Scotsman Robert MacIntyre is never afraid to voice his opinion, and his latest tirade proves that point further.
After tying for 25th at the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship, which Tyrrell Hatton won for a record third time, MacIntyre walked off the course and immediately slammed the Old Course’s penultimate hole, the famous par-4 17th.
“Blow it up,” MacIntyre told Martin Dempster of The Scotsman after his round on Sunday.
“I don’t think there are many worse holes in world golf.”
Known as ‘The Road Hole,’ the 17th features a tee shot like no other in the world. You must hit a cut over the corner of the St. Andrews hotel, making the tee shot on this dogleg right completely blind. Out-of-bounds, therefore, looms down the right side, which always shoots bursts of anxiety through a player’s mind. But the approach does not get any easier on this 495-yard behemoth. The putting surface is pencil-thin, protected by a central, infamous bunker that is nearly impossible to get up-and-down out of. Beyond the green lies a road that gives the hole its name and just past the pavement sits a centuries-old wall. Sometimes, players have no choice but to richoceht chip shots off the stone in an attempt to get it back onto the green. They are often unsuccessful.
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For these reasons, birdies are sparse.
“I think it’s a terrible hole off the back tee. It doesn’t need to be modernized, to bring excitement it needs to be a hole you are able to hit a golf shot into and not one where you just hit it onto the green and try to get up and down,” MacIntyre explained.
“It almost plays like a par-5. They try to do things to this golf course that don’t need to be done. [On Sunday,] I rifled a drive off the tee and then a 4-iron and I was the furthest up the hole.”
MacIntyre has plenty of reason to be furious with this hole. During Saturday’s third round, he made a double-bogey six after his approach landed short of the green and short of the Road Hole Bunker. He failed to get up-and-down to save bogey, let alone par. Despite that, he still shot a 7-under 65, but he did not come close to carding that number during his final round on Sunday. MacIntyre could only summon a 2-under 70, not a bad score given the blustery conditions, but nowhere near as good as the round he turned in on Saturday. Yet, MacIntyre managed to post a better score on the 17th hole on Sunday, although he still dropped a shot, carding a bogey-five. He missed the green short again, failing to get up-and-down once more.
Still, his top-25 finish at the Dunhill Links does nothing to his Race to Dubai ranking, the DP World Tour’s equivalent of the FedEx Cup. MacIntyre still holds on to the sixth spot in the standings and is locked into the final two events of the year on the DP World Tour in the Middle East.
Jack Milko is a golf staff writer for SB Nation’s Playing Through. Be sure to check out @_PlayingThrough for more golf coverage. You can follow him on Twitter @jack_milko as well.
