The first hole on Tom Doak's Gunnamatta course at St Andrews Beach has been marked as a 535 metre par five in all of the literature I have seen thus far.
A brilliant hole (first part of the best three-hole starting sequence in Australian golf), it has nevertheless had me quaking in my Footjoys more than three months before the course officially opens, so much so that I rang Marion Jones earlier this week and inquired as to whether her stash may be for sale at half price, only to have the ungrateful sourpuss slam the phone on me.
For the average golfer, it was a reasonably mean proposition, requiring a fair spank with the driver straight off the bat in order to avoid another one from the fairway for your second, in order to avoid, horror of horrors, anything more than a 7-iron into a small green tucked blind behind a bunker-strewn ridge for your third.
Playing it on Sunday, however, I found, much to my relief, it had shrunk to 497 metres, negating the need for chemical enhancement on my part. If Marion hadn't changed her phone number, I would have told her to shove her stash where the sun don't shine, a direction possibly wasted, since I' m sure, for safekeeping, she already has.
The hole, of course, is no shorter, and a far more peaceful proposition for me, although I wager not for the low handicappers, for whom all of a sudden it may be tantalisingly within reach, and lead to many a foolish 6, or worse.
How much do we rely on yardage markers and the like these days to guide us in our game, instead of realising that, in fact, the optic nerve is connected somewhere to our brain, if I remember my basic biology, a difficult task since I quickly exited stage left as soon as the dead frogs and pig's eyes appeared.
What other instances of perception affect our view of golf courses? That they should contain certain ingredients and features, making it impossible to difficult to fully savour a round if they are missing or limited?
Matt Ward appears to have a prediliction for yardage, as of course is his wont, but does the incredible shrinking par five lower it in his estimation now?
If you perceive a course and/or hole to be one thing and it is in fact another, how difficult is it to change this perception?
Note: Tom Paul, no wiseass asides to Patrick Mucci about the above statement, please.