Right, the 7i from Mark Power.
Context:
It's at Christmas (I think it was the 28th Dec), Mark's home from Wake and it's casual golf all day. The weather is cold and damp, with a slight fog. I'm playing with one of my favourite golf buddies and his son, and we're in the group ahead of Mark and his family (average H'cap is probably +3), we, as a 3 ball, are barely keeping ahead of their 4, but we're holding our own. Kilkenny closes four holes during the winter, and rotates which ones are closed. On this day, you move straight from the 9th to the 12th (see picture).
The 9th is a terribly-designed hole, with dog leg left really far down. That makes it very difficult to get on in two, because the corner is up a hill, and has high pine trees. There is one spot on the fairway you have to land on to have a reasonable chance of cutting the corner (see blue oval on picture). That's a tricky spot to land your drive if you draw the ball, given the trees on the right.
To avoid this, many of the bigger hitters, particularly the youngfellas, go out onto the 12th fairway and attack it with a wedge (the trees on the north side of the green vary in height - the easternmost is the tallest but some of the others are not that bad, so you could get over them and back down with a wedge without too much difficulty). The club has actually threatened to put in an internal out of bounds between the 9th and 12th to stop this, but I guess Mark gets a free pass at Christmas, and that's more than fine with me!
Mark puts it a bit too far left, and he's in the rough on the RHS of the 12th. That rough is cut, but it is always thick and heavy. I've been in there plenty of times off the 12th and it's a fecking dose.
We putt out on the 9th (I won with a par, fyi...) and we're moving onto the 12th as Mark jogs across the fairway to his ball. We give him a wave to tell him to work away, and about 5 seconds later, the ball is on the green, about 12ft left for eagle. We're just staring in disbelief and as he's walking up to the tee box (we were waiting for the fairway to clear), my buddy asks him what he played, and he told us it was a 7 iron.
We saw the ball immediately after it landed, and there was no side spin on it at all. It rolled out slightly, so there was some back spin, but not a lot. To me, this suggests that he just got a 7i over the highest tree and back down in no distance, from thick, wet rough, and stopped it on the green. I honestly didn't think the physics of this would work. I don't think he played a high cut around the trees because that's not the way the ball was moving on the green.
Anyway, we chatted to him for another minute or so, the fairway cleared, and we played on.
