Claudia Laurent

Golf writer, Golf Handicapp · 4 October 2026

123 yards to a true island green, and the yardage is the least of it. The lake it sits in has no beach, no shallows and no shelf anywhere. The rock goes straight down into the water on every side and the water is so deep it reads black rather than blue, with two thousand feet of vertical cliff standing out of it all the way round. There is no bail out, no lay up and no chip back, because there is nowhere to miss it to. You either hit the island or you reload. The way out is a timber jetty and a small rowing boat, which is a lovely detail until you realise what it means: get it wrong and the walk of shame is a row. The shot is a wedge for most people and that is exactly the problem, because a wedge is the club golfers are most likely to be cute with. Still mountain air over cold water carries less than you expect, and a green ringed by water with no reference points anywhere makes everything look closer than it is. Take one more club than feels right, aim at the fattest part of the green rather than the flag, and accept that a two putt three here is a genuinely good hole. The people who make a mess of this are not the ones who hit it badly, they are the ones who try to be clever from 123 yards.

This hole is not real. Like every hole in the collection it was conjured with AI, a golf daydream rather than a course you can go and play. The thousands of courses in the Golf Handicapp app, however, are very real.

This one is make-believe. The thousands of courses in the app are not.

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The Rapids

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The Maelstrom

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AI-imagined golf hole: a par 3 played from a striped tee on the rim of an enormous limestone pit straight down into it, the near half of the pit floor filled wall to wall with deep blue green water, the green sitting on a low rock shelf on the far side with two pale bunkers, a dark cave mouth at the foot of the right hand wall with a gravel cart path running out of it, and dense jungle crowding the rim above

The Sinkhole

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About the author

Claudia Laurent · Golf writer, Golf Handicapp

Claudia writes about the World Handicap System, golf scoring and getting more from every round for Golf Handicapp. She is a mid-handicap golfer who logs every card, the good ones and the ones she would rather forget.

This image is AI-generated. Published 4 October 2026.

The Deep

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The Breach

The Rapids

The Maelstrom

The Sinkhole

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