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MARION, MASSACHUSETTS | Competitors in last week’s Massachusetts Amateur had the pleasure of playing one of the Bay State’s best golf courses at the Kittansett Club. Located in this sleepy sailing village on Buzzards Bay just west of Cape Cod, it is a Golden Age classic, routed across an exposed, often windswept spit of land and through more sheltered swathes of New England woods.
The course demands both power and precision, and the mix of lengths and angles compels golfers to execute a variety of shots if they have any hope of scoring. Kittansett can be a brute, but those who can control their distances and work their golf balls in the wind can certainly score.
Par is 71, measuring some 6,800 yards from the tips but a little more than 6,400 yards from the markers used by most male members. Its most celebrated hole is the par-3 third, where a well-contoured, slightly elevated green is surrounded entirely by sand and bordered on the right by the bay. But there are so many other holes of note. Like the short 4-par at No. 10, with a diagonal row of grassy mounds on the left side of the landing area and a pair of bunkers on the right, both of which force golfers to consider distance and direction on their drives. As for the largely blind, uphill green, it is protected by bunkers left and right.
Another beauty is the 12th, a longer par-4 that doglegs slightly to the left. A cross bunker comes into play from the left on tee shots, and the best move is taking on that hazard with one’s drive, keeping the ball on that side of the fairway for a more open approach to the green. But if a golfer decides instead on the less perilous route down the right, he must then clear a gnarly bunker complex and more grassy mounds to land his second shot onto the putting surface.
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