[Mark_Fine]

Is that better 

[David Lott]

Hey, Augusta National closes their course in the summer, so they don't have to maintain it to playing condition in the summer heat and humidity. That's a pretty good maintenance decision, if you can pull it off.

[John Kavanaugh]

Ron Whitten could cure cancer and the Golfwwek faction would piss on his parade.

[W.H. Cosgrove]

Firm yet receptive= Ball neither bounces once and off the back of the green or spins at freeway speeds off of the front...........seems obvious to me!

[John Kirk]

Ron Whitten could cure cancer and the Golfwwek faction would piss on his parade.

It would depend which type of cancer he cured.  I'm on a roll.

[Joel_Stewart]

That said, it would be nice to provide raters with some wiggle room to account for course-appropriate conditioning, but that's a difficult proposition.

There is plentny of wiggle room, its all subjective.   What you can't teach is common sense.  The problem is raters set ANGC as the benchmark and everything went down from there.  In the future can panelists compare links courses with other links courses and parkland courses to other parklands?   

The other mind set which panelists have trouble with is downgrading a course for excessive agronomy.   I downgraded Cypress Point last year because it ( a links course) was conditioned like Augusta.  Not a pebble of sand out of place, perfectly clean contours, just over excessive maintance. 

The other aspect I like which GD did not accept was breaking conditioning in 2 categories.  Turf and bunkers, trees and surrounds.  I've seen a number of courses which the turf may be perfect but the bunkers are terrible, look at Olympic.  SFGC is different, bunkers may be the best in the country and the turf is terrible.

All in all this is good for the rankings and good for the courses.

[Sean_A]

I don't know if the changed criteria for GD is good for the game or not.  We all have different criteria for ideal maintnenance.  I would rather see a very minimal impact on ratings due to conditioning - a plus or minus thing is what I am talking about.  For instance, I wouldn't dream of downgrading a club for the condition of their bunkers, but I would for the quality of the turf (assuming the weather has been decent).  I consider a bunker to be a hazard and the golfer gets what he gets.  For me a green in good condition will accept a full iron shot if hit properly and/or landing in the right spot FROM THE FAIRWAY - this means that many shots which land on the greens will roll through hence the reason for gaining the best angles for approaches.  Holding a green from the rough should be damn near impossible - reserved for only the very best of shots.  Its doable, but a very low percentage shot which should get the golfer thinking where is it better to be - long or short, left or right OR should I try to bump one in? 

I understand the weather plays it part both ways and unless its been lovely weather and the course is wet then I wouldn't downgrade a course.  Its very rare that I see a course in fantastic condition either in the UK or the US and it is getting even more more rare these days.  I can only think of one course these past several years which was in brilliant nick - Nairn.  When a course stands out that much I would have to give it a plus for conditioning, but most of the time its just a case of much of a muchness. 

Ciao

[Jonathan Cummings]

I think Digest may be in somewhat of a quandary.  If the removal of conditioning from their rating calculations results in a big shakeup of their top 100 list they may look more foolish then if they had done nothing.

It is curious that GW over ten years has changed they rating system once (went from 12 to 10 subjective categories), GM changed their rating system several times over 30 years, and GD changed their rating system around 15 times (!) over the past 35 years.

I continue to believe that all magazines should just cut to the chase and have their raters submit their own top 100 ranked list of courses they have personally played (no categories, no 1-10s, no A-Es, no secondary steps).  These individual lists should be averaged across all raters to attain the published top 100 ranking.

You can argue correctly that this is still a subjective measurement but it has the attraction of not adding unecessay steps (noise) into the process.

JC   

[Mark_Fine]

Jonathan,
Conditioning is not being removed from GD's rating calculations.  Is that the conclusion you have drawn?  Read Tommy's email again. 

Sean,
I'm not sure how you can see a change like this not helping the cause in some way.  Would you prefer to see courses all across the country still striving to compare to Augusta National or conditioned like U.S. Open set ups?  Is that really perfection and the maintenance standards golf architecture should aim for?  I don't think so.

This new definition is not perfect but like Joel says, but no matter what the criteria, rating anything like this will be subjective. 

Again, let's look at the positives here.  If you read the short summary, there are a number of them.  Let's hope it helps. 

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