Golf

As I reflect on my return to ‘course’ golf over 2017, one thing stands out…..the fucked 16th hole at Fox Hills. Measuring 372 metres from tee to green, it’s a longish ‘4’ that I’ve only parred on three occasions in well over fifty attempts. In fact, in all those games my pill has been sitting on the green in two just once and that was when a gale was blowing at my back. I’m a pretty ordinary golfer but you’d think that achieving a regulation ‘4’ should be much easier than my history indicates. None of this made sense until I found out that Joseph ‘Little Joe’ Conrad and Francis Ford Coppola were both on the green-keeping staff at F.H.G.C. when it first opened way back in the 1950s. According to my intelligence, the ‘Labyrinth’ (the 16th’s popular nickname) was fashioned on the course of the Nung River in Cambodia and the rough and tight tree borders were meant to resemble the surrounding jungle environment. Coppola was keen to release a couple of tigers into these areas to f...