TL;DR:
With all the imagination of a retirement home walking track, and all the dramatic tension of a McDonald's regular hamburger, Thunderchief is a mind-numbingly typical chuck-fest made by guys who cannot seem to imagine disc golf as anything else.
For the intrepid:
Mark Twain once derided golf as the ruination of a perfectly good walk. In all my years playing disc golf (almost 20 now), I have rarely felt that way about DG. You have to try pretty hard to take a combination of tossing a frisbee and playing darts and basketball and mess it up, but people keep trying, and occasionally they hit paydirt. Such is the case with Thunderchief at Veteran's Park in Tupelo, MS. Great weather and a few good holes aside, Thunderchief tested my love for DG as only Lover's Lane in Bowling Green had before.
I feel bottomless pity for anyone who would try this course as their introduction to the game. It's most akin to playing poker in a NASA wind tunnel. where whatever skills you might possess are swallowed alive in the onslaught of merciless, unidirectional physics. The blokes who crafted this course want nothing more than a place to show off their ZOMG 500 FOOTS LAZOR DRIVES!!11!, and they hammer incessantly away at it for about 16 of the 18 drudgery-laden holes.
If you're looking for the meager bright spots, play the first three holes (the ones that were re-allocated from another course, interestingly enough) and head on back to the car to go somewhere else. With an average hole length in the 370s and about 11 trees to look at the whole time (3 of which actually affect gameplay), one finds themselves playing a tiresome warm-up to a game that never arrives. You do get a few golden opportunities to lose a disc in a lake (and you can almost imagine the meeting where the guy with the lake-rake chimed in gleefully about that possibility), and about 3 of the approaches have some sort of momentary "well, now what am I going to do?" feeling. But those precious 45 seconds of actual DG are put on the rack and unnaturally extended to a hour and a half of walking to pick up your disc while planning a ranty blog about something.
Course layout is understandable, and the pads are well-marked, dry, and sure-footed. Baskets are high-quality and sturdily set. The grass is mowed, and leg-breaking holes and ruts are few. This is the course that argues for carts in DG, and if it was the only course around, you might find yourself eyeing one of those sleek, battery-powered beauties to help you through the times that a NSAID wouldn't. It would be a lovely cart ride indeed, but it would only vaguely be disc golf.
Pluses:
+ It exists
+ It has pads and pins for all 18 holes
+ Aerobic, a la Jane Fonda
+ Not far from other, vastly better courses
+ Makes you appreciate good course design
Minuses:
- Ego-driven
- Dull
- One-dimensional
- Water hazards are a high point
- Might be perceived as a knock on our Nation's Veterans and a perfectly serviceable combat airplane.
1 to 10 scale ... 3.
