Has A Course Ever Spooked You???

[DJYoshi]

Ask sit in the plane going back home from Orlando I can only think of this weekends gold experience. I played falcons fire from the championship tees for the hell of it. As soon as I got there I was on the tee. They gave me a layout booklet and I noticed damnthats a lot of sand. U all k ow I hate fairway bunkers. I found the 1st fway bunker on my 1st tee shot. I don't know what it is about orlando do courses. They just don't suit my eyes and when tee boxes aren't lined up facing the target my shots stink. I never had a good lie even when I hitfairways. 3 greens in regulation. For a 9.4 Nandi isn't that terrible? I wentb out in 49 and came in at 40. Damn that's rough!
Other than that links courses scare me. When u tell me to hit a shot toavoid trees I can. When it's a links course nothing works well! The openess but evident trouble just kills me.

[kafka01]

Actually my homecourse spooks me. Hilly, forrest sourrounding many holes (I always hated the holes where you look down the fairway and its like a pipe) and absolutly contradicting to my game beeing long off the tee with driver. I do a lot better on courses where no tree is in sight!
Today i played with two guys with a similar handicap as mine and they teed off driver on almost every hole - yeah we did a lot of ball searching :(...

[ctmurrray]

I attended the Women's US Open at Interlochen in Edina MN. That course scares me from just seeing it. The 9th hole with the raised green and shaped like a pringle (per M. Wie who took at 9 on the hole) would just eat me alive on a regular basis if I played there.

[wEst]

Not in my head, but at #8, Mountain Pub Links at Johns Creek, Kentucky, a different kind of spook. There's a case of balls going missing. You shoot over a creek onto the fairway and people have many times complained hitting the fairway and the ball disappear. I lost a Precept ball this way.

[JessN16]

Two courses have done it for me...

Living in Alabama, we have the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail. There isn't an easy course on the Trail, period. I've played most of them but the Ridge Course at Oxmoor Valley in Birmingham absolutely destroys me every time I play it. I've never gone around in less than 110.

A couple of years ago, I played the Ridge twice sandwiched between three rounds at other courses in the area. My scores for those five rounds were 90, 110 (Ridge), 89, 118 (Ridge), 92.

There's another course in Birmingham called Heatherwood. It's only about 5,400 yards but it's tight as a rubber band. No rough to speak of, just fairways leading into dense forests. It's a golf course that was built as an excuse to build an expensive neighborhood around and through. Most of the par-4s are 350-yard doglegs. But the way they're built is maddening: 190 off the tee, turn left or right, then 160 to the green. My driver is one of my best clubs but I don't use it more than 2-3 times out there. I've played it three times and the fewest number of balls lost in a round so far was 12.

Jess

[Awsi Dooger]

Some course in the Incline Village area of North Lake Tahoe. I don't even remember the name. This was about 15 years ago. I was playing great and had my clubs with me on vacation. Had my best day ever on the range, blasting everything. The next day on that course I got spooked by the narrow fairways, to the point I was aiming everything. Finally I resorted to a 4 iron off every tee.

A few months later I read a review of courses in that area, in either Golf or Golf Digest. The summary of that course: "If you can split a hula hoop from 200 yards, this is the course for you."

It seemed like my game suffered for months.

Generally, the holes that give me trouble are nondescript ones with nothing to aim at, like straight narrow par 4s with trouble on each side. When I had a dependable draw as a teenager those were no problem, just fling it toward the right tree line. Now I'm supposedly a straight hitter but on those tee shots it's normally straight into trouble, either side.