In the early 1970s, Golf Digest magazine published its inaugural listing of the Top 100 Golf Courses in America. A panel of Golf Digest staff members came up with a formula to determine the top courses of the game based on difficulty, conditioning, quality of layout, history and tradition.
As one can only imagine, that initial Top 100 included traditional American golf course gems such as Augusta National, Pebble Beach, Cypress Point, Pine Valley, Pinehurst, Oakmont, Oakland Hills, Oak Hill and the Olympic Club, among others. Readers were very familiar with the vast majority of the Top 100 because those honored courses had served as venues for PGA Tour events and past U.S. Opens and PGA Championships. Even though televised golf was barely more than one decade old and often fans of the game only saw the last few holes of a course because of media constraints, people still had an opinion about the relative merits of Riviera, Medinah, Firestone and Baltusrol.
Golf Digest wasn”t initially aware of the impact of their listing, but once it came out and once they began to reproduce it on an annual basis, they found that they had hit a gold mine of debate among knowledgeable golfers and fans. Exactly why was The Country Club ranked higher than Cherry Hills? How did the NCRA Country Club make the list in the first place? Where exactly was Pine Valley and how come Los Angeles Country Club wouldn”t host a U.S. Open? It was a relatively subjective listing and yet many readers formed an opinion about its validity, leading to interesting 19th hole debates.
As time went on, golf publications such as Golf Links, Golf World and Golfweek jumped onto the course-listing bandwagon. To further discussion and readership, these publications began to specialize their Top 100. Suddenly, you could read and then debate among your golfing buddies the merits of the Top 100 Public Courses, the Top 100 Resort Courses, the Top 100 Courses Worldwide, the Top 100 Courses of the Modern Era (post-1960), and the Top 100 Classic Courses (pre-1960).
Golf courses bought into the listings and often one would visit a remote golf course such as Arcadian Shores in a faraway place such as Myrtle Beach, only to see on the pro shop wall a very distinguished-looking plaque commemorating their facility”s place on a Top 100 list. It made for good advertising, more play, it allowed management to justify raising green fees, and it was obviously an interesting point of discussion.
The listings also put pressure on golf course facilities to improve their position in the rankings. Locally it was a big deal when Pasatiempo, an Alister Mackenzie course in Santa Cruz, fell out of the Top 100 in the early 1990s, and it was just as big deal when the venerable course returned to the listings some 10 years later.
The most recent edition of Golf Magazine has published its current version of the Top 100 Courses You Can Play as well as a state-by-state ranking of the top courses in all of the 50 states. It”s an interesting time to consider great courses that the public can access when you consider that the site of the 2010 U.S. Open and this weekend”s PGA Championship are courses that you can plunk down your money and tee it up. Of course, in the case of Pebble Beach and Whistling Straits, you”re putting up a great deal of cash to play at one of these major championship venues. St. Andrews is open to the public, too.
On Golf Magazine”s listing of the Top 100 You Can Play, Pebble Beach and its $530 green fee is listed No. 2 while Whistling Straits and its $400 fee to play is ranked No. 3. The No. 1 public access course is Pacific Dunes, the very creative yet minimalist design by Tom Doak. Pacific Dunes is a part of the 72-hole Bandon Dunes complex on the southern Oregon coast and is a former host of the U.S. Mid Amateur. In fact, all four of the Bandon Dunes courses are ranked in the Top 100. Pacific Dunes costs $275 to play.
Other highly ranked public access courses with pro tournament pedigrees include Bethpage Black at No. 6 ($150 green fee); Pinehurst at No. 7 ($410); Spyglass Hill at No. 8 ($385); and the TPC at Sawgrass, home of the Players Championship, at No. 9 ($375). The aforementioned Pasatiempo is in 11th place and its green fees top out at $250 although my son and I played there last December for a reduced winter rate of $135.
While most golfers don”t belong to a private golf club such as the Olympic Club in San Francisco or Mayacama in Santa Rosa because they can”t afford the annual five- to six-figure dues and membership costs, you”d have to have a fairly opulent bank account to afford the majority of the courses on the recent Top 100 listing.
Kiawah Island, a former Ryder Cup site, costs $338 to play; Torrey Pines has used its fame as the 2008 U.S. Open site to charge $279, and the Sea Island Golf Club in Georgia charges $295 to play, the same price as Spanish Bay, one of the sister courses of Pebble Beach. Doral in Miami, another PGA Tour course, tops out at $325, while Cascata, a Rees Jones course in Boulder City, built in 2000, comes with a hefty $500 green fee.
You can debate all day and all night whether you think Doral should be ranked No. 98 or how Cascata made it to 55th on this year”s rankings, down from 46th in 2008. Yet one thing is very clear. With few exceptions, if you really want to play golf at one of America”s top public access golf courses, you had better have a platinum credit card to get you onto the first tee.
Finally, from my perspective, I”ve played a good number of the courses on the Top 100 list. Some of them were very memorable rounds and some of them were places I truly enjoyed and would love to return to someday. However, I”ve never put down $500 to play golf simply because I have never found a golf course that I thought merited a $500 green fee.
