US Top 100 v. GB&I Top 100: Your Choice

[John Morrissett]

If this topic has been discussed before, my apologies for the repetition.

In going through the recent British Golf World issue in which it lists its Top 100 for GB&I, I wondered which would be better: The Top 100 from the US or the Top 100 from GB&I.  In each case, it is your choice of each Top 100 -- you don't need to rely on someone else's judgement.

A couple of years ago I would have said "US" with little hesitation, thinking that our top ten and bottom ten are much better.  Now, I'm not so sure.

Opinions?

[Paul_Turner]

I'll surprise nobody and vote for GB & I.  Better variety of holes (we've got holes like the 15th at Prestwick!) and within a sensible distance of eachother  .  Would you prefer a list dominated by links or parkland golf?

[Jonathan Cummings]

John - with 18,000 courses to choose from compared to their 2,500, the US has a bit of an edge in 'depth of the pool'.

The top 10 on either list are equally good - just a matter of opinion which is better.  The US wins hand down when comparing the bottom 50 of the two lists.  JC

[Scott_Burroughs]

I'm curious to see how many people have played 100 courses in both the U.S. and GB&I to properly rate?   (I wouldn't be surprised if John has played at least 100 in GB&I, which very few Americans can claim).  Can I really rate either country/former kingdom if I haven't played a majority of the top courses?

I've played over 250 courses in the U.S., but only a small % are top quality.  Never been to GB&I.  I can really only speculate.  

[David_Tepper]

Comparing the two lists is pretty much like comparing apples and oranges. Do you like links or parkland? How important is course conditioning? etc.
To me, the biggest difference between the two lists is that I know (as an American) I stand a much better chance of getting to play more of the courses on the GB&I list than I ever will on the US list!

[Craig Disher]

Maybe a better comparison would be to GWeek's classic US list. I haven't seen the GBI list, but I can imagine that it contains very few courses built since 1960.

[bakerg (Guest)]

I would vote for the GB&I list just for the fact that you can actually play all 100.  While in the US you can only play around 30 to 40 that are on the top 100 list.  The rest being private and you have to have connections to do so.  I know that you have to finangle your way to play Muirfield but at least their is a way of doing it.  But, unless you know someone at Pine Valley or Augusta don't count on ever playing those.  

[Ben Cowan-Dewar]

The parkland vs. links debate, this is slightly flawed;  National Golf Links, Seminole, Cypress, Pebble, Sand Hills, Prairie Dunes..   Obviously there are some U.S. greats that are not strictly parkland, as you would have some notables on the GB&I list that are not links (though not as many, I suppose.)

U.S. would dominate the bottom half and the modern courses.  With such a huge variety, I imagine the U.S. would win.

Do you think if you compare top 15's it might be closer?

[Glen_Fergo]

Being in Oz its hard to play many of either list. I've just reviewed the GB&I list and have manged 60 courses but only 10 in the US.

It's hard enough to debate the choices in either list let alone comparing the two. I much prefer the "natural" type of golf GB&I offers because of the challenge regardless of conditions. I find many of the new courses to tricked up (like putt putt ranges).

I also think that, like a number of the respondents have added, that the accessibility of the courses in GB&I affects there condition some times, the less accessible courses of course are much better conditioned. I'll be interested to contiune reading the responses and hopefully find some new courses to aspire to play (and that you can actually et on to).

One day we'll have to discuss the list in Oz, although the number of courses is far lower we have some around Sydney and Melbourne that are set up well enough to hold a major tournament at any time hence the number of top golfers we have for the limited population (18 million).

Let's hear more!!!

[Phil_the_Author]

During the 2002 U.S. Open at the Black I ran into a family who was visiting from the village of Carnoustie. I was fascinated talking with them, especially to hear their views on the Black.

I told them of the numerous comments made by players here that the Black was the toughest course they had ever played including the past brutal Open at Carnoustie. This included players from their part of the world such as Nick Faldo and others.

They responded by saying in the most wonderful of accents that "The Black Course is a real bear, unfortunately it is only a cub when compared to our Carnoustie!"

I spoke with a woman who was all of five feet in height and where she might have stored a hundred pounds on her frame certainly went undetected by my eyes. She was from Waterford, Ireland, and was following Ireland's hero Paddraig Harrington. She told me that she "...had played all of the great courses in Ireland and this Black Course was a monster unlike anything that she had ever seen anywhere."

I think we all love that which we know best. I would just love to be able to say that I had a chance to play them all once...  

[Rich Goodale (Guest)]

I think that the GBI lists struggle when they get to the 2nd 50.  Sure, there are some great tracks in there (e.g. Machrahanish, Gullane #1, Westward Ho!, Skibo, etc.), but there also some clunkers (discretion prevents me from naming them....).  In GBI you "descend" pretty quickly into "quirk" or CCFADs whereas in the US you have huge numbers of really good courses that don't get a sniff at "top-100" status these days (e.g. Winchester, Stanford, Stevinson Ranch, Sawgrass CC, University of NM, etc.) as well as "quirk" that doesn't even show up on the rater's radar (e.g. Pacific Grove, Woods Hole, the whole panoply of courses in Carmel-by-the-Cornfields (Indiana) etc.).  A few years back the highly quirky Blackwaterfoot (Shiskine) 12- holer made it to the top 100 in GBI.  As fun as that course is, it doesn't really match up with Pacific Grove, which will never make any US list (except Adam Clayman's top-10!).

Accesibility is an issue which should be separated from quality, IMO.  But.......if you add it to the criteria, GBI begins to overtake the US very quickly.

[Paul Turner]

I disagree that the 2nd 50 in GB&I really peters out; or at least it shouldn't do, the GW list does have a few strange choices (but so do the US lists), but I reckon I could soon fix it with several courses of top merit: (Addington, Pennard, Broadstone, Seacroft, Ashridge, Brora)

[John Morrissett]

Perhaps I was not clear enough: The conditions of the question are that YOU get to select the 100 courses from the US and the 100 courses from GB&I to compare; forget about Golf Digest, etc.  Everyone would be comparing different Top 100s -- and that's OK.

I agree with Paul -- don't sell short the second 50 from GB&I.  The depth over there continues to impress me.  For example, after playing 20-30 courses in England I feel I have barely scratched the surface there.  I would put the 100th course from GB&I against the 100th course from the US.

[D. Kilfara]

An excellent question, posed by this thread. I agree with the opinion that the bottom 50 in the GB&I list shouldn't sold short if you get to pick it yourself. There are SO many really good courses which slip below the raters' radar screens in GB&I because they aren't as well known as modern course X with an efficient PR machine.

Still, I think I'll commit a bit of heresy and choose the US Top 100, the principal reason being that the US offers more variety. GB&I gives you a variety of flavors of links golf and only one distinct type of inland golf; the US gives you infinitely many types of inland golf, plus several distinct types of seaside golf. The overall quality of each is probably about the same, but America has so many more landforms, types of vegetation, and so on.

Also, and this point might be more contentious (as well as less relevant to the original question), GB&I really has only two types of clubs: the posh, highbrow club you can still play (as a visitor) if you write a stylish and suitably begging letter of introduction, and the lowbrow club which has no reservation in welcoming absolutely everyone, assuming that there are more than one or two people in the clubhouse to do the welcoming when you arrive. It doesn't really have any mystical clubs like Pine Valley, Augusta, Cypress or Sand Hills which make your knees tremble (in various ways) on the order of, "I really can't BELIEVE I'm playing here!" (Maybe Muirfield, but it isn't really that difficult to finagle a game at Muirfield if you really want to play it.) I wouldn't want to play all of my golf in such rarified atmospheres, but there is something terrifically neat about them when the do come along. And the American experience spans the full gamut from Pine Valley/Augusta to resort courses to homespun local clubs and public places. I'd like to think my US Top 100 would have a smattering of each...

Cheers,
Darren

[THuckaby2]

Interesting, Darren... you need to read Goodale's accessibility thread... you are marking these clubs UP for the exact reason he's marking them DOWN.  Very interesting indeed....

I tend to agree with you... but that's because I've now received access to quite a few of the US greats.  Ten years ago, I might have also said what good is a course if no one can ever see it...

None of this has anything to do with the "architecture" of the course at any rate, but what the hell, that's never mattered to me before and still doesn't!

TH

[brad_miller]

The top 15-20 in the USA is close to the best in the world. I would rather play the top 20 in GB&I than numbers 20-50 in the USA though.

[Ran Morrissett]

GB&I wins in my book.

After the top US 50-60, the courses get more and more landscaped to the point where the need to play them again  rapidly diminishes. Meanwhile, the GB&I courses remain rooted in nature, plus they possess more variety from nine holers to one-off courses like Shiskine. Finally, the GB&I courses are a lot less likely to be over-maintained.

Perhaps the top 100 just from England would be more interesting to compare to the US? Wonder what Paul Turner might say to that?! I imagine that the US's top 20 (NGLA, Pine Valley, CPC, Pebble, Sand Hills, Merion, Shinnecock, Fishers, Seminole, PacDunes, Friar's Head, No.2, Prairie Dunes, Riviera, Garden City GC, Maidstone, Crystal Downs, Oakmont, Winged Foot, and probably still Augusta) is strong enough to carry the day vs. just England.

Cheers,

[brad miller]

Ran, that top 18, 19 or 20 carries the day aganist all, but your comment on the back end of the US top 100 is what I was trying to say.

[Paul turner]

Darren

Any old letter is usually fine, or often just a phone call; I think people get a bit paranoid with the whole intro letter part.

The US does have more variety of habitat for golf, but I stand by my conviction that the GB&I holes are less formulaic.  Probably because they follow nature as Ran states.

Ran

I'd have to think about Englands's top 100 or even 20.  I have played over a 100 English golf courses at least!  I do reckon Sandwich is probably as good as any of those US courses listed.  I don't really care what the current world rankings say and I think old Bernardo and Peter Allen would agree  

[D. Kilfara]

Paul - I don't think any old intro letter would get you on to Muirfield or Swinley Forest. A little care needs to be taken with the posh ol' boys. That's all I was meaning to imply.

Huckster - I'm marking super-exclusive clubs up only in the sense that they'd give me a different aura relative to the rest of these 100 courses I'd be playing all the time. If this question was purely about architectural merit, that consideration wouldn't apply. On the whole I prefer less snotty clubs with less exclusivity, but variety being the spice of life and all...

Ran - Do you really think there are only 50-60 courses in the US with enhanced replayability value? I mean, this website currently profiles 93 courses in the US alone which as being be worth a look (94 if you include Mid Ocean, which for some reason seems to be part of America now). And this website doesn't feature a lot of cliched courses which are eminently worthy of Top 50 consideration, let alone Top 100. I just think that by restricting yourself to GB&I, as a whole you get only a couple of different types of golf course. Sure, the typical links course has a higher replayability value than the typical inland course, but at the end of the day a constant diet of anything gets a bit samey after a while. Even assuming your assumption is correct that Britain's Top 100 features better architecture than America's Top 100, I'd rather have the length and breadth of America's topography and vegetation to choose between than be restricted to Britain's selection.

Cheers,
Darren

[THuckaby2]

Huckster - I'm marking super-exclusive clubs up only in the sense that they'd give me a different aura relative to the rest of these 100 courses I'd be playing all the time. If this question was purely about architectural merit, that consideration wouldn't apply. On the whole I prefer less snotty clubs with less exclusivity, but variety being the spice of life and all...Cheers,
Darren

I'm with you 100%, Darren.  I feel the exact same way.  I just played Shadow Creek and it gave me freakin' goosebumps riding in there in a limo past all that security... I've felt the same excitement at many other great places, I'm lucky to say.  It just strcuk me as curious how Rich marks this as a negative, you and I a positive... I can see Rich's side most definitely as well - what good is a course if few people ever see it?  Or really, what relevance does it have?  So grading the GB&I clubs "up" for allowing more access makes sense to me also.  It's just very interesting to me how these two views can indeed coexist.

And it matters in assessment of a golf course... architecture in a vacuum always has seemed meaningless to me.  I don't design golf courses, I play them.

TH

TH

[Rich Goodale (Guest)]

John and Ran

As much as I love Brora and think it is a great golfing experience, I don't think it would rank in the top 250 in the USA, if you just looked at architecture.  Maybe I'm jaded from playing the course so many times, but I really don't think it is anywhere near as "good" as either course at MPCC, for example.  Architecturally speaking.

Overall, I think the variety of the US wins out, as well as the fact that there have been so many new courses built in the States  over the past 20 years by excellent architects with big budgets.  I hate to beat an old horse chestnut of mine (confusing enough metaphors, Dan K.?), but if you planted Cinnabar Hills in the middle of Sutherland, Brora wouldn't seem so alluring.

Tom H

Forget about this ranking stuff.  Please tell us what sort of massage Shadow Creek lays on for GD raters!

[THuckaby2]

Rich:  funny, several friends have asked me that, or asked about even dicier "services"...    I suppose something about Vegas gives people that impression about Shadow Creek...

Maybe it was just me, but the club was NOTHING like that at all.  If anything the understated clubhouse and genuinely nice people there reminded me far more of Sand Hills than any "gentleman's club."

I suppose the less I say the better though... they were very nice to accomodate me, and I did get the impression Mr. Wynn still wants his privacy.  

TH

[Brian_Ewen]

Guys
Sorry for going off on a tangent but while we are discussing the merits of the Top 100 in GB&I and the USA , does anyone know if or how the rating criteria differs between the lists .

The Golf World UK Top 100 for 2002 used this criteria :

Quality of Test and Design = 40 points : How well does the course test the full range of skills .How varied and interesting is the challenge . How well do the holes come together as a course ?.

Visual appeal and Enjoyment = 30 points : How memorable and attractive are the holes and the courses setting .How pleasurable is the experience ?.

Fairness and Presentation = 20 points : How well does the course reward a good shot and punish the poor shot. Is the luck factor to the detriment of the course .How well is the course presented ?.

Ambience and History = 10 points : How unique and memorable is the atmosphere . Does its history and tradition add to its feel and appeal ?.


Anybody know if the US magazines use the same or  ?

Best Regards
Brian

[Scott_Burroughs]

Darren,

Excellent point on Ran's mention of only 50-60 worthy candidates.  I think the generally sad state of architecture for so many bad/boring courses built since 1950 has perhaps jaded him into thinking almost nothing of note has been built since then and many of the 2nd tier classic courses aren't worthy or just plain forget about them.

You counted 93 courses worthy enough to have write-ups on GCA.  Remember, that doesn't even include several top-flight courses with no write-ups or writeups requested to be taken down.  Such courses not amongst the current 93 with write-ups include:

SFGC
Merion
Myopia Hunt
The Creek
Olympic
Baltusrol
Colonial
Double Eagle
Shadow Creek
Southern Hills
Oakland Hills
Oak Hill
Quaker Ridge
Newport
Winged Foot (East)
Olympia Fields
Wildhorse
Lawsonia (Links)
Fox Chapel
Harbour Town
Long Cove
Atlantic
Friar's Head (supposedly coming)
Five Farms
Peachtree
East Lake
Interlachen
Spyglass Hill
Cherry Hills
Pete Dye
Medinah
Saucon Valley
Princeville
Scioto
NCR
Inverness
Canterbury
Crooked Stick
Wade Hampton
Congressional
Stonewall
Twisted Dune
Barona Creek
Dubsdread
Arcadia Bluffs
Red Mike