carolina’s Sand Hills to experience a game with which they were not familiar—one with a gaping 15-inch cup that was nearly four times the size of the normal 4½-inch hole.

“The WIDE Open,” Diaz wrote, “was about exploring ways to make the game (or a form of it) more fun and easier to include in recreational players’ busier lives.”

(Golf Digest+ members get access to the complete Golf Digest archive dating back to 1950. Sign up here.)

The concept was first floated by then-TaylorMade Golf CEO Mark King, a fast-talking and charismatic salesman who was seeking ways to grow the game in the early 2010s at a time when play was decidedly stagnant. It would take another three years after the WIDE Open for King and company to push the 15-inch cup on a grander scale, but King got the attention of Golf Digest Editor-in-Chief Jerry Tarde, who signed off on the experiment at Pine Needles.

In Diaz’s account, the day was a huge success. “The event was relaxed, fearless, fast and fun. As if emitting a soothing power, the big hole had a liberating effect,” he wrote.

The players loved not sweating out four-footers and having a chance to hole out with pitches or full shots from the fairway. (It was discovered at one point that sand had to be put into the cup to keep strong shots from caroming out.) There seemed to be more laughs than in regular rounds, and they played quick, with an average round of three hours, 10 minutes. The golfers loved their scores. One player broke 90 for the first time and the full field averaged more than five strokes better than their usual score.

Even the most accomplished of golfers embraced it. “It was like I was a kid again,” said Kelly Miller, a past club champion at Pine Valley and Seminole.

By the spring of 2014, King was ready to bring the big cup to the whole world. TaylorMade staged a 15-inch cup event with media after the 2014 Masters at Reynolds Lake Oconee, and Sergio Garcia and Justin Rose played. (They didn’t exactly light it up—Garcia shot 30 for nine holes and Rose 32.)

King, who would leave TaylorMade in the same year to become president of Adidas North America, did a bunch of national interviews on the subject and predicted every club would be using the big holes, at least for single events, within a few years. And there were courses that immediately jumped onboard. In San Diego County, home of TaylorMade’s headquarters, the course management company JC Golf converted a couple of its courses to feature two sets of holes—regular and 15-inch—on every green.

There appeared to be some momentum at first because of the novelty, but it passed like a car barreling down the freeway. Serious golfers mostly shunned it and were annoyed by the hazard the big cup presented on the green. Neophytes didn’t play enough to make the holes worth the time and effort. The people who truly disliked it? Greenskeepers who had a bear of a time cutting the big holes and replacing them.

Ultimately, the 15-inch cup went the way of planking and selfie sticks. As far as we (or Google) can tell, there was no obituary written, no last event to say goodbye. One day it existed, the next it didn’t. And you basically have to be 25 years old or older to have even heard the lore at all.