Hitting a golf ball onto any normal green can be hard enough, even for professional golfers at times. Hitting a golf ball onto a green that is all but surrounded by water then, is nigh on impossible. Such a task awaits the field who will contest the Player’s Championship at the famous Sawgrass course in Ponte Vedra beach in Florida this weekend.
The course’s signature hole, the par three 17th, is one of the most, if not the most famous golfing hole in the world. Known as Island Green, the 78 foot long putting surface is surrounded by water on all sides and is linked to the rest of the course only via a narrow walkway.
The 17th at Sawgrass is one of golf’s most famous holes
At 132 yards, the hole is actually the shortest hole on the course and contains the largest green, but that doesn’t stop 120,000 balls from finding a watery grave there every year. Bob Tway once lost four balls on a single visit to the hole, making a nine over par 12 to slip out of contention in the 2005 Player’s Championship, while in 1986, a Pennsylvanian grocer named Angelo Spagnolo, who had won a Golf Digest competition for ‘America’s Worst Avid Golfer,’ shot a 66 on his way to a total of 257, a massive 185 over par at the Florida course.
Over the next four days, the curse of the 17th is likely to haunt some of world’s best golfers and it has inspired us here at JOE to take a look at some more of the world’s toughest golf holes.
