1920's Golf Course Ranking List

[Sven Nilsen]

Buried within the following article on golf at Penobscot Valley CC in Bangor, Me is the statement that PVCC was the 12th ranked course in the country based on "the professional technical reckoning of class A holes, etc."


I've never heard of a ranking of courses from the 1920's (other than ones that included Foulpointe).  Anyone have any idea where this ranking could be found, and if it did indeed exist, I'm curious to see how PVCC was ranked 12th and to know if it was the first ever golf course ranking list ever produced.


PVCC opened in 1923, so the list would date from some time between then and the article date in 1929.


June 17, 1929 Bangor Daily News -

[MCirba]

It would be fascinating to see such a list and I hope you find it, Sven.   My gut feel in reading it, however, is that it is simply artistic license by the writer given the other hyperbole and superlatives throughout the article. 


I hope I'm wrong.

[Sven Nilsen]

Well, here's another article from earlier that year.  Hopefully its a little better on the hyperbole and superlative front for you.


May 20, 1929 Bangor Daily News -

[MCirba]

Sven,


I'm perplexed as well how a course just opening was seen by enough 1920s raters to be nationally ranked.   I find myself wishing the writer had identified the source.

[Tom_Doak]

I'm perplexed as well how a course just opening was seen by enough 1920s raters to be nationally ranked.   I find myself wishing the writer had identified the source.

If there was any sort of magazine or PGA ranking of courses back then, which I doubt, it would most likely not have consisted of lots and lots of "raters" voting on the result.  [GOLF and GOLF DIGEST didn't do that until 1983-85.]  It just would have been a small group of people getting together and sharing lists.


The article refers to the course having "11 or 12 class A holes" as the foundation of its ranking, so it appears that someone was just tallying up the number of holes they admired at each course they'd seen.  That's not the worst way to do it, actually, although surely the standard of a "class A hole" would vary with each observer.


The funny part is that the writer has got it down as the 12th best course in the country, as if there is a concrete pecking order or an actual ranking.  If Sven actually finds one, that would be great fun.

[Phil Young]

Sven, after seeing what you found, I did a bit of research and found earlier newspaper articles that mentions the "ten best golf courses in the country." On June 20, 1922, both the Birmingham News and the Atlanta Journal named the East Lake golf course as being "one of the ten best golf courses in America-and it is as good as any of the other nine." None of the other nine courses were named. On May 6, 1923, the Atlanta Journal stated, "The East Lake course is now one of the ten best courses in the United States."
      I found it more than a bit puzzling as how East Lake could be proclaimed among the top ten courses, then eveidently fall out the top ten and then it is proclaimed as "now one of the top ten courses" all in less than a year. This makes it hard to believe that there was an actual list of the Top Ten courses...
      "I'm emailing the articles to you as I'm not used to putting them into my post.

[Niall C]

Sven


What about Joshua Crane ? Did he not start "scientifically" ranking courses round about that period ?


Niall

[Jonathan Cummings]

CBM put out a ranking criterion in 1907 called "essential characteristics."  It was 7 weighted categories.  His own courses were the highest ranked.


Darwin in his 1910 book compiled (but did not rank) a list of the 60 best courses in the UK.


MacKenzie in his 1920 book - Spirit of St Andrews - laid out 13 principals of good golf architecture.


Joshua Crane in 1924 published in Field magazine a ranking system and applied it to a dozen or so UK courses.  Crane (along with pals Max Behr and Alister MacKenzie) loved TOC.  Much to his chagrin, using his system Muirfield came out on top and TOC dead last.  A few years later Crane tried to rank a small collection of US courses using his system but nothing was ever published, possible because he didn't trust the system he designed!


The Big US three ranking systems started ranking courses mid-to-late century.


Digest 1966
Magazine 1983
Golfweek 1997

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