Meadows Farms Golf Course in Virginia is stuffed with zany options, however one stands out from the relaxation.
Courtesy Meadows Farms Golf Course
You don’t typically see Kyle Berkshire laying up. But examine his YouTube channel and there he’s, the three-time World Long Drive champion, on a golf course in Virginia, taking three whacks to succeed in a inexperienced.
Berkshire is lengthy. But the hole he’s enjoying is even longer. At 841 yards, it’s, based on the “Guinness Book of World Records,” the longest hole in the United States.
“People come from all over to see it,” Lora Dotson says.
With her husband, Ken, Dotson is the co-owner of Meadows Farms Golf Course, a 27-hole facility in Locust Grove, Va., and although she performed no function in its design, she is aware of how the quirky course got here to be.
Meadows Farms takes its title from the late Bill Meadows, whom everybody referred to as “Farmer,” owing to the work he did.
An Army vet and former highschool soccer coach who turned a summer time gig promoting tomatoes right into a multi-million greenback plant nursery, Farmer performed golf for the first time when he was 21. Though he appreciated the recreation, he had different issues to do, so he didn’t play once more for an additional 35 years. By then, he was middle-aged and rich however fueled by youthful power and whimsy. Rather than journey to different programs, he selected to construct one in every of his personal, on farmland roughly 90 minutes south of Washington D.C.
Courtesy Meadows Farms Golf Course
As the story goes, Farmer had three standards for the venture: modest greens charges, pleasant service and unicorn golf holes, each completely different than the subsequent. Like a high-end collage-maker, he purchased a big assortment of golf coffee-table books and reduce out footage of issues he appreciated. Then, in collaboration with a golf architect named Bill Ward Jr., he went full kitchen-sink, throwing the whole lot and extra at the design.
The outcome, accomplished in 1993, is a routing composed of three aptly named 9-hole layouts: the Waterfall 9, the Longest Hole 9, and the Island Green 9, which, technically, needs to be the Island Green 10, because it has a warm-up hole. It additionally has — you guessed it — an island-green hole, with railroad ties of the sort you’d discover at TPC Sawgrass. The Waterfall 9 has — shock! — a hole with a 40-foot waterfall behind it, in addition to a par-3 meant to appear like a baseball stadium, with a billboard-covered wall behind the inexperienced.
From the second he started dreaming up the course, Farmer knew he wished it to characteristic the longest golf hole in the world. But at the time that honor fell to a 948-yarder on Koolan Island, in Australia (a mark that has since been surpassed by a 1,100 par-7 at Gunsan Country Club, in South Korea), and Farmer wasn’t positive that he had sufficient land. He can be stated to have wished a USGA score and was fearful that the governing physique wouldn’t sanction a par-7. (When reached by GOLF.com, the USGA stated par isn’t an element in its rankings.) Whatever the case, he wound up with a par-6 hole and settling for the home report as a substitute.
Farmer died in 2017, three days shy of his 82nd birthday, with numerous rounds at Meadows Farms below his belt. By then, he’d offered the course to Lora and Ken Dotson, who’ve stayed true to its founder’s unique intent by hiring cheerful workers, maintaining greens charges modest (they vary from $35-$68) and leaving the uncommon design intact.
The lengthy hole performs as the third on the Long Hole 9, and nobody has ever reached it in two photographs. But a gaggle of massive hitters have gotten there in three, together with a 15-year-old named Michael Wallace, who seven years in the past turned the first golfer to make an albatross on the hole. Playing from the white tees, at 720 yards, with an aiding wind, Wallace went driver, 3-wood, 3-wood, jar.
No one has equaled that feat since. Not even the long-bombing Berkshire. In his YouTube video, teeing it from the suggestions, he blasts a driver, nukes a 3-iron and flushes a 9-iron to arrange a ho-hum birdie 5.
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