For every golfer, there are good golf holes, great golf holes, and then there’s Fernbank No. 1, a tee box so tangled in topographical lunacy it verges on performance art. On paper, it’s nothing, a 254-yard dogleg par-4 with a single bunker near the green. But the cartographic reality unfolds as an absurdist sketch: one tee shot slicing across five other fairways, a layout so recklessly interwoven it feels less like a golf course and more like a choose-your-own-misadventure.
Most designers would call that a mistake. At Fernbank, it’s a mission statement.
A Maze of Mayhem and Meaning
Because there’s something illuminating about a hole this objectively bad. Not merely quirky or idiosyncratic, Fernbank’s opener is a hazard to both the pace of play and cranial integrity. But in that dysfunction lies the point. Golf is supposed to humble you. Why not start on the ground?
We pretend to love golf for its beauty, its grace, its whispers of serenity between trees. But the deeper truth is this: we love it because it tests us. Golf, more than any other sport, is a prolonged study in managing disappointment. It’s a game of scars, and only occasionally of triumphs. Without the former, the latter means nothing.
So yes, celebrate the bad. Bad range balls that wobble like wounded geese. Bad lies that dare you to try something heroic. Bad weather that scrapes your skin and fogs your lenses, offering nothing except the question: Will you keep going?
Rock Bottom Has Its Perks
Even a bad round, truly bad, can become a gift. It relieves you of pressure, expectation, and self-importance. It liberates you from the tyranny of your own ambitions and returns you to the simple wonder of being outdoors, trying something difficult, knowing you’ll fail more often than you succeed—and showing up anyway.
We’ve all had the front-nine meltdown or the double-bogey parade. But what lingers more often than the numbers is the quiet pride of clawing your way back. You stop chasing perfection and start chasing perseverance. Golf becomes less about the result and more about your response.
The Golfer Redemption Hidden in Ruin
That’s where the heart of the game lives. Not in the beauty, but in the wreckage. Not in manicured precision, but in the awkward improvisation demanded by a bad bounce or a tree that shouldn’t be in play but absolutely is. There’s a reason the best golf stories don’t start with “I hit every fairway.” They start with disaster, and end with survival.
So yes, Fernbank is chaos. But it’s the right kind of chaos. The first hole may be a traffic accident in waiting, but it’s also a reminder that perfection is not the point. The point is to keep swinging, to keep going, and to find meaning not in avoiding the bad, but in moving through it.
Golf is pain, sometimes. But it’s also a purpose. And if you’re lucky enough to spend your holiday walking a $15 course in Cincinnati, dodging incoming shots from six directions, maybe you’ll discover that even in the worst of it, the game somehow remains the best.
