There is a hole at Naruo — the eighth, the one with the ridge in the way — that has been the subject of nearly a century of complaint. You stand on the tee. You can see the marker post. You cannot see the green. A great many people, modern people in particular, find this offensive.
They are wrong, and the wrong is interesting.
A blind shot is the moment a course stops being a calculator and starts being a country. You cannot pace the yardage to a thing you cannot see; you can only know its rough whereabouts, and you must commit. This is exactly the same situation faced by every player who has played the game for five hundred years, except in the past forty, when the rangefinder and the cart path and the perfectly numbered yardage book reduced golf to arithmetic.
You cannot calculate what you cannot see. You can only trust the line.
Arithmetic is not the game. The game is judgment. A blind shot returns it to you whether you want it back or not. The eighth at Naruo — the eleventh at Hirono, the second at Otaru, the fourth at Kawana Fuji — does not ask you to compute. It asks you to trust the line the architect chose to give you, and to walk over the hill to find out what you did.
This is, of course, why the modern industry hates them. They cannot be photographed for a brochure. They do not test “shotmaking” in the way a magazine taxonomy understands the term. They cannot be defended in a member’s meeting against the question, “but how do I know where to aim?”
The answer is: you walk it. You play it twice. You learn it by foot. And the day you stand on that tee with no marker post at all and you swing with conviction at a thing you cannot see, you will understand more about golf than the entire field of a major championship combined.
A blind shot is the architecture telling you to grow up. The Academy votes for that.