Interesting Tom, that those people would want their opinions help private on a subject like this.
Sure, there would be friendly questions to answer and maybe that's enough to want to avoid it.
In truth, and Jeff Evensky sniffed it out.
I think the people would need credibility but not necessarily fame for their golf or design accomplishments. Eliminating them would certainly shorten the list of eligible candidates.
I said on a thread once that I'd rather read Matt Ward's list of Top 20 in The Badlands as opposed to a collective average. He liked that idea.
What would you rather read if you're traveling through Pennsylvania, the stock Top 20 that has Huntsville as #4 or #5? Or Mike Cirba and Joe Bausch charting their way from the Philly greats up to NE PA unknowns and out to the West Penn hills and standing behind their opinions as exactly that...an unvarnished, highly educated opinion!
Jim:
It's usually more interesting to read people's opinions than to read a list . . . though I would be selective in whose opinions I wanted to read. No one has ever explained WHY Huntsville should be #4 or #5 in Pennsylvania, and at some point, you just start to assume that the answer is that it really shouldn't be.
The rankings are just lists, with rarely any thought expressed behind them. It was nice that Ran gave me a bit of space to write about Pine Valley, but that leaves 99 great courses about which he wrote two or three sentences each, and 50 more that were just listed alphabetically. It's a magazine, and that's all they have time or space for, which is one reason why magazines are a failing business.
I have seen a couple of magazine rankings [I think one of the Australian magazines did it, and maybe one of the UK ones as well] where they had each panelist list their top 50 or whatever. Honestly . . . that was not any better. Just more lists, with no room to talk about whatever the opinions behind them were. And everyone stuck too close to the consensus view.
In the end, though, it gets down to everyone having different reasons for doing these lists to begin with.
All of us architects want the rankings to be done well, so that if we do good work, it will be recognized as such . . . but we also know how much bias there is in the process.
Ran claims in his article accompanying the list that rankings stir discussion . . . except that he can not come on here to discuss any of the results, because now he [like Ron Whitten] has to stand behind the results of the consensus, instead of pointing out the flaws with it.
The publishers and editors want their ranking to be accepted as the gold standard, because it benefits them . . . but that same imperative encourages them to stymie real discussion.
And the members and course owners just want their own five minutes of fame.
The only thing we all share in common is that everyone seems afraid what might happen if the facade is pulled away. It's too bad there is no blind taste testing for golf course architecture.