Cog Hill #4 Dubsdread (Blacks)
7144 yards – 75.8 Rating – 144 Slope – 90 Score
Day 37; May 27th, 2017
There are some courses I play (or consider playing) where I’m just not sure if I can add any value writing about them. Cog Hill (#4, Dubsdread) is just such a course. While most courses on my trip many people, even in the golf community, haven’t heard of… pretty much everyone who might read this review also knows about Dubsdread. Nevertheless, I’m going to do it anyway (the writing that is, not as sure about the value adding part).
I’ve seen #4 on a few “toughest courses” lists and there also is the fact that it gets it’s moniker from the notion that this is a place that average golfers should fear to tread. However, as I began playing the course what I did not was notice an impossible track eager to gobble up half of the balls in my bag; by contrast, I realized that while Cog can be trying, it’s not really a day ruining kind of tough.
In fact, one of the things I really liked about Cog was that it didn’t seem to want to penalize you as a means of keeping your score from being too low. It just wanted to… how to say… vet you; and be sure you were deserving of the score you obtained. I found this very refreshing.
Pool players say 8-ball is a shooters game, while straight pool is a pool players game. In this sense I think a course like #4 is a golfers track rather than a shot makers. There is nothing symbolic or even akin to target golf at Cog Hill. While I’ve spent my life loving courses that highlight my strong mid to short iron game; if you want to know how good, and complete, a golfer you really are, Dubsdread is a great place to find out.
My favorite hole was probably the par 5 11th, which happens to be the #2 handicap on the course (despite me having a far more difficult time with #18 which is the 16 handicap). I felt it had its hazards in great places to keep play honest while still being a hole that could be attacked. Three strong mid irons could get you close, if not on the green, while avoiding the well placed traps. In other words, avoiding the temptation to hit a longer club made the hole easier to play.
My whole day at Cog was an exercise in course management and restraint (it’s the first course in a long time that I really cared about the outcome from a score standpoint), and the 11th was no different. I took a shorter club (5 iron) off the tee with the idea of leaving myself short of the bunkers, and then took a mid-range iron (6) into a wide landing area short of the second set of hazards. This left me with a very reasonable 7 iron into the green (which I *may* have pulled into the rough on the left resulting in a bogey).
This was an example of how I thought the course sets up in general. It can be managed, by a bogey golfer, to play bogey golf. That is until #18… which, because of the way it is set up, is hard to simply manage your way around. By and large though, I think if you played Cog Hill 20 times, you would actually have a true handicap; which I don’t believe is the case for many other courses.
The course itself was in immaculate condition. From the precisely cut tee boxes, to the manicured fairways and perfectly prepped greens, there was not a blade of grass that didn’t seem ready to be golfed upon. I thought the design was exemplary as well. I, as have many before me, assumed the PGA players play the tips and was curious how I would do from back there. However, I was assured by staff that they play the gold tees and that there is nothing but distance to miss by not playing the back (i.e. the angles don’t get trickier). From my perspective, if the golds are good enough for the pros, they’re good enough for me as well.
That said, there are a variety of tee options on #4, especially if you count the combo tees, so you can really dial in the distance you want to play to maximize the enjoyment of your outing. The bunkers, while – as I understand it – are not as daunting as they used to be, are still significant enough to ensure you don’t want to spend too much time in them. Given how well protected most of the greens are, deciding how much you want left on your approach shot is probably an important distinction when selecting your tee box.
The staff at Cog Hill was great and (who knew?) they’ll wash your car while you play (being first out, we didn’t know about this until we were done, so missed out). Overall the Dubsdread experience was everything I wanted it to be and I not only recommend you play it if you have the chance, I think you owe it to yourself to play Gog, or another course like it, just to see where your golf game really stacks up.
