You Northeast guys are spoiled.

[BCrosby]

Jim -

Conn. has many fine courses.

My question is the following:

Conn., NY, NJ, PA, and MA are all endowed with:

   - lots of old money;
   - lots of old private clubs dating to the Golden Age;
   - a wide variety of interesting land forms; and
   - large golfing populations,

but of those states only Conn. does not have a top 50 course. It doesn't seem to have any courses that rank with the Shinnies, the Merions, the PV's or TCC's.  Just curious as to why?

None of this is meant as a criticism.  It's just a historical anomaly for which I've never heard an explanation. Given its history and demographics, I would have thought that Conn would have at least as many great courses as its neighbors.

Could the answer be connected with local boy Mark Twain's line that "golf is a good walk spoiled"? Did Twain shame everyone into thinking that playing golf was frivolous or a sign of a weak character? At least in Connecticut.

Just curious...

Bob

[Jim_Kennedy]

BCrosby,
Never sensed your post as critical.
 
I think Yale used to make the "lists" but fell off due, I think, to raters criticisms of the conditioning. A tour around Yale or the courses I mentioned, and some I forgot, would reveal many world-class holes.

CB dismissed the Cape Cod region as being too far from population centers. New York City seems to have the been the lure, as was Philadelphia for others. The Port of Boston probably saw its fair share of Scottish Pros disembark from clippers and set up shop in the environs. Connecticut had more than its fair share of hard working Yankees who looked on idle pastimes, such as golf, as inventions of the devil.  

Another possible reason is found in the words of the best heavy equipment operator I have ever known, Dick Bunce Sr..
He used to say that "God didn't rest on the Seventh Day, he put all the rocks in Connecticut".