I have a nominee that is so bad, most of you will have never heard of it.
Wabeek CC, in Bloomfield Hills, northwest of Detroit.
It is so bad that the architects (two guys named Pete Dye and Jack Nicklaus) almost disown it. You might not find it on thier resumes at all.
The story goes that in the early 1970's when Jack was first getting into design work, he started off with some co-authorship projects with Pete Dye. Wabeek was an amazing bit of rolling farmland owned by the family of Senator James Couzens.
http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19230716,00.htmlThe land was purchased by Chrysler Realty with the goal of building a residential community and golf course. Then, the first oil shock hit and they had to scramble to make ends meet on the project and cannibalized some of the intended golf course to build more residences.
The result is one of the most awful wastes of beautiful land that I know of. There is no point in blaming Dye and Nicklaus too much, but the course is pretty much of an encyclopedia of the worst of both of them.
[I see that Wabeek's webpage has no attribution to Dye and/or Nicklaus; they might actually have insisted that they be removed from mention...]
http://www.wabeekcc.org/Default.aspx?p=CourseTourDefault&ssid=97266&vnf=1By the way, I caddied for Jack in the summer of 1973 as he played his inaugural round at Wabeek. And, as you might expect, it was a thrill and a pure pleasure. Jack could not have been nicer. He talked with virtually anyone who wnted to converse with him. He shot -1 on a course that he hadn't seen before and perhaps didn't recognize. He was longer than anyone I had ever worked with; he had (inflation-adjusted) Tiger length and then some. Earlier that same summer, I had caddied for Lee Trevino on the same course, in a Chrylser outing/invitational to support the Detroit Police Athletic League. When Jack found out, he peppered me with questions about what Lee had thought of this or that hole or certain shots.