[Daryl]

Yes, but oddly, in my experience not due to a designer or greenskeeper wishing to make a hole difficult, but rather due to ignorance and/or resources.

One hole in particular I play (often) is a 450 yd par 4 that has been 'redesigned' a few times to accommodate redesign and rerouting of nearby holes.

It has a huge tree smack dab in the middle of the fairway, leaving only 5 yards of fairway left and 20 yards of fairway right. If you go left of the tree, you have an uphill blind shot from the rough. If you go right of the tree your ball will go through the fairway into the rough on a 45 degree sidehill lie.

From there, the approach shot is into an elevated green built into the side of a steep hill, with a large mound blocking the right 1/3 of the green. The green itself is sloped severely from right to left and front to back. I have hit 9-irons dead solid perfect, 9 miles in the air, that will not hold the green.

The irony is the rest of the golf course is a pushover, making this hole completely out of place.

I totally agree. They don't want to spend the money to remove it.

The guy who owns this course might market it better if he stopped watering, everyone must use rented hickory shafted clubs and low compression golf balls, and sell it as an experience to enjoy and have events and competitions. Charge more for it. (people lack imagination, if you can't compete with the big golf courses, them make them compete with you.)

If they would just design courses to follow the lay of the land more or less and stop watering them so much, we would play a game much closer to that of the Bobby Jones era and I bet that this golf course would be fun to play wth pitch and runs, etc. It's fun to have the ball roll out a bit on a drive or long iron. It brings back a dimension of the game we've seem to have lost.

The pros' get their fairways rolled and firmed up a bit for tournaments but the game was historically played on fast fairways and slow greens. Now we have slow fairways and fast greens. Things have changed. I think that course designers generally go too far nowadays.