/ 16 July 2004

Postage Stamp can lick the best

The Postage Stamp, the eighth hole at Royal Troon where the Open Champhionship is under way, is the most famous short hole in Europe. It is the Penny Black of the album but, given any weather, it morphs seamlessly into a penny dreadful.

It is only 112m long, the shortest hole in championship golf, and as a player, even a quite ordinary player, stands on the tee there appears no good reason why the green, carved out of sandhills front, left and back, should not be hit. It is an enticing prospect and one that has lured many a great player to destruction.

No one who has played the hole faces it with equanimity, for they know that to miss that tiny putting surface is to face a bogey — or much, much worse.

It was Willie Park Jnr, winner of the Open in 1889, writing in Golf Illustrated, who said of the reconstructed eighth in 1909 that it had ‘a pitching surface skimmed down to the size of a postage stamp”, and so it has been called ever since.

It is dangerous not only because the green is difficult to hit but also because it is difficult to hold, and anything less than a well-struck shot is likely to run off into one of the five cavernous bunkers that surround it. And they, emphatically, are not places to be.

Some of golf’s greatest names have been licked by the Postage Stamp. Tiger Woods, in contention in the 1997 Open after a 64 on the Saturday, took six and was not heard of again, and when, in the 1989 Open, Greg Norman got round in a then course-record 64 to get into a play-off, guess where he dropped his only stroke?

It has been ever thus. In 1923 Walter Hagen contrived to take five at the Postage Stamp and finished second to Arthur Havers — by one shot.

In fact many players would sell their souls for a bogey at the eighth. The championship record for the highest score at the Postage Stamp is held by Hermann Tissies.

In 1950 poor Tissies ran into the Postage Stamp at its stickiest. His tee shot found a bunker, his recovery found another and then yet another. He took five to get out of one of the bunkers and, as is the way of things when you are taking 15 at a hole, he finished by three-putting. —