R tinga Game
The S
What makes a Top-100 course? Golfweek’s when rating a course
architecture editor explains what he sees BY BRADLEY S. KLEIN
o, you think your home course is a Top-100 layout. You think your course deserves a place on one of those many magazine lists showcasing the country’s greatest courses, like the state’s
premier public layouts, the best new courses of the last five years or the best renovation projects. When personal judgment is publicly
affirmed, you feel validated. It’s like the parent whose kid gets into Harvard or Stanford—it’s a highly selective outcome that confirms what you always thought and wanted to proclaim. Actually, the odds of getting
accepted at Harvard or Stanford (both now accept under 10% of applicants) are a whole lot better than getting your course on a Top-100 list. With roughly 15,000 courses in the U.S., what are the odds of yours being among the elite? And yet many of us think our home course deserves the honor. Some dismiss the whole thing as
a matter of politics—who you know, or who bought an ad in the magazine. Others figure that without a long history of major championships, or an ideal lo- cation in a major metropolis, or without the name of a celebrity designer attached
to it, a course simply has no chance. Of course, that doesn’t explain how
an obscure Scotsman named David Kidd could design the first course for the remote resort of Bandon Dunes along the southern coastline of Oregon in 1998 and watch it vault to the upper reaches of every list. There’s nothing more subjective in
golf than evaluating courses. After all, the appeal of a layout is entirely a mat- ter of judgment and taste, rather than scientific precision. In a game governed by all sorts of readily measurable indica- tors—score, yardage, swing speed, launch angle, coefficient of restitution, Stimpmeter speed—it seems odd that the experience of a golf course is entirely aesthetic and personal. That’s simply because of all sports
fields, a golf course is the least governed by rules specifying its parameters. The only rule pertaining to the structure and design of a golf course is that the hole to which you play must be 4-1/4 inches in diameter. That’s it. Everything else about a golf course
is variable: length, width, texture, soil, elevation, setting and character. And that’s also what makes golf so endlessly
fascinating. Its playing fields are the most compelling, the most diverse, and the most distinctive from one to another of all participatory sports. So what distinguishes a Cypress
Point or Riviera from a Turkey Trot National or Podunk Muni? Each of the major golf publications
doing ratings has a different system and criteria of evaluation. And many pres- ent the results in a patina of numerical detail that might easily be mistaken for objective science. What’s going on with these criteria is the effort of arriving at a quantification of subjective feel- ing—the law of averages. Many ranking outcomes are determined by aggregating the collective judgment of a reasonably large and (supposedly) informed body of course evaluators. It’s a more complicated task than it might seem to get a good-sized team of course evaluators to see enough dif- ferent facilities. The evaluation teams range from 100 to 800, and if a course doesn’t have at least 15 votes, the results are unstable and subject to too much variation from any one rater. But logistics aside, what most golfers want to know is what it all means to them. And here, the matter is stun- ningly simple. What we’re trying to do with course ratings is help golfers ap- preciate the strengths and weaknesses of their golf courses, and give some public forum to the things that make them respond emotionally. Analytical terms like “shot values,”
“conditioning,” “resistance to scoring” and “quality of routing” don’t really address what most golfers sense and
SUMMER 2014 /
NCGA.ORG / 45
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