TROON, Scotland – As past U.S. Open champion Gary Woodland opened his sand wedge wide and practiced in the sand, Brennan Little, his caddie, took one look at the bunker with three steps to help golfers descend into the pit and said, “That must be the coffin bunker. It really does look like a coffin.”
Colin Beard, a hole marshal and a member at nearby Troon Welbeck Golf Club, nodded in agreement and shot back, “It’s death to the average player. It’s a killer.”
“There’s no death for these guys,” Little responded. “They’re too good.”
“Just tell your guy, don’t hit it there,” advised Beard.
The eighth hole at Royal Troon is nicknamed The Postage Stamp, which sounds all warm and fuzzy, except it should come with one of those warnings on the side of a pack of cigarettes because it can be dangerous to a player’s health and his scorecard this week. At 123 yards, it measures in as the fifth shortest hole in major championship history. It plays essentially the same distance – to a green 33-paces in width and almost 3,600-square feet in size – as it did 101 years ago when Troon first hosted the British Open. The L-shaped tee plays slightly downhill, with an elevation drop of 20 feet, and depending on the direction and strength of the wind it can be hit with just a flick of a wedge.
“It looks smaller than it really is as we stand trembling on the tee with some form of pitching club in hand,” wrote Bernard Darwin several years ago.
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And yet players may prefer a 3 o’clock root canal to trying to escape its fortress of bunkers, surrounding the front, right and left of the green. Architect and Troon club pro Willie Fernie, who won the British Open in 1883 at Musselbergh and was runner-up four times, is credited with creating the Postage Stamp, shortening a blind one-shotter over a dune with the Ailsa Craig in the distance. Players formerly used the hill to the left as a backboard but James Braid, a five-time British Open champ, put an end to that practice by installing the coffin bunker in 1922-23.
“It’s an unusual little hole that serves as a great anecdote to the power game of today,” said World Golf Hall of Fame member and noted course architect Ben Crenshaw.
The hole played to a scoring average of 3.09 in both 2004 and 2016, the two most recent times the Open was played here. It has given fits to some of the greatest, including Greg Norman, who shot a final-round 64 in 1989, but made his lone bogey of the day at No. 8. Three golfers have enjoyed exhilaration, acing the hole in the championship – Gene Sarazen in 1973 in his penultimate Open, little-known pro Dennis Edlund and past champion Ernie Els.
Jim “Bones” Mackay, who was on the bag for Phil Mickelson when he finished second in 2016 and will be working as an on-course reporter for NBC Sports this week, tabbed the Postage Stamp one of the top-five spectator holes in golf.
“And I may be underselling it. It may be one or two,” he said. “If I was a patron there this week and the gates opened, I’d be sprinting out there to spend the day. I just think it’s an incredible hole.”
Mackay said it may be short in stature but it will derail the dreams of someone in the field of 156 in quest of claiming the Claret Jug.
“I got really lucky that I didn’t caddie for anybody that had any train wrecks there. But as we go through the week, we’re going to see quite a few 2s and also some 5 or 6s,” Mackay said. “I can’t wait to see how it plays out this year, especially if we get a little bit of wind.”
Mackay’s NBC colleague, analyst Brad Faxon, seconded the motion.
“If you were going to put together your top 10 list of the best par-3s in the world, I don’t think anybody could leave the Postage Stamp out as one of the best holes in the world,” Faxon said. “It could be No. 1. It could be No. 3 or 5, but it can’t be outside the top 10.”
Indeed, the Postage Stamp is renowned as one of the great short holes, along the likes of No. 12 at Augusta National and No. 17 at TPC Sawgrass, but doesn’t quite get the attention those famed holes do mainly because disaster isn’t captured on TV for all to see every year. But the Postage Stamp does have one leg up on those other notable short par-3s: In 1994, the Royal Mail issued a postage stamp of The Postage Stamp. High praise for a hole that Tiger Woods described as a very simple hole.
“Hit the ball on the green. That’s it,” said Woods. “Green good, miss green bad. It doesn’t get any more simple than that.
“You don’t need a 240-yard par-3 for it to be hard.”