No. 5 at The Heather. A wetland-water hazard guards the entire left side of this 560-yard beauty. Navigate safely around it, not to mention over a front bunker to the green.

No. 5 at The Mines. From an elevated tee, players must stare down and conquer the two massive sand dunes to the left of the fairway that hold the ninth tee on this 607-yard No. 1 handicap hole.

No. 18 at Shepherd’s Hollow. This hole was made to antagonize right-handed slicers. Seven bunkers stair-step up the fairway along the right side, followed by a massive pond. Two bunkers to the left and two in back guard a narrow green.

No. 16 at Eagle Crest. Golfers can lose a ball in the water at any point along the 520 yards from the elevated tee to the peninsula green that juts out into Ford Lake. The tee shot is the most daunting, though, requiring a 175-yard carry over wetland to a fairway pinched by woods on the left and the lake on the right.

No. 7 links nine at Bay Harbor. Although short by par 5 standards (and criteria for our main story) the 500-yard hole is generally considered one of the top par 5s in all the Midwest. Contoured mounding guards the entire left side, while a cliff overlooking Lake Michigan is a penal distraction on the other side. The green is perched perilously close to the edge of the drop-off.

Ray Hearn (right) studies the green on one of his par 5s.

Great par 5s don’t just happen says Raymond Hearn, president of Raymond Hearn Golf Course Designs with offices in Plymouth and Holland, Mich.

“They’re big exclamation points,” notes Hearn, who crafted three of the Monster Par 5s (Hemlock, Yarrow and Moose Ridge) listed in our feature.

Ray wanted readers to know that he never designs a par 5 as an opening hole. Yet when you play Yarrow in Augusta you’ll be greeted with what may well be the defining hole of your golf experience there.

“It turned out okay (the routing),” reflects Hearn. “And the folks there love the comments they get. But I’d rather it have been the 10th hole rather than the first.” Regardless, No. 1 at Yarrow got the “wow” affect Hearn strives for on par 5s.

“To quote Robert Trent Jones, Jr., golf course design is like creating a piece of music. Par 5s are high notes. Ideally, I strive to design these moments in play to come on the fourth hole, the opening hole of the back nine, and when possible, the 18th hole,” says the award-winning architect.

It’s difficult to trace the introduction of par 5s in the context of their significance to the game (i.e., par being 72 strokes on a regulation, 18-hole golf course requiring 10 par 4s, four par 3s and four par 5s). Eighteen holes was accepted as the standard for the game of golf in Scotland in 1764. Hearn nods to the father of American golf architecture, Charles Macdonald, for contributing most to the value of par 5s being designed into American courses and 72 strokes as the standard of play. Macdonald also was instrumental in the creation of the United States Golf Association in 1894, a year after he built the first 18-hole golf course in America, the Chicago Golf Club.

Course designers – and owners for that matter – seldom if ever set out to construct par 70 or par 71 golf courses. More often than not, a course with fewer than four par 5s is owed to a lack of land or the proper land formations required to fully execute a designer’s creativity. And it’s getting more difficult all the time, laments Hearn, who called technology the bane of course architects. Three-hundred-forty-yard tee shots render many par 5s to mere long par 4s.

“We can’t build courses for the pros,” he says. “It’s still a club (courses in general) that members (the fraternity of golfers) are going to play.”

Because of sheer length, par 5s are the most dramatic and the most challenging holes to construct, Hearn explains, because they are so complex in the context of designing them for three strokes and two putts per their intended contribution to the course and your game. Properly constructed and placed, they add balance and enjoyment to the round.

The longest hole in the Michigan Monster Par 5s feature is the 640-yard 10th at Thousand Oaks. As golf courses are stretched to even further lengths (several 8,000-plus yard courses currently exist in the U.S.), golfers will soon be playing from tee stations that will extend par 5s to 700 yards in length. In fact, Purgatory Golf Club in Noblesville, Indiana has one hole that’s nearly one-half mile long, the par 5, 741-yard 13th hole. Purgatory, indeed.