In hindsight, the hole offers no options: whether you aim right or left off the tee, you’re going to finish left and your only chance of keeping your approach shot on the planet is to aim right. It’s a breathtaking opener - but a quiet harbinger of what’s to come. Tee shots pour off the slope and careen downhill to the left edge of the fairway, from which an approach shot right of the green will again roll down toward the pin. The first hole (448 yards from the black tees, 350 yards from the white tees) swoops dramatically from right to left, like a gigantic waterslide that would give a defense attorney nightmares. I didn’t need pristine greens to appreciate that.Īnd the view from the first tee didn’t disappoint.
#TOT HILL FARM FULL#
I was ready for the full Mike Strantz experience: to see bizarre, manmade landforms directing play through unconventionally routed holes. Neither were the reports that conditioning had slipped. “I’m glad I saw it,” a friend had told me months earlier, “but I’ll probably never go back.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement. But Tot Hill Farm was a bit of a blind spot for me. Strantz’s design at Tobacco Road - which also sat near the top of my itinerary - needed no introduction.
Ever since I’d begun putting together an itinerary for a quick, late November golf trip to North Carolina, Tot Hill Farm had been near the top of my Christmas list: a fairly under-the-radar layout by the late Mike Strantz, the godfather of maximalist golf course designers. It was a fairly miserable scene, actually. The cold air bit through all the layers I’d managed to cobble together from my token assortment of Mississippi-inspired winter gear, and the rising sun stared straight into my eyes on the driving range as I tried to shake my body from hibernation. The Sunday before Thanksgiving awoke with frost on the ground and smoky breath on the mouths of foolish golfers hoping to squeeze one last adventure out of 2021. Late November had arrived in full force in central North Carolina. For the moment, though, it didn’t matter, either. Tot Hill Farm is not experienced - it’s escaped. The sense of adventure - of plotting through a puzzle and imagining different ways to make it work - is replaced here by a tedious sense of duty. The joy that pervades Tobacco Road is nowhere to be found. For four hours, Tot Hill Farm demands specific shots again and again - and if players do not execute, they are penalized. The playing corridors are too tight to allow for error. There is no room for strategic decision-making.
Over and over again, though, those are questions for which Tot Hill Farm allows just one answer. And it constantly presents players with uncomfortable questions that have no obvious answers. Many of its green shapes and contours are like something out of an acid trip. Its scorecard yardage, which tips out at less than 6,600 yards, suggests playability. The land upon which it sits is among the most dramatic (or severe, perhaps) on which I’ve ever seen a golf course routed. By some of these metrics, Tot Hill Farm - a Mike Strantz design that opened in 2000 an hour northwest of Strantz’s masterpiece, Tobacco Road - is a good golf course.
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