I like to play a proper 18-hole, Par-72 course, but it’s not always possible. Fortunately, when time is a consideration, there is a par-3 course nearby. I can play nine holes in about an hour or so, and it’s a great way to work on my short game. Does anybody else like playing a par-3 course?
My girlfriend likes them, but I don’t mind them for the same reasons you outlined. However, it’s still nice to play a full 18. I can’t quite shake the “You know, I could have been playing real golf” feeling I get after a par 3 course, though.
No, unless you’re in college and extremely stoned.
We had a nice par-3 course around here until about a year ago (they sold the property to a nearby hospital so that the hospital could expand). Its 18 holes ranged from 100 yards to 250, so you got to use every club in your bag. The greens were tiny (apparently tiny greens are less expensive to construct and maintain), so you got lots of chipping practice.
We’d play it using just three clubs to make things more fun (usually some sort of putter/chipper/long club combo - I’d bring a putter, sand wedge, and three-hybrid).For me, that 250-yard hole was a full three-hybrid followed by a 3/4 sand wedge shot.
The hardest hole using just three clubs was a 130-yarder over a pond - you’d have to hit a partial three-hybrid hard enough to clear the water but easy enough not to rocket over the tiny green into/through the trees beyond it.
Lots of fun, and no handicap pressure as the course didn’t have a USGA rating.
I’ll take a real course over a par three, but of course any time you’re golfing it’s gonna be good.
I haven’t played in a while, but I much prefer par-3. The boyfriend doesn’t have to stand around waiting for me to get the damned ball down the fairway, and you can play in the heat of the summer without spending the last six holes or so fantasizing about jumping into a water hazard.
Par-3 is the only way I play golf. You only need to carry three clubs (an iron, a wedge, and a putter). The price is cheap, the lines are non-existent, you can take as many strokes as you need. It’s the way golf should be–relaxing and non-competitive.
Wow. That makes it sound completely un-fun.
Personally, I would rather play a regulation course. My father’s sister-in-law, age 90+, plays 9 holes on a par 3 course, several times a week. She walks the course.
If a 90+ year old lady can walk a par 3 course, it cannot be all too bad.
For the record, each summer this lady drives from Florida to New England to see her kids, grandkids, and great grandkids. All alone. She is a remarkable lady.
We had a par-3 course at the course where I worked as a teen. It was the weirdest damn par-3 course of all time.
First of all, the second hole was a 350-yard par 4. Nobody knew why it was there. I think the course designer just wanted to throw people for a loop. “It’s a par-3 course, I’ll just take my 7-iron, pitching wedge and putter…WTF?” What made the hole worse was that because the rest of the holes were par 3, the maintenance guys didn’t always bother to cut any of the grass on the course to fairway height. So you had a 350-yard hole with nothing but rough from tee to green. Even if there was a fairway cut, it was usually about ten feet wide, so it took an absolutely perfectly straight drive to reach the fairway.
After a second mundane hole, you reached the fourth, which was another gem. It was about 120 yards to the green, no traps or anything. What’s the catch here? Apparently, the green was cut into the north face of Mt. Everest. If your ball was on the lower part of the green, the hole was about at eye level. You think I’m exaggerating, but I swear I’m not. I once PLACED the ball on the green at the top end, and it rolled all the way down to the bottom. It was so bad that we encouraged golfers to hit to the green, add two strokes to their score, and pick up.
The greens on all other holes were of two varieties: rock-hard, or aerated so thoroughly they looked like Swiss cheese. You could bounce a golf ball like a basketball on the first type. The latter type was more like an obstacle course than a green. I often wondered whether I should try a pitching wedge. Come to think of it, there was a third variety: rock-hard Swiss cheese greens. Your putt would hit a bump and go bouncing off the green. Some of the greens looked like the final scene of Caddyshack.
Owing to the generally half-assed nature of the course, the administration sort of forgot about the par-3. If the club pro wasn’t working and a kid came in wanting to play it, we’d just let them go for free. Other patrons took the hint. I once saw a guy with bucket of range balls at the first tee, hitting ball after ball to the green. The brazen part of that was that you could see the first tee from the clubhouse, but the guy knew that nobody cared. The maintenance team, already overstretched when we added a second 18 (and that’s a whole 'nother story by itself), didn’t exert itself too much at the par-3, and so you’d see some interesting patches of rough. At some places the rough reached knee height. After the snake rumors started spreading, and especially after actual snakes were spotted, no golfer dared brave the really tall rough, which became a lost ball gold mine.
The only thing that saved the par-3 from being a real trash dump was that you could see it from the main highway. Of course the hole which paralleled the highway was kept immaculate. There was a small swamp between it and the roadway, and it stank like Satan’s feet, but still.
All of us workers kind of had a soft spot for the par-3. Its main patrons might have been under-teens, over-80s, and thieves, but nobody could argue that it was soft-boiled. A par score on any of its holes was a minor triumph, a birdie was all but unheard of. I birdied the first hole once and walked off the course; I knew it was going to be all downhill from there.
Played lot and lots of par-3 in college in between going to real courses with friends.
It was totally cheap, you could go solo, you could go practically daily, no tee times required. Between that and the driving range there was no better way to get practice in during the work week.
You perfect your short game this way and you have a humongous advantage over your colleauges on game day.
Your remarks remind me of a couple of local par-3s.
The first, which I played just a few days ago, seems easy at first–there are no water hazards, nor are there sand traps. But the maintenance occasionally leaves a little to be desired. For example, it is entirely possible to lose your ball on a fairway, where the grass sometimes gets long enough to qualify as rough on other courses. The greens themselves are a little better looked after, but bumps and longer-than-the average-grass on a green, mean that putting is a challenge. In spite of these problems, I like the place–it opens early in the season, closes late, is fairly quiet, and doesn’t seem to attract a lot of yahoos.
The second has one of those quirky par-4s that is out of place on a par-3 course. Also about 350 yards or so, its fairway is narrow and wedged in between a couple of other holes and a farmer’s field. A lot of golfers pull out the heavy artillery for this one, and frequently find themselves slicing into the field. Otherwise, this course is a lot more challenging in its design than the first–it has, for example, both water hazards and sand traps–but it can be crowded and noisy on a weekend, and one slow group can hold everything up.
I can’t even think of a par-3 around me, tho there are literally 100s of reg courses within 20-30 miles of my home. Well, there is one 9-hole course that is almost a par-3 but I believe it has 2 or 3 par 4s. And that one is quite pricey and always quite crowded. I would take someone just starting out there, but would never go myself for my own enjoyment.
I wouldn’t mind a par-3 that had holes up to 200 yds, but it seems most of them are mostly limited to wedges - what I believe used to be called an “executive” course. I work on my short game several times a week, but would be bored to play a round where every time I got up to the tee it would be “What should I hit here? I know, how about sand wedge!”
Also, it seems par-3s are often quite pricey for the experience, and generally quite crowded with a huge percentage of duffers with zero idea of proper golf etiquette. If I had ready access to an inexpensive and uncrowded par-3, sure, I’d be there several times a summer.
Kinda different topic, but I generally play more 9-holes than full 18s. Just lots more times I can fit 2.5 hrs into my schedule than 5+ (including travel and all).
Within the last week Chicago Trib columnist Eric Zorn had an article decrying the lack of short courses. He described one he liked with holes as short as 50 yds or so. In his opinion, that type of course would be helpful in getting young people into the game. Apparently the percentage of younger folk into golf is decreasing.
I suck at golf, mostly because I only play once or twice a year. However, doing the quick math, I see that if I triple-bogeyed all 18 on a par-3, I’d still score the best game of my life. I suddenly have the incredible urge to get out to the par-3 course as soon as possible! 
I like par 3s, I never keep score anyhow.