Royal Troon’s most famous hole will make some golfers want to return to sender (2024)

TROON, Scotland — As the thick, dense gorse plants wave heavily back toward the tee like fine hair in the wind, another golfer steps to Royal Troon’s eighth tee box trying to figure out why exactly this short little hole is so daunting.

It’s not a long golf hole. It’s not complicated, either. The greens aren’t particularly fast or full of crazy contours. It’s a 123-yard shot down to the green 20 feet below your feet.

“Green good, miss green bad,” Tiger Woods said. “It doesn’t get any more simple than that.”

But the green No. 8 at Royal Troon is tiny — so much so it is known as The Postage Stamp — and it will likely decide the 152nd Open Championship.

It is the most fascinating hole to watch this week and one of the most famous in golf, a 123-yard beaut known for its minuscule little green built into the side of a 30-foot dune near the Scottish west coast. It is a hole that is both so simple like Woods said and so unbelievably complicated as there are countless ways to play it, bringing in ball flight, distance, direction and speed. The stamp can reward you. And it can ruin your entire tournament.

Eric Cole’s caddie, Reed Cochran, took a look up at the stamp on a cold, windy, rainy Tuesday in Troon and wasn’t too concerned. “It’s a long one compared to LACC,” Cochran joked about Los Angeles Country Club’s 13th hole that played as short as 80 yards one day at last year’s U.S. Open.

Cole, rightfully so, was more worried about the swirling northwest winds coming nearly 20 mph off the Firth of Clyde. He saw the scattered bunkers, the false front and the tiny little landing spot. He tried to go with a full swing higher into the air, but it did not take long for him to realize his mistake.

“Uh-oh,” Cole said.

The wind grabbed Cole’s ball and tossed it further and further left until it was not just left of the green, not just left of the bunkers, but so far left it hit the grassy mound and rolled down a long hill into the high grass. He then tried to hit another one further right and with a lower loft to avoid the wind. Still, the swirls knocked it down to land short near the false front.

“When it’s swirling like this, oh my god, give me a four and get me out of there,” Will Zalatoris’ coach Josh Gregory said.

A large chunk of the most famous golf holes are these sort of tiny, mentally intimidating par 3s that toe the line between extremely scorable and incredibly punishing. The 17th at TPC Sawgrass is surrounded on all sides by a large lake, putting any mish*t in the water, but the green itself is large at 3,912 square feet from 137 yards away. No. 7 at Pebble Beach brings a beautiful shot 40 feet downhill along the crashing Pacific Ocean waves from 106 yards away — the shortest on the PGA Tour schedule — and is most comparable to Royal Troon’s No. 8 with a 2,415-square-foot green. Even No. 12 at Augusta National, the epic 155-yard hole that’s decided many Masters, is more about the wind swirl and the mental challenge than the actual difficulty of landing the 3,360-square-foot green.

The Postage Stamp, though, sits at 2,635 square feet.

Like so many of the best short par 3s, No. 8 is about that beautiful fine line between risk and reward. It is scorable. A great shot with the correct ball flight and spin control can land near the pin. If you know how to play the green’s slopes, you can roll it near the hole. But it is not a hole built around pars. It’s all about birdies and bogeys. If you’re short, you’re rolling down the false front with the front bunker now in play. If you’re left, you’re absolutely hosed with horrific bunkers — the most comically deep of which is simply called The Coffin — and tiny landing spots. If you’re right of the green, the ball rolls straight down to a bunker and leaves you a daunting uphill shot where many attempts roll right back down.

“It’s the possibilities,” Paul Casey said when the Open was last here, in 2016. “The variation in score, the chance of a double bogey or a birdie, right there, just a millimeter difference.”

To camp out for a practice day at The Postage Stamp and watch 100 or so shots into No. 8 is to see creativity and carnage. Almost no two attempts are the same. The objective is simply to land the center of that small green, not to aim for pins. And every player brings different skills and weaknesses to it.

Jordan Spieth hit a fuller shot high into the air. He caught a break at the noon hour with slightly less wind, but Spieth wanted the wind to slow that fuller shot. It landed beautifully, maybe two feet behind the front pin for easily the best shot of the day at No. 8.

Sepp Straka, playing with Spieth, hit a seemingly identical shot moments later. Full swing. High ball flight. Should be the same, right? The wind took it just a few feet further left, and when the margins are so small, those few feet mean landing directly in The Coffin. JT Poston, also in their group, went with a low-flighted line drive to control the wind. It didn’t make it up the false front.

“You know what’s so hard about this?” Cole asked his playing partners earlier. “This is the prevailing wind, right? Well, you play the first six holes with this wind — almost a perfect headwind — and then the first one you play against, it is this little guy.”

Many tried a soft shot, more like a pitch, but the lack of speed left it completely vulnerable to the wind. Those pitches tended to be thrown short left either in the front left bunker or down the hill like Cole.

Todd Hamilton knows a thing or two about how to play Royal Troon well. He won the 2004 Open Championship here as the thrilling underdog, so the 58-year-old veteran turned to a friend and nonchalantly said: “This is kinda like 17 at Sawgrass. If there wasn’t a lake around it, it’s not a big deal. If it weren’t for all these little bunkers around this, it’s not a big deal.”

To Hamilton’s credit, he hit a beautiful little low-flighted shot aiming just left of the pin. It perfectly countered the wind, bounced by the left-side ridge in front of The Coffin, and prepared to roll down the ridge to the pin.

Instead, the bounce landed on a drain and stuck there.

Hamilton mouthed an expletive to himself. The golf gods had spoken. Don’t disrespect the stamp.

World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler played with his usual practice group mates, Sam Burns and Tom Kim. Kim and Burns flew balls either past the green to the right or into left-side bunkers. Scheffler, the best ball-striker in the world, had less trouble, as you might suspect, as he landed center green. But he raved about what the hole represents.

“I get frustrated sometimes when the solution to distance is just making holes further and further, and then it only just encourages guys to try to hit the ball further and further and not worry as much about controlling your ball,” Scheffler said. “No. 8 is a good little way to almost step back in time and control your ball a bit more.”

It’s a dramatic adjustment, though. Not just because it’s short and small. But because the greens in Scotland are slower and spin much more. “That spin gets them every time,” volunteer Tony Coombs said after working near the eighth green all day. Scheffler said that back in the U.S. he might just pinch a ball into the wind and be able to control it, but in Scotland, that same shot might spin back too far and roll off the false front.

Tuesday, the hole played 113 yards adjusted to the pin, and Scheffler pulled out his pitching wedge that normally goes about 140 yards and hit a lower shot to go in the high 120s but without spin.

“If I’m going to take 15 yards off of a club and not try to spin it, that’s a lot different than hitting a stock shot,” he said.

That’s the kind of creativity required here.

And that creativity is not just about the tee shot. Burns’ ball landed in The Coffin, plugged into the sand. Scheffler’s caddie Ted Scott got excited. He had been telling them about how to play this for days. Scheffler said, “Oh, you got the plugged lie? That makes it easier!”

So Burns went down to the evil Coffin bunker that is so deep with vertical walls it requires actual, physical stairs. He set up and did not aim to the pin or even the center of the green. No, he took Scott’s advice and aimed well, well right of the entire green, toward a little ridge just above the stairs. Burns hit a perfect soft shot out of the sand that hit the top of the hill and slowly rolled down the slope to the pin for a tap-in par.

“You guys were making fun of me the other day!” Scott said with vindication.

Kim then tried the same shot. It went over the hill and into the next bunker, and that is how the hole plays. It’s not so much about the green as it is the fact an up-and-down is nearly impossible from a miss. The best place to miss, arguably, is just in front of the false front where you can put up the hill and settle for par, but the front right bunker is in play.

Basically, a miss means bogey.

“And if you hit it in the left bunker,” Scheffler said, “you’re going to be glad to be making a bogey because it’s probably going to plug, and you’ll be hitting up-and-down for your bogey.”

PGA Championship winner Xander Schauffele thought of the hole: “It’s fun if you’re just playing with the boys, I think. I don’t know about for a tournament. Trying to win a major championship, and you have a little hole like that, that can mess your entire week up.”

And it truly has messed with many. Ian Baker Finch shot 92 at the 1997 Open, and that really started with a double at No. 8. Tiger Woods dropped out of the mix at that ’97 Open with a six at the Postage Stamp. It has played over par in each of the last three Opens Royal Troon hosted, and most famously a German amateur named Herman Tissies scored a 15.

The beauty of the Postage Stamp is in the way it lures you in with possibility and terrifies you with, well, more possibilities. So as you watch it for four rounds at the 152nd Open Championship, appreciate both the ways it’s so simple and so damn complicated.

“It’s refreshing,” Schauffele said. “It’s really hard.”

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Photo: David Cannon / R&A via Getty Images)

Brody Miller covers golf and the LSU Tigers for The Athletic. He came to The Athletic from the New Orleans Times-Picayune. A South Jersey native, Miller graduated from Indiana University before going on to stops at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Indianapolis Star, the Clarion Ledger and NOLA.com. Follow Brody on Twitter @BrodyAMiller