Q&A With Daniel Wexler

Daniel Wexler has added another helpful volume to his collection of great reads on golf architecture: The American Private Golf Club Guide. It's a simple, clean, easy to access volume that has found its place on my reference shelf next to The Architects of Golf and The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses. Wexler profiles 1000 private U.S. courses of all shapes and sizes, offering the golfer a short write-up about its architectural merits along with historical anecdotes of note. He also includes other vitals like yardage, par, rating and website and/or club phone. And there's a twist to his rating system, which he answers in this short Q&A:

GS: This wasn't exactly a small undertaking, tell us how this book came about and how you researched the 1000 courses you selected?

DW: The book initially came about as sort of a novelty project, a volume I figured would fit a corner of the golf guidebook market that had previously been largely unexplored. Only after I got rolling did I realize that given the size and style of the course reviews (with their accent on architecture, history, etc.), this might turn into a much deeper book than initially planned. So far as research goes, I utilized an enormous range of sources beginning with my own travels, but also taking into account lots of information from various internet and literary sources, plus many people around the country whose golf opinions I trust. The goal of the book was to be candid without being opinionated – that is, to present each facility in an accurate architectural and historical context, utilizing my own opinion as little as possible.  

GS: Who is the book geared toward and how do you see it supplementing their golf experience?

DW: The traveling club golfer is the obvious starting point, but one of the things I like most about the book is that it should appeal to anyone with a serious interest in courses and course design. For the traveling golfer, its role in helping them decide where they may wish to play is clear enough. But for anyone else, it’s the only book ever published that profiles so many private facilities with any real degree of detail, providing candid portraits of far more than just the handful of great courses with which everyone is already familiar. Interestingly, the most frequent comment I’ve received regards the sort of historical material included, so I think it really does work on both levels.

GS: You give a star rating to each course called a Collectability Rating, something Tom Doak took issue with because he felt it somehow infringed on his rating system in his out of print Confidential Guide To Golf Courses. Tell us how yours is different.

DW: Tom’s system is representative of his opinion on the quality of each of the courses he’d visited, which I think, given his position in the game, is of considerable interest to people. My goal, as mentioned, was just the opposite: to remove my opinion to the greatest degree possible. Thus the Collectability Rating represents how prestigious or desirable a “get” each club might be to a player’s personal collection based upon its quality (as determined by numerous published rankings and commentaries), history, architectural significance and importance in its market. It’s an easy-to-understand five diamond scale which, so far, has been pretty well received.  

GS: You are working on follow up editions that cover public and resort courses? How are those coming along?

DW: The resort book is on schedule to be published by Thanksgiving, and covers pretty much every golfing resort in the U.S. and the Caribbean. The public course book should be out in the late spring of 2011 and will profile at least 1,000 top non-resort public access facilities nationwide.

GS: You self-published through Amazon, how did that work out compared to working with a traditional publisher?

DW: So far very well. In order to make this sort of endeavor work, a writer needs to be able to perform all the tasks normally done by a publisher, particularly editing, layout and marketing. If you’re able to do this to a reasonable degree, then self publishing is wonderful because you control every aspect of the process. No fighting with editors over stupid changes, no waiting for the book to be published, no questions over royalties. All in all, a very welcomed change. As far as Amazon goes, it’s actually done through their CreateSpace subsidiary and to date they’ve been great. They’re well organized, the process is relatively simple and so far they’ve done everything they’ve promised.