When you come to think of it that is the secret of most of the great holes all over the world. They all have some kind of a twist. C.B. MACDONALD
At least based on the posting of the top 50 public courses of readers, I think it's safe to assume someone in Alabama did a lot of clicking at GolfDigest.com, as two Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail charmers top the list of reader favorites.
Here's the intro to the Golf World spread, with the private and resort listings still to come.
But it's probably not what you think...a reader's choice ranking. No stinking panels, and politics. Instead, it's all about you!
(Which reminds me, because you are wonderful, don't forget to vote for your favorite public golf course in southern California, more specifically, the one in Moorpark not designed by Peter Jacobsen.)
This is from the May Golf Digest:
To do our part, at the urging of some members of the American Society of Golf Course Architects, Golf Digest has redefined the Conditioning category used in our various course rankings.
The old definition asked panelists, "How would you rate the playing quality of tees, fairways and greens when you last played the course?" The new definition reads, "How fast, firm and rolling were the fairways, and how firm yet receptive were the greens on the date you played the course?"
Uh, what if the course has kikuyu fairways?
Seriously, this is a nice step. Lop off Resistance to Scoring and you might start seeing some of those dogs flopping off the list of America's Best Courses.
...yhey and the people who employ them are taking up valuable space on the latest edition of my favorite ranking, the Washington Top 200.
I really have little to say about the latest Golfweek ranking. The same things I like from last year are there and the same bizarre choices by the panel remain.
Golfweek.com does not yet have the new lists up, nor even Gil Hanse's guest commentary which the print edition promised would be online.
You can view the issue here in the online digital edition format, or check out the lists and bantor at GolfClubAtlas here and here.
And I'm pleased to note Rustic Canyon remains on the Modern list at No. 99, moving up only a notch despite improved conditioning that had reportedly caused it to slip down the list.
Golf.com features Golf Magazine's annual top 10 best new courses that you can play, and even starts listing green fee instead of greens fee. A major victory for golfing linguinistas!
Travel and Leisure posts their international top 10 with several different courses, but they both seem to agree on Chambers Bay.
And certainly it's easy to understand the competition for the top 100 list considering there are about 16,000 golf courses in the country, according to the National Golf Foundation. That means one in every 160 golf courses makes the list. Even a prolific golf mecca like the Coachella Valley can't boast 160 golf courses, so statistically, maybe the desert only deserves one course on the list.I like that argument. Sure beats pointing out that about 90 of them are Ted Robinson masterpieces.
But with such famous courses as the Dinah Shore Tournament Course at Mission Hills, the Stadium Course at PGA West, the Canyons Course at Bighorn and lesser-known but strong courses like Tradition and Classic Club, it still seems strange that only the Quarry makes the magazine's top 100.Britney Spears is famous too, but that doesn't make her a great singer.
Now posted at GolfDigest.com, Jack Nicklaus and Tom Doak's Sebonack takes the private category.
The Best New Public With Hot Beverage Cart Girls Over $75 goes to Virginia's Highland Course at Primland by Donald Steel and Martin Ebert.
Best New Public Where You Might Have To Change Shoes In The Parking Lot Under $75 goes to another Virginia course, Ed Carton's Spring Creek.
The Best New Public Remodel, Lester George's restoration of The Greenbrier, beats out in stunning fifth place position, the horrid Industry Hills, aka Misery Hills, oh, wait, it's been rebranded as Industry HIlls GC at Pacific Palms Resort. I think the rebranding put it in the top 5.
Best New Private Remodel, goes to Gil Hanse, Brad Faxon and Jim Wagner for their revitalization of TPC Boston, edging out Rees Jones remodels of Bellerive and Atlanta Athletic Club as well as Jack Nicklaus's work at Ohio State.
And Best New Canadian goes to Muskoka Bay by Doug Carrick.
Stephen Szurlej's exclusive photos of the winners are posted, but other than the aerials of Sebonack I wouldn't waste your time unless you want to see a bunch of TPC Boston ground views from behind greens guarded by lakes. Not as horrific as his photo of Rustic Canyon when it won, which actually was taken by a blind ground squirrel. However, considering how easy the two courses are to photograph (I know, I'm biased) and considering the landscape photography work of folks like Lambrecht, Dost, Brown, the Henebry's, Cuban, Furore and Scalletti, Golf Digest should farm this assignment out.
While not award winning, at least some of these images give you a sense of why TPC Boston edged out some tough competition.
I know you are just dying to know how many shots it's going to take for Lucas Black to catch Jack Wagner, so here's the link.BusinessWeek and ESPN the magazine got together to determine the most powerful figures in sport. Golf's four contributions to the list:
2. Tiger Woods
34. Tim Finchem
74. Mark Steinberg
76. Arnold Palmer
Shockingly, the list includes four ESPN VP's, ESPN EVP's and of course, an ESPN SVP.
I think we know now how the USGA Walker Cup committee tabbed Trip Kuehne for the Walker Cup team: he landed first on Golf Digest's ranking of really rich, really white Wall Street golfing dudes. Surely it wasn't based on his tournament play over the last year.
Meanwhile, USGA President Walter Driver finished a disappointing T-32 but did take first prize in the Blackberry typing category, clocking in at an impressive 62 words per minute all while measuring closest to the hole in a first round U.S. Amateur match.
I'm not sure how many of you have received the Golf Magazine course ranking issue, but it did cause me to put the brakes on my normal power-flip through the mag. Which is good since I have gotten a few paper cuts lately trying to break my all time leaf through record of 63.6 seconds.
Well, besides the stuff I linked earlier, there were a few panelist sidebars describing their favorite courses, and other than ones from Larry Lambrecht and Masa Nishijima, these descriptions are not exactly packed architectural revelations.
Which brings me to a general thought about the list. While I still agree with it more than Golf Digest's, there is a sense that its panel is a bit behind the times, while Golf Digest, for all of its faults, seems to have a more active group out monitoring what's going on at our best courses.
That's not to say that I think heavy turnover on a list is a good thing, but we are living in a very exciting time with so many compelling new courses, cutting edge restorations and a newfound appreciation for many architectural elements. Looking at the Golf panel and the list it has produced, I just sense there is a lot of dead (star name) weight and an excess of conflict of interests holding back the enthusiasts from really putting together a list that highlights fun, interesting and timeless architecture.
But it's Joe Passov's first full list and if given the time and freedom, I suspect he'll put together a stronger panel.
This also caught my eye:
In 2007, we switched to a web-based system that allowed panelists to vote on a combined master list of 475 courses from around the world. Panelists can only vote for courses they've played. (On average each panelist has played 73 courses on the World Top 100 list.) From this master list, the top 100 point earners make up our Top 100 Courses in the World. The Top 100 in the U.S. are determined by taking U.S. courses from the World list, in order, and then rounding out the list with the remaining top point earners that did not make the World list.
The points break down as follows: Each course placing in the top three earns 100 points; spots 4-10 earn 85 points, followed by 11-25 (70 points), 26-50 (60 points), 51-75 (50 points), 76-100 (40 points), 101-150 (30 points), 151-200 (20 points), 201-250 (10 points), 251+ (0 points). Any course that received a "remove from ballot" vote has 10 points deducted. The results at the top were remarkably similar to 2005, with Pine Valley, Cypress Point, St. Andrews' Old Course and Augusta National keeping their 1-4 spots.
Does anyone understand this balloting system. Help me here!
This was interesting:
Our rankings are guided by our panel, whose 100 members represent 15 countries. The men and women who cast their votes include major-championship winners, Ryder Cup players, architects, leading amateurs, journalists and a cadre of nearly a dozen course connoisseurs who've had the doggedness to play all Top 100 Courses in the World.
To keep it fair, course architects and course owners on the committee can't vote on their own properties. In the end, the opinions of our staff editors are factored in as well.
So we trust the panel to figure out a great course, but we re-jig the final tally as we see fit. Well, at least they're honest about.
Now, that doesn't explain how Torrey Pines-South is still on the list.
The U.S. list is posted here, the world top 100 here.
A sidebar on panelist's favorite courses is here, while this is the list of people who rarely ever pay to play golf.
Just taking a quick glance I noticed several interesting things, but all in all it looks like the usual suspects are still popular. But I have paying work to attend to, so in the mean time let the bickering begin.
I was clicking through the golf.com slideshow previewing Golf Magazine's new course rankings and couldn't help but wonder what the story is behind this photo of Mayacama. Any thoughts?
Golf Digest's "100 Best Courses Outside the United States," is but the latest in a long list of lists that contains the likes of America's 100 Greatest ... Best New Public ... Best New Private ... America's 50 Toughest Courses ... America's Best Resorts ... America's Best Golf Cities. Just about the only list they haven't done is a list of the 100 best courses that have not yet appeared on a list. Maybe next year.
Top of this year's rankings is the links of Royal County Down in Northern Ireland, which has bumped the Old Course at St Andrews down to second. Third is Royal Dornoch, with Royal Portrush fourth. Muirfield is a surprisingly lowly fifth, with the top ten rounded out by Royal Melbourne's composite course, Ballybunion, Turnberry, Carnoustie and New Zealand's Cape Kidnappers.
Having played nine of the magazine's top ten (not Ballybunion), I am somewhat qualified to comment on the real order, which should read: 1) Muirfield; 2) St Andrews; 3) Royal Melbourne; 4) Royal Dornoch; 5) Carnoustie; 6) Royal Portrush; 7) Royal County Down; 8) Morfontaine; 9) Sunningdale; 10) Portmarnock.
Elsewhere, there are even more outstanding examples of the inexplicable. Loch Lomond is as high as 11th. It's a good course and the scenery is lovely, but how anyone not addled by either old age or an excess of alcoholic beverages could rank it above the likes of Sunningdale (12th), Morfontaine (13th), Kingston Heath (15th), Portmarnock (24th), Hoylake (33rd) or Barnbougle Dunes (57th) is a mystery on a par with the current location of Lord Lucan. Perhaps the voters meant to say that Loch Lomond is the best course in the world hardly anyone from Scotland ever gets to play; that makes more sense.
Then there is dear old North Berwick. Many of the self-proclaimed experts on a favourite architecture website (golfclubatlas.com) of mine are quick to extol the virtues of this eccentric East Lothian course - they love what they love to call "quirk" - but to rank it 50th in the world outside of America is more than a bit of a stretch. Only if the thought of hitting over improbably placed walls or to impossibly contoured greens is even remotely appealing could one rank North Berwick above Walton Heath or Melbourne's Metropolitan, to name but two.
Other oddities leapt to my attention. Most Australians will be wondering at the admittedly stunning New South Wales finding a spot above the cunning Kingston Heath. Had it not been for the tragic and wholly inappropriate redesign of a couple of greens on the back nine (what were you thinking, Donald Steel?) I have no doubt that the always fun Royal Aberdeen would be a lot higher than 56th. And that Royal St. Georges - where someone called Ben Curtis was singled-out as the best player in the 2003 Open - is apparently the second-best course in England will lift more than just a few eyebrows skyward.
Some rhetorical questions came to mind, too. Porthcawl is better than Troon? Cruden Bay is better than Hoylake? And Kingsbarns is better than Birkdale, Troon, Lytham and Portmarnock? Come on!
My last shakes of the head came upon discovering some courses that have no business being in the top 500 never mind 100. I'm talking about the beautiful but architecturally flawed Kauri Cliffs in New Zealand; Spain's overrated Valderrama (ask almost any of the competitors in the Volvo Masters); Old Head in Ireland - a caricature of a links; and the nice but hardly memorable Mid Ocean Club in Bermuda.
Geoff Shackelford is a Senior Writer for Golfweek magazine, a weekly contributor to Golf Channel's Morning
Copyright © 2022, Geoff Shackelford. All rights reserved.
