2. ON CULT COURSES
When I was a junior at Cornell, trying to figure out where I should go on my overseas scholarship, I stumbled upon a picture of the 8th hole at Cruden Bay, with sheep all over it, in a 1929 copy of GOLF ILLUSTRATED in the basement of the ag school library. [Who says an Ivy League education isn't good for anything?
] Honestly, I had never heard of the golf course, and wondered if it still existed . . . that's how unknown it was in 1980.
Somewhere in between then and now, Cruden Bay became a cult course. Maybe I even played a small part in that. I loved it when I first saw it, but I also understood it had its limitations [total length, blind par-3's, a heart-attack-hill climb, and some lesser holes to offset the awesome ones]. I was quite surprised when it made a ranking of the top 100 courses in the world years later, but I believe the main reason it did is because rankings were seen as the only way to recognize it, so its fans just kept pushing until they succeeded.
Don Mahaffey's post named the current internet darlings [Sweetens Cove, Wolf Point, and Winter Park] as examples of cult courses, but there have certainly been others, in the stone age days of traditional media. Many designers have cult followings at the start of their careers, when nobody in the mainstream will pay any attention to them.
The course that Sweetens Cove reminded me of most is Tobacco Road, which is a great study for this exercise. Tobacco Road has legions of loyal fans, including myself, but it has never done well at all in the magazine rankings, and I don't really think that is even seen as a controversy -- I can love it and yet agree that it does not meet the working definition of "great" employed by most of the ranking panels.
So why is Tobacco Road like that, but Sweetens Cove and Wolf Point have people insisting they belong in the rankings? Volume. Tobacco Road is less than an hour from Pinehurst, and it cannot help but be compared with all of the courses there, whose pecking order is well established. The contrast with everything in Pinehurst has been key to Tobacco Road's business success: it adroitly siphoned off the golfers who were sick of playing five courses that all looked the same, and established its own little niche. Indeed, it was so successful that it caused the owners of Pinehurst and Mid Pines to start re-investing in their own properties to make sure their courses did not look all the same.
[If you didn't notice, I have switched words now, because that's what this is REALLY about. Golf, like other luxury goods is a niche business, and if you can find your own niche, you can be very successful without worrying about what's happening in other niches.]
By comparison, Sweetens Cove and Wolf Point and Winter Park are in tiny, tiny markets that also happen to be architectural wastelands. There is not much around them to compare them to, and nothing whose pedigree is firmly in place to peg them on the pecking order like Pinehurst et al do for Tobacco Road. Their charms are magnified a million times by the size and structure of the internet, which seems like free word-of-mouth advertising: but remember, GIGO goes double on the internet, because you don't know who are the people whose word you're taking, or whether they are even real people!
Will these courses find [or create] their own niche? Perhaps. Sweetens and Winter Park are nine-hole courses, which conveniently keeps them from having to be compared apples to apples against full-size courses; the same applies to The Cradle, Bandon Preserve, The Mulligan, and all the other "short courses" making waves these days. They may help popularize a resurgence of nine-holers that somehow makes them the granddaddy of that genre, because their advocates have never been to Whitinsville or the Sacred Nine. [Wow, talk about cult status, just think of that nickname! Or of The Dunes Club in Michigan which preceded these newcomers.]
And really, for Winter Park, if it works for the community, it doesn't matter a bit whether Matt Ginella fans are going there, too. But Sweetens and Wolf Point must operate under a different measure.
[size=78%] [/size][size=78%]] [/size]