The 7th at Friar’s Head

A short par-3 that won’t behave the way the yardage says.

The 7th at Friar's Head is 130 yards from the back tee, 118 from the member tee, and 96 yards from the forward. It plays nothing like any of those numbers.

The hole sits at the highest point of the Friar's Head property, on the bluff above the Long Island Sound, in the kind of position where the wind has been moving across the property for ten thousand years and has been ignored by the routing for none of them. From the tee, the green appears almost level. It is not level. The right side falls away into a shaved collection area that gathers any ball within four yards of the right edge and feeds it down, and away from, the player.

The left side of the green is guarded by a steep, mostly hidden bunker — hidden from the tee because the green's front-left ridge obscures the bunker's true depth. A ball that lands left of the flag, on most days, settles into a sand position from which the average player will require two shots to finish.

The wind, on most mornings, is from the west-northwest at twelve to eighteen miles per hour, with the higher gusts coming up the bluff face on the player's right. This means the ball travels less than the yardage suggests, drifts left, and is pressed gently into the right-to-left flow of the green by the prevailing breeze. A pulled tee shot ends in the bunker. A pushed tee shot ends in the collection area. A perfectly struck shot can, on a particular morning, end up in either.

"You are not playing the 7th. The 7th is playing you."

— A caddie at Friar's Head, asked what his player should do on the tee.

A short history of an unfinished thought

Friar's Head opened for play in 2002, designed by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw on land that had been a sandy farm property in Baiting Hollow, on the North Fork of Long Island. The site is one of the more remarkable parcels of land used for golf in the modern era — a stretch of sandy bluff above a tidal sound, with a topographic variety that would not be out of place in a Coore-Crenshaw project on a Sandhills site in central Nebraska.

The 7th was not the routing's most celebrated hole during the design phase. That distinction tended to go to the 11th (a long uphill par-4 that asks for a draw against the wind) or to the 17th (a downhill par-5 reachable in two for the longest hitters, with a green complex that has been called one of the best in American golf since 2000).

But the 7th has earned its reputation across the course's first two decades. It has become the hole that members talk about most, that visitors remember longest, and that caddies plan around the hardest. A common observation among Friar's Head loopers is that the rest of a round, for any given player on any given day, can usually be predicted from how that player handled the 7th.

The walk

From the tee, the player sees what looks like a benign short iron. A wedge for most members. A nine-iron for the older players. A pitching wedge into a green that, from the elevated tee, appears to have generous landing room. The Sound is visible behind the green, framed by the dunes on either side. On a morning when the wind has come up the bluff and the sun is just lifting over the eastern dunes, the 7th is one of the most photographed views in American golf.

The shape of the green is what isn't visible from the tee. The green has two distinct tiers, separated by a ridge that runs from the back-left corner to the front-right edge. A pin on the back tier — common on weekend morning rounds — is roughly twelve yards from the back fringe. A pin on the front tier — common on weekday rounds — is six yards from the front edge and three yards from a sharp drop that runs across the front of the green.

A ball that lands on the wrong tier, with respect to the pin, will not stay on the green. The ridge does not run with the slope of the green; it cuts across it. A ball above the pin will release, hit the ridge, and either trickle to the right edge (and then off) or hold against the ridge in a position from which putting back to the lower tier is nearly impossible at green speed.

The bailout shot is short and right. Not long, and not left. Long-and-left is the second worst miss on the course, after the right-of-the-12th-green miss. Short-and-right leaves a recovery from the collection area with a wedge from grass mowed at fairway height, which a skilled player can putt or chip with reasonable confidence of getting up and down.

The shot the 7th asks for, on most days, is a knockdown wedge from 130 yards — a club longer than the number suggests, played twelve feet right of the pin, with the expectation that the green will gather it back toward the hole.

This is not the shot most players hit. Most players hit a full pitching wedge from 130, aimed at the flag, with the expectation that a struck shot will end fifteen feet from the hole. The number of times this expectation is rewarded on the 7th is, by caddie consensus, lower than at any other par-3 on the property.

The reckoning

The 7th has a reputation among the members for what one of them, in conversation, called "the lesson it teaches you about your own assumptions." A 130-yard par-3, by every conventional measure, is a hole that better players should make a number on. Most members of Friar's Head, by handicap, should average between 3 and 3.5 on a short par-3 of this length over the course of a season.

The average score on the 7th, taken across the membership for a representative recent year, is closer to 3.7. The hole plays roughly one-quarter of a stroke harder than its yardage would predict. This is not a statistical anomaly — it is the result of a design decision, made twenty-some years ago, to use the wind and the green geometry to extract a shot most players are not equipped to hit on demand.

The members who score well on the 7th, consistently, are not the longest hitters. They are the players who have learned to play to the right side of the green on most days, to take their three, and to move on. The players who do not score well are the ones who continue to aim at the pin, who continue to expect their full wedge to behave the way it does on the practice tee, and who continue to be surprised by the right-fall-off and the back-tier release. The hole is, in that sense, a test of golfing humility. It punishes ambition and rewards restraint.

Practical notes

Friar's Head is a private club; access for non-members is through a current-member host or, in increasingly common practice, through reciprocal-play arrangements that the club has quietly maintained with a small number of peer clubs in the United States and abroad.

Visiting members generally play in the morning, with a 7:00 or 7:30 tee time being the most common. The course walks; carts are available but uncommon. A caddie is standard, and the cost is set by the looper — most current rates run $150-$250 per loop, plus tip. The pro shop opens at 6:30. Members and their guests gather for breakfast in the clubhouse around 6:45.

On the 7th, a caddie's advice is usually some version of: play your club, aim twelve feet right of the pin, accept the three. The members who follow this advice make threes. The members who do not, often, do not.

The 7th does what the best short par-3s have always done. It makes you decide who you are.

The Journal Staff writes for The Journal.

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