Short and Sweet

Feature-BeautifullyBrutal-Mackenzie

“Sixteen is really, really tough,” says Mackenzie, who should know — as an All-American golfer at Washington before launching her LPGA TOUR career, she’s played it plenty of times in competition. “It kicks off a perfect finishing stretch for a golf course — hard par-3, hard par-5, then you get to 18 and you get to take it easy, with the widest fairway on the golf course,” she says. “That’s how I like to finish a round.” Sixteen may not look like much on the scorecard, at just 146 yards from the blue tees — but until you’ve found yourself hunting for your ball among the rocks that line the creek running down the right side, or hacking out of one of the steeply faced bunkers, you can’t entirely appreciate its challenge. The back-to-front slope of the green, too, makes staying below the pin key to any serious birdie attempt — an extra-challenging task when coming in with a long iron from the 198-yard tips. And of course, there’s always the looming vision of 17 — one of the state’s most bedeviling holes — in the background.

More like this