This course has been on my list for quite a while, it’s not far from where I live, it’s pretty new and made quite a buzz amongst golfers here in my region.
And that’s mainly because Mainzer Golf Club is not the usual course you would expect next door, it’s pretty different from anything I have so far experienced. It starts with the fact that it’s situated in an old stone quarry. This alone should create some pictures in your mind. Huge elevation changes, tall stone walls along the fairways, tee boxes high up with fairways and greens much below the hitting area. It looks like golf from another planet, at least for some of these fancy holes.
The structure of the course is like this: you play two pretty normal golf holes, then one dogleg right with split fairways along the rim which offers great vistas over the next following holes as they are 30 to 50 metres below from where you are standing at that point. Next hole is a shot into the mine, two more holes at the same level, then a super tricky par-5 steeply uphill with an incredibly narrow fairway at two levels with a stone wall in the middle, and a literally breathtaking elevation change. Once your lungs found fresh air again, you play a par-3 downhill, all what you just came up. One more normal hole and you managed the front nine – and most likely you are out of breath by now already.
The 10 is an interesting tee shot into a split fairway and the 11 is again a par-5 dogleg right which goes up and up and up and up. 12 goes up again by the way. 13 is very short par-3 followed by a par-4 dogleg right with a blind tee shot. Tricky to find the right angle here if you haven’t played the course before. 15 goes up again and now you are more or less at the highest elevation of the entire course. The 16 is another par-5 dogleg with a blind tee shot. A pole marks an alignment point but being there for the very first time it’s difficult to judge for angles and distances. When you hit at the wrong side of the fairway, this hole gets unbelievably long. On paper it’s just 544m from yellow but I hit a 3-wood and a hybrid only to find myself at the 200m marker to hit another hybrid which didn’t reach the green eventually…
As you are very high up on the course, guess what happens next: exactly, you are standing and smashing a ball into the 17th fairway from at least 60 metres high. Believe me when I say a ball takes quite a while to land from that altitude. The 18 is a very pretty finishing hole after which you turn around and say to yourself something like “Yes! I made it, tackled it… ok I lost 20 balls, my legs are hurting, my score was abysmal but the experience was great.” This explains my mood at that time very well :)
I played with a golf bud, the weather was very good and we had lots of fun. Yes we did lose a number of balls to the biotopes which happen to be found on most holes but we were happy that we finally managed to play the course at great weather conditions on a normal Monday afternoon. Golf definitely beats a day in the office big time!
After the round we sat together, counted scores, had a beer and summed up the day. What I personally didn’t like was the gravel parking lot and the “club house” which is more something you would expect at a down-to-earth football club or tennis court facility. Bit too basic for my liking.
All in all a very interesting course which I definitely will play once more, but it’s a tricky one, I wouldn’t recommend it to players with a 28+ handicap at least they should be aware that the golf performance on that day has to be absolutely secondary and that they have to bring lots of balls. Course management is key here. We very often took shorter clubs in order to play it safe, which was a good thing in the end.
I’m not sure if it will but I tried to take some pictures to illustrate the unusual setting of the golf course, at least for those that can be found in central Europe.
Check out Instagram for more pics.
I can’t recall exactly but I might have been to Föhr a dozen times. Föhr, the neighboring island to Sylt in north Germany, was one of my parents’ usual family summer holiday destinations and as a kid I remember spending quite some time on the island. I didn’t appreciate the beauty of it back then and when I reached a certain age, I just stopped going without hesitation. Needless to say I wasn’t golfing in my teens and never visited the golf course—until just recently. I had to become 40 years of age and the course needed some severe renovations in order to be mentioned in golf articles and to earn a spot on my bucket list.
Golficiency 