I played Troon’s famous postage stamp – you shouldn’t do that

Bees sting bears. That’s a fact the giants of the sport at the 152nd Open Championship should keep in mind as they head to the par-3 8th hole at Royal Troon and suffer defeat at the Postage Stamp.

“It’s a dream destroyer, a card destroyer, an Open destroyer and it’s awesome,” says Colin Montgomerie, the Ayrshire town’s most famous son of golf. The evidence of this can be found throughout the course’s history. In 2016, the field played the hole over par on all four days, with the weekend’s rounds producing 32 bogeys and six double bogeys with 23 birdies.

In 1997, Tiger Woods described the challenge as “easy enough.”

“Hit the green – good,” said Woods. “Missed the green – bad.”

Montgomerie believes there is more to this than that. In fact, a test so heavily influenced by the wind can be seen as the result of a perfect storm in golf.

“First of all, there’s position in the Troon test,” Montgomerie said. “It’s the first hole that leads to victory. The first seven holes are into the wind. Ball position, the way you hit the ball, the way you think, how the wind reacts, everything has to do with hitting into the wind.”

“But then suddenly: ‘Bingo!’ Everything has changed compared to the last 90 minutes. What do you do now? You take the ball back into the stance, change the way you approach the ball, you try to hit the ball downwards. The feeling is completely different. So you pull it to the left or push it to the right. That’s the first mistake you make.”

And then there’s the visual itself. “You’re standing on an elevated tee and you’re looking at this narrow strip of green. My God, it’s narrow,” Montgomerie says. “And you say to yourself, ‘Come on, it’s 120 yards, you’re a pro, all these people are watching and this is just a small shot.’ But the more you look, the bigger these bunkers get and that’s the problem. Because this isn’t a case of ‘so what, just go up and down out of a bunker.’ My goodness, anything but that.”