The Thumbprint Short

The premise of the “Short” is deception through brevity. At Sleepy Hollow’s 16th, the yardage offers a false truce. The green floats above a fortress of sand, an island in a sea of silica, but the true defense is internal. The “Thumbprint”—a hollow pressed deep into the putting surface—severs the green into distinct shelves. To find the wrong quadrant is to abandon the expectation of a two-putt. The contours here defend par with more ferocity than the hazards ever could.

This ground survived a century of interference. Though C.B. Macdonald laid the foundation, the ensuing decades brought Tillinghast and Rees Jones, men who smoothed and softened where sharpness was required. It fell to Gil Hanse and the historian George Bahto to exhume the past. They took spades to the green, excavating the buried Thumbprint and restoring the internal violence that decades of topdressing had erased. It is no longer a polite green; it is a restored geometric argument.

Standing on the tee with a wedge in hand, the ego swells. The distance is trivial. But the green rejects indifference. It demands a specific landing spot on a surface that moves like a troubled sea. Miss the shelf, and the ball trickles inexorably into the depression. From there, the putting stroke becomes a tentative guess, and the walk to the next tee is usually undertaken in silence, minus the price of the hole.