Serapong’s 4th hole offers unique test to Singapore field

SINGAPORE – It’s a par 5 in which driver is – surprisingly – not particularly useful. Two landing zones exist, split like fingers by the larger of the two bunker complexes. The fairway grain runs in two directions. The second shot may require navigating through a line of palm trees and over a saltwater lagoon. Watch out for the Sunday pin tucked on the far left.

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It’s the 587-yard dogleg-left fourth hole at Sentosa’s Serapong course, the venue for LIV Golf Singapore presented by Aramco. It’s part of the famed Dragon’s Tail on the front nine, and it’s arguably the most interesting and unique hole the 54 players will face this week. It certainly offers a different set of challenges than your normal par 5.

Most players enjoy it. “A great hole,” said Stingers GC Captain Louis Oosthuizen. His teammate Branden Grace agreed. “Very seldom do we play par 5s where you really don’t need to hit a driver,” he added.

A few are not as enamored.

“It’s a weird one,” said David Puig, who has a legitimate reason, given that he leads the league in driving distance. “Part of my game is I hit it pretty far, so I don’t have as much of an advantage.”

From a scoring standpoint, it’s not any different than most par 5s. There are three par 5s at the Serapong, and the fourth played as the second easiest one last season. Walking off with par remains a disappointment.

But from a strategy standpoint, it provides some interesting options and dilemmas, especially when playing a shot through the trees seems preferable than a safer, more conservative route.

Speaking of the trees – don’t get the impression that these are thick, luscious oaks that block out the sun. It’s more like a set of tall, skinny poles, with significant gaps in between. Weekend hackers may cringe at the thought of hitting a 3-wood between trees and over water to a green 240 yards away, but professional golfers consider it a mere annoyance.

Asked if it was fairly easy to navigate the trees, RangeGoats GC Captain Bubba Watson replied: “For me, maybe. I don’t know about you.”

Even so, he admitted that “you can get stymied behind them. There’s enough of them. There’s 10, 15 trees? Maybe 15. So, you can get behind them. I’ve hit some wayward shots in the water there, for sure.”

That doesn’t prevent Bubba from being among the few who opt for driver. As one of the two left-handers in the field along with Phil Mickelson, he opts for an “easy cut, dink cut” past the bunkers.

“If I get really behind a tree and I can’t play the shot, or it’s in the rough (on the right side), then I just pay it like a normal par 5, just chip down the fairway and hit on the green from there,” Watson said. “I take my chances on the trees.”

His first-year RangeGoats teammate Ben Campbell, who has played a few Singapore Opens at Sentosa, also uses driver, but for different reasons.

The main set of trees is 309 yards from the tee box, and so the light-hitting Campbell – he’s on the opposite end of this year’s driving distance stats from Puig, ranking last with a 273.7-yard average – need not worry about the trees coming into play.

“I sort of hit easy driver down there, and I can sort of cut one around,” Campbell said. “For me it's driver. I take quite an aggressive line there, and I've sort of played that hole a lot here.”

For others, driver is just not appropriate.

During a Stingers’ practice round this week, Oosthuizen used a 4-wood, Grace a 3-wood while Dean Burmester and Charl Schwartzel each went with 2-irons.

Oosthuizen and Burmester took the aggressive line to the left, closer to the water but into the grain. Grace and Schwartzel went to the right of the big bunker and utilized the down grain. Schwartzel’s shot rolled 20 yards; both he and Grace were forced to navigate the trees on their second shots

Grace also had to deal with another issue.

“The ball was below my feet,” he said. “That makes it a little bit more interesting. It wasn’t just your straight-forward 4-iron or 3-iron. That created some sort of doubt (for the second shot). Do I have to fade it? Do I have to draw it? What do I need to do to just even hit the shot? How is it going to come out? Then there’s the second obstacle – the trees are in your way.”

Oosthuizen remembers a previous LIV Golf visit in which he was behind the trees but hit a massive cut around it. He saw just enough of the left edge of the green to give him confidence that his approach would stay dry.

Even so, “you can hit a good shot there and be really screwed,” he said.

So there’s that.

The league’s longest hitter will not use driver on the fourth hole this week. Puig said he will either opt for a driving iron or a 3-wood, depending on wind conditions, with the goal of landing it short of the trees. That will leave him anywhere from a 5-iron to a mid-wood for a clean second shot. He’s birdied the hole three times in six previous trips in LIV Golf.

“The driving iron is probably the best club,” he said. “If I hit it good, I won’t have any tree trouble.”

Others? “A lot of guys are hitting 3-woods,” Watson said. “You’ll see that this week unless it’s into the wind or something crazy like that.”

But it’s the big dog for Watson. Full steam ahead – trees, water, split bunkers, two-directional grains and right-side rough be damned.

“Some might think that’s the wrong play,” he said, “but it works for me.”