"The Murder of the Par 5" (And Now The Par 4)

Jerry Tarde’s “Last Call” column in the pre-November Masters issue makes a terrific case for what’s been lost with the end of true three-shot holes.

There’s something about the symphony of a par 5 that makes it greater than the sum of its shots. It requires more forward thinking, more self-restraint and sufferance, risk and reward at once. It can be cataclysmic like Sam Snead’s triple-bogey 8 when all he needed was a par on the last hole in the 1939 U.S. Open, or heroic like a 5 on the 18th at Pebble Beach any day of the week.

I was standing on the green of Pine Valley’s behemoth uphill 15th hole, measuring over 600 yards, about 15 years ago, when the second shot of the club’s pro, David Clark, bounded onto the putting surface, stopped and glacially rolled back off the fringe. David is a good player, but not Bryson DeChambeau. I remember thinking, Have I just witnessed the death of par 5s?

He eventually includes Tom Doak’s views on how to roll things back to restore relevancy and you’re feeling really good about the case Tarde’s making.

There used to be a list of what Tom Doak called in 1982 “the untouchables”—par 5s that had never been reached in two. In researching Golf Digest’s ranking of America’s 100 Greatest Golf Courses today, we’ve found only one untouchable left—the 675-yard 16th at Olympic’s Lake Course.

**Blogger’s note because the fact checkers are gone: even that 675 tee is one, only used for the 2012 U.S. Open. Go on…

On all of the PGA Tour last year, ShotLink data shows one par 5 wasn’t reached in two (the 623-yard fourth at Sea Island Resort’s Plantation course)—that’s 0.6 percent of all the par 5s played—and on two-thirds of the par 5s, at least half the field “went for the green.” The longest hole in tournament golf today is TPC Colorado’s 773-yard 13th hole on the Korn Ferry Tour, which even at Denver-area elevation has not been reached. Yet.

In the late 1970s, I remember playing the longest golf course in the United States, The International in Bolton, Mass., which measured over 8,000 yards. I was on Sam Snead’s team in a scramble. He liked to hit last from the fairway, so he could place his ball at the end of his partners’ divot hole and slam a driver off the deck. Pure distance leads to contrivances, not good golf.

Good news right? Tarde and Golf Digest are going to end decades of rewarding longer, more expensive courses that only rich white males can join, and even better, stop cow-towing to companies that stopped advertising years ago?

Eh, baby steps.

My advice would be to change the par, not lengthen the holes and incur all sorts of land, design and maintenance expense. I certainly don’t want to see a universal distance rollback that would shorten my already short drives—every hole over 400 yards seems to be a par 5 for my non-elite game.

I know what you’re thinking, it’s “all about me” is very 2010, as is suggesting changing par-5’s to par-4’s. Us distantistas have been hearing that nonsense since the late 90s. Shoot, Hannigan and I had some fierce email exchanges around then about the “just change the par” idea.

But in 2020 here’s the not-so-funny part: we have almost no real par-5’s where risk and reward has meaning for golfers and spectators. And now we are starting to get a lot of par-4s that play as one-shotters. So add par-4’s to the victim list, all in the name of stuff that does not make the game better.