"Nightmare" Golf Course

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23009, 9 April 1938, Page 14 (Supplement)

"Nightmare" Golf Course

"DECENTLY we ventured on to Joe Cook's Sleepless Hollow Golf Course at Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey. The course is par for nightmares, writes A'lec Duncan in The Judge, New York. The first tee Joe refers to as "Schultz's," and, sure enough, Schultz wan there to serve us a round of beers to help unsteady our nerves. Tho second hole would put anyone on his mettle as a sharpshooter. The green is an island about forty feet in diameter. The water moat about it is supplemented by a sand trap, just to make sure it isn't too easy. We moved on thankfully to the third tee, which the comedian explained was a cinch—"Only sixty yards." It was only sixty yards—but you have to chip through an iron caisson eight feet in diameter and twelve feet long, raised and turned on its side. The afternoon wore on and tho party arrived at an old stone water tower, some forty-five feet high. Cook went prancing up the wooden steps, and we

followed to find that tho top had been seeded down to form a green. (I also happened to notice that ono of the caddies, a midget who had been wearing a

mustachio, had suddenly and unobtrusively exchanged it for a full beard. Since nobody seemed to find this' procedure at all unusual, I held my tongue.) - The following hole, as I recall, is known as the "Hill to Hill," It is iust that, and 297 yards lie between them. Unfortunately for several players, the brow of the second hill was not the beautiful greensward it purported to be. The balls bounced far and wide, and we discovered that actually the hill is hard New Jersey granite, painted green. We moved on to the prize hole of Sleepless Hollow —the Hole-In-One. When you mak* the bowl-shaped green, as one of us, too modest to name himself, did on his drive T your ball rolls automatically into the* cup. There it slips into a pipe and "comes out in a desk below and beyond the green. .Too thereupon opens the desk, producing both the. ball a;nd a handsomely printed "Hole-ln-Ono Certificate," which he fills out with the winner's name. Just as Joe presented us with our certificate, Schulta popped up, dressed as the Big Bad. Wolf. We fled.