From Todays Scotland on Sunday
Lists can appear as wayward as a sclaff
John Huggan
Golf has long been in love with lists. Every magazine worth its salt has come up with top-tens of this, that and the other over the years. Those with the most high profile, however, are the rankings of golf courses.
In the US, Golf Digest (the magazine for which I also write) was first to recognise the interest - and potential advertising dollars - in course rankings and came up with ‘America’s 100 Greatest’. It has added the likes of ‘Best New Courses’, ‘Best Teachers’ and ‘Best Cities for Golf’. As it should, the magazine takes it all very seriously. Indeed, just about the only list not covered so far is one of those courses that have not yet featured on a list.
All of which provoked Digest’s main competitor, Golf Magazine, to retaliate with the ‘World’s Best 100 Courses’. And the British mags soon caught on. Golf World, in fact, has just produced its latest version of what it grandly titles ‘The Top 100 Courses in the British Isles’. And what a dog’s breakfast they have made of it.
Unlike Golf Digest, whose judging panel includes hundreds of amateur golfers who are category-one handicappers or have been that low at some time in their lives, Golf World’s small collection of golfing ‘experts’ contains some right choppers.
This is an important point. While it may sound dreadfully snobby to say so, like it or not, good players look at golf courses in completely different ways compared to the bad golfers. That fact has been brought home to me whenever I (handicap one) have tried to explain the strategy of a particular hole to my long-time winter four-ball partner, Jim (handicap 13). The looks that I get in return for my pearls of wisdom are invariably of the blank variety.
There are exceptions to this unwritten rule, of course. But the fact is that most high-handicappers don’t know the difference between a good hole and a bad hole, something that should summarily disqualify them from sitting on a panel telling the world what courses represent good and bad golf.
Golf World’s 86-strong gathering of ‘experts’ - supplemented by the magazine’s editorial staff - contain plenty of good players, many of them professionals, but also a fair few for whom breaking 80 is but a pipe dream.
For example, European Tour executive director Ken Schofield and Sandy Jones, chief executive director of the PGA, have each been asked for their knowledge and input. Now, while both presumably do a fine job on the business end of the golf industry, I would have to question whether either really knows good from bad when it comes to golf courses.
Schofield, for one, doesn’t spend that much of his working life looking at examples of great course architecture. Of the 100 courses on Golf World’s list, only eight appeared on the European Tour during 2002. And Jones? His office is at the boring Belfry, a course that - quite rightly - does not make the list.
Enough said.
There’s more. Numbered among the panellists are two golf journalists. One I have never seen play; the other is someone for whom the next air shot will be a long way from his first. Of the rest - a conglomeration of area secretaries, professionals and assorted ‘celebrities’ - too many are compromised by their jobs and their localities.
The bottom line? This is a list with zero credibility.
So it is perhaps no surprise that - even allowing for the inevitably subjective nature of such a ranking - that Golf World’s top-100 contains so many obvious gaffes.
Let’s be parochial and look at some of the Scottish venues that did, and did not, make the 100-strong cut. Twenty-six are included on the list, with Muirfield ranked at No1. At least they got that right.
Lower down, however, some inexplicable ups and downs occur. Is there, for example, anyone from East Lothian who thinks that North Berwick’s west course (placed at 62) is a better test than Gullane No1 (78) Or that Luffness (89) is in any way superior to Dunbar, which doesn’t even make the list? Come on!
We are also asked to believe that the sixth-ranked Loch Lomond, a course on which hardly anyone gets to play, is a finer test of a golfer’s mettle than Carnoustie (12); that there are only seven courses in Scotland better than the picturesque, but hopelessly outdated, King’s course at Gleneagles; and that Kingsbarns (13) is a better place to play than Royal Dornoch (15). And where is Downfield, one of Scotland’s best inland layouts? Nowhere, sadly.
I ask you! None of this makes much sense.
Well, it does in one way. Of the examples listed, Kingsbarns and Gleneagles are commercial enterprises, openly looking for golfers to come to play - and to pay for the privilege. The likes of Carnoustie and Dornoch, one imagines, are not in the advertising market to quite the same extent. Their long-held, worldwide reputations as top-quality tests are surely enough to guarantee paying guests.
Call me cynical, but is Golf World, rather than trying to come up with a scientifically- generated and credible list, simply attempting to maximise advertising income? How else does one explain why, in the November issue, Carnoustie rates two pages of editorial while Kingsbarns - a lower-ranked course, remember - gets five? I could go on.
That is how it will always be with lists, even those compiled in the most straightforward of fashions. But that said, this is not one of which to be proud.