Hey Guys,
My name has been invoked, so I suppose I should respond, haha. I consider several of you close friends, and I have a lot of respect for your views. In the case of Ravisloe, I don't think that you guys actually disagree all that much--at least not enough to warrant any grudges or feuds!
Jack, I think your overall assessment is very good, although anyone can quibble with a course here and there. I personally think Ravisloe deserves to be in Tier 3. Thinking about the greens, the design of the holes, the strategy, etc., it's clearly better than the other courses in Tier 4. And if it were conditioned the same way as most of the private courses we're discussing, I think a lot of you would agree with me and Ben that it deserves to move up one category. As Ben says, the par 3's are memorable, strategically interesting, scenic, and well varied from one another. The short par 4s are fun, quirky, and provide different ways to play them without being contrived. I also think the stretch of holes from 12-17 has a really neat feel. It's great land for golf, and that part of the course has a quiet ambiance that you can't find at many fancy private clubs. It does lack a really good long par 4, like say 5 at Beverly or 13 at Calumet, and if it had something like that, it would be even better. I also wonder if Ravisloe is held back in some minds because it's not particularly difficult, but Chicago has plenty of long slogs with thick rough, and it could really use a few more fun, quirky, strategic courses like Ravisloe.
I do agree with a lot of the general statements in this thread about the overall market in Chicago. If we're being honest with ourselves, Chicago has very few truly great courses (as the title of the thread implies), but it does have a deep bench of very good courses that are architecturally interesting and a lot of fun to play. In my view, our top 5 courses wouldn't fare particularly well against the top 5 of Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc., but I suspect our top 30 would hold up very well. And because of the dearth of truly great but the depth of very good, there's a lot of hair splitting when we discuss the best courses in the region. There are probably 35+ courses that different reasonable and well informed people could argue should be in our top 20. Ravisloe is clearly one of those that could be on or off one's list depending on how much they value length, difficulty, and conditioning, among other things.
As far as the Doak ratings, I'll go ahead and call Ravisloe a 6, but I understand why others would rate it a 5. In general, Doak et al. were pretty tough on Chicago, but that's probably the way it should have been. They're trying to highlight the most unique and interesting courses in the world that students of architecture should actively seek out, and we don't have a lot of those. But on the other hand, we have so much competition in the 5-7 range that a lot of very good courses get overlooked. Heck, if Elgin or Onwentsia were in, say, Kentucky, their Doak ratings might be 2 points higher, and people from Chicago would be traveling to play them!
Anthony