The Postage Stamp at Royal Troon is the shortest hole on any Open Championship rota — 123 yards from the back tee — and one of the most feared par 3s in major championship golf. There are no trees, no water, no length. Just a tiny green sat on the side of a sandhill, five bunkers carved around it, and the wind coming in off the Firth of Clyde. This guide walks you through the hole’s history, its hazards, and how to actually play it.
The Stats: Britain’s Shortest Major Par 3
The Postage Stamp is the 8th hole at Royal Troon Golf Club, on the southwest coast of Scotland. From the championship tee it measures 123 yards and is the shortest par 3 used in regular Open Championship rotation. The green sits roughly 18 paces deep and only about 9 paces wide at its narrowest — small enough that the hole’s nickname, given by Willie Park Jr. in a 1923 article, has stuck for more than a century. A green the size of a postage stamp.
Modern Open Championship setups list the hole at anywhere from 114 to 125 yards depending on the day’s tee position. Members usually play it from inside that, often as a 100-yard wedge shot. The yardage isn’t the test. The yardage is the joke. The test is the green, the sand, and the air.
A Brief History of the Postage Stamp
Why It’s Called the Postage Stamp
The name comes from Willie Park Jr., the two-time Open champion and golf-course designer, who wrote in 1923 that the 8th at Troon featured “a pitching surface skinned down to the size of a postage stamp.” The phrase caught on immediately and never left. The official name on Royal Troon’s scorecard, “Postage Stamp,” is one of the few major-championship hole nicknames that has been formally adopted by the club.
Iconic Moments at the 8th
The hole has produced a disproportionate share of Open Championship drama. In 1973, at the age of 71, Gene Sarazen made a hole-in-one with a 5-iron in the first round, then holed out from the bunker for a 2 on Friday — playing the hole in three strokes across his final two competitive Open rounds. He had finished sixth at the same course in 1923, fifty years earlier, on what was meant to be his Open swan song.
In 1997, the hole produced one of the most asymmetric scoring days in major history: Tiger Woods made a triple-bogey 6 on Friday, finding the deep “Coffin” bunker on the left and needing two shots to escape. The same day, the eventual champion Justin Leonard played it in 1-under for the week. In 2016, German amateur Sebastian Cappelen recorded a 9 in the third round, having visited multiple bunkers on his way to the green. Open Championship statistics regularly list the Postage Stamp among the highest-scoring holes on a links course where the long par 4s should, on paper, do more damage.
The Five Bunkers That Define the Hole
The Postage Stamp is defended almost entirely by sand. There are five bunkers in play around the green, none of them shallow, and each one capable of converting a missed tee shot into a card-wrecker.
The Coffin Bunker (Front Left)
The most famous of the five is the deep front-left bunker known as the Coffin. The face is roughly ten feet high and steep enough that escape is often only possible by playing out sideways. Tiger Woods’s 1997 triple bogey came from here. So did Hermann Tissies’s 15 in 1950 — still believed to be the highest score ever recorded on the hole at an Open. The Coffin is the bunker every player on the tee is most actively trying to avoid.
Front-Right and Greenside Bunkers
A trio of bunkers sits short and right of the putting surface, catching anything thinned or bailed away from the Coffin. They are less penal than the Coffin but still steep, and they leave delicate up-and-down attempts to a green that runs away from the player on most pin positions. A fifth, smaller pot bunker is set into the back-left edge, ready for any shot that flies the green when the wind drops unexpectedly. Of the five, the back-left bunker is statistically the rarest to find — but only because most players miss short rather than long.
How to Play the 8th: A Strategy Guide
Club Selection: One Less Than You Think
From the member tees of about 100 yards, the Postage Stamp is a half-wedge for most amateurs. From the Open tee of 123 yards, professionals are typically reaching for a gap wedge or pitching wedge, with the exact club dictated almost entirely by the wind. Reading the wind matters more than reading the yardage. On a still day the hole plays as a flick. With a stiff breeze into the player, it can become a 7-iron knockdown. With a wind helping from behind, the danger flips: the green is too small to land a full pitching wedge that flies the entire yardage, so players have to take less club and run the ball on, accepting a flatter landing angle.
Tee Shot Strategy: Pick a Side and Commit
The standard advice from caddies on the course is to ignore the flag entirely and aim at the centre of the green. The green is too small to chase a side pin; the bunkers are too penal to flirt with. A ball that finishes pin-high in the middle of the putting surface, regardless of where the flag is cut, sets up the easiest two-putt par on the hole.
If you must miss, miss right and short — not left. The bunkers on the right are reachable but recoverable. The Coffin on the left is not. The same principle applies to the iconic island green at TPC Sawgrass: identify the side of the hole where bogey is still possible, and play away from the side where double is the floor.
Reading the Wind
Royal Troon sits beside the Firth of Clyde and the prevailing wind on the 8th tee swirls. The tee box is sheltered by a low dune; the green sits exposed above. Players who read the wind only from the tee almost always under-club. The cleanest read comes from looking at the flag on the green itself, or, when the flag is hidden by the contour, from watching the longer rough behind the green. This is the kind of links-specific wind read that also catches out players at Shinnecock Hills — the green is in a different microclimate to the spot from which you are hitting.
Bail-Out Options Are Limited
Unlike most short par 3s, the Postage Stamp offers almost no bail-out area. The fringe is narrow, the surrounding rough is thick, and any miss left or long brings the steep sandhill behind into play. The honest advice for a higher-handicap golfer is to play the hole as a 110-yard target with the intent of putting from a centre-cut position — and to accept that this hole is, against modern major-championship measurement, a place where a 3 is a great score and a 4 is not a disaster.
What Happens When You Miss
The bunker recovery shot at the Postage Stamp deserves a paragraph of its own. The Coffin bunker has a face so steep that the standard high-bunker technique often fails. Professionals will typically open the clubface more than they would in a normal bunker, accelerate harder through impact, and accept that the ball may need to come out sideways rather than at the flag. Amateur players are well-advised to do the same. A bogey from the Coffin is a triumph. Trying for par is how you turn 4 into 7.
The greenside chip — if the ball stays out of the sand and finds the fringe — is itself non-trivial. The green slopes away from many of the surrounding chipping zones, and a bump-and-run played short of the surface will roll out further than expected. Many of Troon’s iconic disasters have come not from the tee shot but from a third shot that scuttled across the postage stamp and into the sand on the far side.
What the Pros Actually Do
Modern Open Championship data shows the Postage Stamp playing slightly over par in most years — a remarkable figure for a hole this short. The field rarely averages better than 3.05 across four rounds. Birdies are common, but so are doubles. The hole’s bell-curve of scores is unusually flat, which is the statistical signature of a hole where bad outcomes are not capped by length but uncapped by hazard.
Players who tend to score well at Troon — Tom Watson in 1982, Justin Leonard in 1997, Henrik Stenson in 2016, Xander Schauffele in 2024 — all describe the same hole-eight strategy in their post-round interviews: aim for the middle, accept the par, walk to nine. The players who lose tournaments at Troon describe the same hole differently: a flag-hunt that didn’t pay, a half-club that turned out to be a full club, a moment where the smallest hole on the course exposed an attempt at the smallest possible shot.
Lessons for Your Own Game
You may never play Royal Troon. The lessons of the Postage Stamp transfer anyway, because almost every course has a hole that looks soft on the card and plays mean on the day. The 8th teaches three habits worth taking to your home course.
- Yardage is the wrong unit on short par 3s. Wind, lie, and target size matter more than the number on the card. A green this size, in this wind, is not a 123-yard shot — it is a “smallest dispersion possible” shot.
- Pick the safer miss before you take the club out. If the disaster only lives on one side, the strategy is over before address. Aim for the centre, plan the miss away from the worst hazard, and accept par as a triumph.
- Bunker face dictates intent. A steep-faced bunker is not the same shot as a flat-faced one. Choose the recovery line that gets you out, not the line that goes at the pin. The most expensive mistakes at the Postage Stamp aren’t the tee shots — they are the second shots that try to do too much.
The same instincts apply at iconic short par 3s elsewhere: the cliffside 16th at Cypress Point, the ocean-fronted 7th at Pebble Beach, and the wind-exposed approach shots that define a links round. Small target, big consequences, simple rules.
A Hole That Earns Its Reputation
The Postage Stamp is famous because it refuses to be intimidated by the modern game. Tour pros routinely carry the ball 320 yards off the tee with the driver and 180 yards with a 7-iron. None of that helps on the 8th at Royal Troon. The hole is older than the equipment, older than the swing speeds, older than the launch monitors, and it still extracts the same toll it did when Willie Park Jr. described it a hundred years ago. A century is a long time for a hole to keep winning. The Postage Stamp keeps winning because the same things that beat Hermann Tissies in 1950 beat us today: a small target, a deep bunker, and the moment when we forget that the bravest play on a short hole is the unbrave one.
The next time you stand on a 120-yard par 3, look for the side where the disaster lives — and pick the other side. That is the lesson the Postage Stamp has been quietly teaching for a hundred years. Like the famous closing stretch at Carnoustie, the hardest holes in major championship golf are rarely the longest ones. They are the ones where bad outcomes have no floor.
