Golf Digest has just come out with its February 2015 edition. Similar to its other lightweight covers of late, Billy Horschel, the winner of the Fed Ex Cup playoffs last September, is on the cover. Horschel is dressed as if he’s going to do a soft shoe dance routine, perhaps golf’s modern era version of Gene Kelly or Danny Kaye from a bygone era.
However, I’m not going to spend my day ripping the covers of golf’s oldest monthly publication. Instead, I’m here to report upon Golf Digest’s latest ranking of America’s Top 100 and Second 100 golf courses as well as its listing of the Top 100 Public Access golf courses.
It’s fair to say that any valid attempt to rank or compare and contrast golf courses is a very subjective issue. After all, can you really quantify whether Augusta National, the home of the Masters, is truly a better course than San Francisco’s Olympic Club? How is Pebble Beach, located alongside the Pacific Ocean, not as highly ranked as Cypress Point, its neighbor, and why is Shinnecock Hills, located alongside the Atlantic Ocean on Long Island, ranked lower than Cypress yet higher than Pebble?
I’m also of the opinion that familiarity breeds some amount of success in the world of ranking golf courses. I was working at Beverly Country Club in Chicago during the 1960s when it was typically ranked between 40th place and 60th place. Beverly was a regular PGA Tour site, part of the every-three-year rotation for the Western Open. The Western ultimately found a long ime home, first at Butler National and then later at Cog Hill. Beverly, a Donald Ross design, fell out of the rankings over time. It returned to the Second 100 listings when it hosted the United States Senior Amateur, won by Vinnie Giles, in 2009. Now, some six years after that Senior Am at Beverly, it has once again disappeared from the Top 200 ranking.
Golf Digest has some 2,500 course-raters who travel from course to course and fill out a fairly intricate form that takes into account things such as ambiance, aesthetics, design variety, shot values, condition and my personal favorite, resistance to scoring. I figure that the term resistance to scoring means course toughness. I’m not necessarily sure that a tough course is a great course, but I guess when you meld it with ambiance and a great design, you have a highly ranked course. Sounds like every course on the U.S. Open rotation.
Because great golf courses normally continue to remain as great golf courses, there is very little movement among the top 10 courses in America. When the ratings were added up and published two years ago, Pine Valley was No. 1 and Augusta National was No. 2. This time around they have reversed their spots atop the rankings. The remainder of the top 10 is basically unchanged and included Cypress Point, Shinnecock Hills, Merion, Oakmont, Pebble Beach, Winged Foot, and Fishers Island. Nebraska’s Sand Hills, a Ben Crenshaw-Bill Coore design, fell out of the top 10, only to be replaced by the National Golf Links on Long Island. Of course, back to my earlier argument, National Golf Links hosted the Walker Cup last September and that event of note resulted into a higher ranking for the C.B Macdonald gem from the turn of the 20th century. How can you beat links golf and that century-old windmill?
Certain locales have more great golf courses, a tribute to the geography of golf. While a course such as Crystal Downs (ranked No. 13) is a beautiful, old-style Allister Mackenzie-Perry Maxwell course, it just sohappens to be located in a remote section of Michigan and it has exactly zero famous neighbors. There are multiple courses in the Top 100 from some well-known golfing destinations such as Long Island, Bandon (Oregon), Pebble Beach and the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan. Among NorCal courses, Cypress Point is ranked No. 3, Pebble Beach comes in at No. 7, their relatively young neighbor, Spyglass Hill, is rated No. 48, and Monterey Peninsula’s Shore Course is listed at No. 67. Pasatiempo in Santa Cruz is ranked No. 111 while another Pebble Beach course, Spanish Bay, comes in at No. 198.
All four golf courses at Bandon are in the top 75, with Pacific Dunes ranked the highest at No. 18. The old-style San Francisco Golf Club is ranked No. 35 while its neighbor, The Olympic Club, comes in at No. 33, down seven places from two years ago when it hosted the U.S. Open. The highly regarded South San Francisco golf course, the California Club, jumped 11 spots, going from 147 to 136. The Palm Springs area in Southern California is regarded as a golfing mecca with just under 100 golf courses and yet it only has two courses of note among the Top 200, namely the Quarry at LaQuinta and PGA West.
The golf course architect from a long gone era and with the greatest amount of courses in the rankings is Seth Raynor. A contemporary of Macdonald, Ross, A.W. Tillinghast and Allister Mackenzie, Raynor is best known in California golf circles as the architect who would have designed Cypress Point had he not passed away in 1926. In fact, it was Raynor who envisioned the dramatic par-3, 230-yard 16th hole at Cypress Point when he made his first walkthrough with Women’s Amateur champ Marion Hollins. Allister Mackenzie took on the project when Raynor died. Raynor is best known on the West Coast for his design of Monterey Peninsula.
Finally, Raynor brings up another concept of note, namely travel arrangements some 100 years ago. After all, Raynor was not only in Pebble Beach in the 1920s, but he also had a hand in designing top-notch courses in places such as New York, Chicago and South Carolina as well. This was long before the era of efficient air travel. Yet if you’ve ever been to places like Crystal Downs, Michigan or Fairfax in California, you have to scratch your head and wonder how they ever got to these remote locales and how did they ever get their crews and their equipment up and down all those remote roads? How much dead time involved railway travel?
If you can get past the Billy Horschel soft shoe shuffle on the cover of Golf Digest magazine, then you’re in for a treat with the latest ranking of the game’s top 200 courses and its top 100 public access courses. True, it’s all a matter of opinion and conjecture, and yet it’s interesting to see what others think about the great golf courses of America. Now all I’ve got to do is find a way to play the San Francisco Golf Club and the Valley Club near Santa Barbara to continue my quest to collect more of the great 100 golf courses in America.
