Not only is Jumbo Ozaki's Selangor creation visually dominated by the Bukit Takun, a dramatic outcrop from the Malaysian topography but rumour has it that golfers may not be the course's only transient populace...
"Templar Park is renowned for being haunted....i found the changing room very eerie despite it being quite packed....there's a certain hole where the air is incredibly still with absolutely no sound at all....don't worry you'll know it when you play the hole...spooky!!!!.....rumour is that prisoners were executed and buried here during the 2nd. world war by the Japanese army My uncle played at night there and there were extra shadows on the fairway......." - from Golf RepublicHow this affects your average golf architect, I don't know, other than he might want to get his best work in before the fateful hole comes along. Not much point serving up a dazzler like Templer Park's 18th (below) if punters, by the time they get to it, are shaking so much they can barely manage their own signature, let alone the course's...
Even Templer's own website reports the closer as being "controversial" and "gimmicky". If "gimmicky" is modern golf-speak for "more than one way to be played", though, then let' hear it for gimmicks.
Presumably, the gonads-of-steel route sees you drive onto that spit of land extending into the lake, south-west of the green. Half-way house is to drive parallel with the lake at the bottom of the photograph before depositing your second shot in the area between the bunker fringing the lake and those by the green, leaving you with an open approach.
Aquaphobes who want land beneath the flight of their ball at all times, on the other hand, play around the lake but even they have their moment of decision, whether to go for the green with their second or lay up in front of the sand.
Four ways to play one hole. That's the spirit, Jumbo.
View Templer Park Country Club, Selangor, Malaysia in a larger map
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