Statistics

[Steve Kline]

Ted:

Nothing can be perfect, but what if you relied on the collective Doak rating of this site for courses. There are plenty of stats guys here that could help weed out high and low rankings and the effects of individual rankers who are always high or low. Collectively we have played a ton of courses.

[Tom_Doak]

I think it's a mistake to rate architects, period.  You can rate the courses we've done, but since you don't know how much of the credit for them should really go to us, it's a pointless exercise.

Ted, the number of courses you cite for MacKenzie is not a good representation.  I think it's been verified over the years that he did many more than 49 new courses -- but more importantly, several of his top-100 courses [Royal Melbourne, Kingston Heath, Lahinch, even Crystal Downs] were renovations of greater or lesser degree.  So you couldn't count them among his 49, even if 49 was the right number.

P.S.  I did notice the % for Bill Coore is also way off ... Bill has five courses in the world top 100, the same as me.  Hard to believe that someone at GOLF Magazine was that bad at counting.  I wonder where David Kidd was when all this faulty math was being done ...  

[Nigel Islam]

I think it's a mistake to rate architects, period.  You can rate the courses we've done, but since you don't know how much of the credit for them should really go to us, it's a pointless exercise.

Ted, the number of courses you cite for MacKenzie is not a good representation.  I think it's been verified over the years that he did many more than 49 new courses -- but more importantly, several of his top-100 courses [Royal Melbourne, Kingston Heath, Lahinch, even Crystal Downs] were renovations of greater or lesser degree.  So you couldn't count them among his 49, even if 49 was the right number.

P.S.  I did notice the % for Bill Coore is also way off ... Bill has five courses in the world top 100, the same as me.  Hard to believe that someone at GOLF Magazine was that bad at counting.  I wonder where David Kidd was when all this faulty math was being done ...  

Tom,
I was thinking much the same thing, but please expand on Crystal Downs being a renovation? I also think it is much easier to get a design credit for a renovation done in the 20s than one done today.  Am I correct in saying that?

[Tom_Doak]

Nigel:

I don't think an architect should get design credit for a renovation unless he has significantly changed the routing (more than just a couple of holes) and/or rebuilt all of the greens.

Crystal Downs was almost a complete re-do ... there was a nine-hole course there for a couple of years before MacKenzie arrived, and the only feature that was kept was the site of the 4th green.  His changes to Royal Melbourne and Lahinch left a few fairways or green sites (or holes like the Dell) from a previous version, but still, they were much more extensive than most of the renovations you see today, and thus deserving of a full design credit.  In contrast, most of the restorations I have done are very small by comparison.

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