Golf Club Atlas
GolfClubAtlas.com => Golf Course Architecture Discussion Group => Topic started by: Greg Krueger on September 21, 2013, 11:38:21 PM
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In the latest edition of Links Magazine they name the 25 best architects of all time. Interesting list with Tom Doak #5 all time. Congrats TD!
Here it is:
1) Harry Colt
2) Alister MacKenzie
2) Donald Ross
4) A.W. Tillinghast
5) Tom Doak
6) Pete Dye
7) Bill Coore / Ben Crenshaw
8) Charles Blair Macdonald
9) Old Tom Morris
10) Tom Fazio
11) Seth Raynor
12) C.H. Alison
13) Tom Simpson
14) Robert Trent Jones Sr.
15) Stanley Thompson
16) William Flynn
17) Jack Nicklaus
18) James Braid
19) Willie Park Jr.
20) Herbert Fowler
21) Greg Norman ?
21) George Thomas
23) David Kidd
24) Perry Maxwell
25) Robert Trent Jones Jr.
Pretty cool list....Greg Norman T21??? What does everyone think?
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I think they needed to sell more magazines to GCA contributors.
I think that an attempt to quantify or rate architects is preposterous.
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Colt as #1?
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With all due respect to Tom, that seems absurd simply due to longevity. I think he is the finest GCA alive but, there are so many who are not with some astounding bodies of work over very long careers - OTM! In time, he may end up as THE best. But now, to place him there seems premature.
Cheers
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I'd have thought George Thomas might have finished ahead of Greg Norman.
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1,476: Arthur Hills
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Will,
I disagree. I believe time with only be even kinder to Renaissance Golf Design's courses.
Ballyneal, St Andrews Beach and Renaissance Club particularly have not yet come to be recognised as being as good as they are, and they'll continue to grow in stature with good management.
Ren Club and StAB especially are in really tough neighbourhoods and with time, when they are less new, will be given a more fair comparison to the older more established courses around East Lothian and greater Melbourne.
And Barnbougle Dunes is the only course in Australia that bears comparison with Royal Melbourne West as best in the land, which given RMW's place in the conversation of great courses of the world is saying a heap.
The fact Tom and his team have worked as far afield as Long Island, Myrtle Beach, Oregon, Scotland, France, New Zealand, Tasmania and China also adds a lot, IMO. The back end elements of building golf courses and working with outside crews are surely more complicated working in foreign environments with different rules, customs, even units of measure etc.
At the top end, there is no way I can support Colt over MacKenzie, much as I really enjoy Colt's courses.
And Tom Simpson would surely be higher if his French courses were instead built in the United States. As an exercise, what are Alison, Fazio and Pete Dye's seven best courses and what are Simpson's? Now look where each candidate's courses are located.
EDIT - On my first look over the list I missed how egregiously low Perry Maxwell is. That's fucking insulting.
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I took a stab at reordering this over morning coffee, but cannot really come to grips with it. I would only go so far as to put them in groups of five, and my top five (in no order) were:
Alister MacKenzie
Perry Maxwell
George Thomas
Charles Blair Macdonald
A.W. Tillinghast
That list is biased towards the question of whose courses I would go out of my way most to play, but that makes it biased towards private clubs I have little access to, and to the ODG as well. It also seems to favor those with fewer but better courses over those with big production, long careers, and consistency. (Tillie is the biggest exception in the five, IMHO) Of course, that is my golf playing preference - to play good new (to me) courses over just playing at the club every day just to play golf.
Short version, its just another list to generate discussion, and even then, I bet it generates less discussion here than most course lists.
My only other comment (to Melvyn M on Facebook as well) was that Old Tom may not deserve to be on this list, as how many of anything are there where the first was the best? On the other hand, he deserves a special historical category all by himself, and his legacy is both TOC and that everyone built on what he did early on.
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I just find it amazing Norman is on the list?... :P
maxwell....really ..... Next list please
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I never understood how people rate one architect better than another since golf architecture is one of the few disciplines where not all architects start with the same initial conditions. I'm not taking anything away from Tom Doak but in his young career he has arguably already worked on more world-class sites than any architect ever. Granted, he makes the best of these sites, but who is to say another architect would not given the chance? How do you compare an architect working in the 80s on dead-flat land in a desert with a post-2000 architect who gets a site like Ballyneal or Cabot Cliffs? Just sayin'.
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I just find it amazing Norman is on the list?... :P
maxwell....really ..... Next list please
Brad,
Are you saying Maxwell should not be on the list or that Norman should not be ahead of him?
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1,476: Arthur Hills
1,477: Greg Norman
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Lists like this seem incredibly difficult to do so I take them with a grain of salt. If anything it gets people talking.
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The mention of Greg Norman, aside from the quality of the body of his work, got me thinking about how accurately we could really attribute work to an individual.
How much of the work credited to big names in the game is really their own work? How much did TD do which goes under the name of Peter Dye and how much, by extension, is the next big thing currently doing in the name of someone else?
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If living architects move up in the years to come that'll be okay, but if it's the dead ones who do I'm cancelling my subscription!!...
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Will,
I disagree.
I believe time with only be even kinder to Renaissance Golf Design's courses.
Agree completely.
Ballyneal, St Andrews Beach and Renaissance Club particularly have not yet come to be recognised as being as good as they are, and they'll continue to grow in stature with good management.
Have played none of these...they all look phenomenal.
Ren Club and StAB especially are in really tough neighbourhoods and with time, when they are less new, will be given a more fair comparison to the older more established courses around East Lothian and greater Melbourne.
RC looks to me the more attractive course to Muirfield.
And Barnbougle Dunes is the only course in Australia that bears comparison with Royal Melbourne West as best in the land, which given RMW's place in the conversation of great courses of the world is saying a heap.
Can't argue.
The fact Tom and his team have worked as far afield as Long Island, Myrtle Beach, Oregon, Scotland, France, New Zealand, Tasmania and China also adds a lot, IMO. The back end elements of building golf courses and working with outside crews are surely more complicated working in foreign environments with different rules, customs, even units of measure etc.
Agree but don't see where this factors into the discussion...Dr. AM had to travel overseas and to S. America by boat, and deal with all of the above. I think the biggest factor is earth moving capabilities from the earliest designers with very little to modern architects who can do just about anything. Now, I would say that the few moderns designers - TD, C&C, and a few others - would have flourished with horse-drawn plows just the same! I believe that and I think it is why I admire their work so much.
At the top end, there is no way I can support Colt over MacKenzie, much as I really enjoy Colt's courses.
Agree.
And Tom Simpson would surely be higher if his French courses were instead built in the United States. As an exercise, what are Alison, Fazio and Pete Dye's seven best courses and what are Simpson's? Now look where each candidate's courses are located.
I still kick myself for not playing in France during my year overseas, especially having made it to Kennemer! Every Simpson I've caught glimpses of looks amazing and really of a distinct style and look.
EDIT - On my first look over the list I missed how egregiously low Perry Maxwell is. That's fucking insulting.
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I never understood how people rate one architect better than another since golf architecture is one of the few disciplines where not all architects start with the same initial conditions. I'm not taking anything away from Tom Doak but in his young career he has arguably already worked on more world-class sites than any architect ever. Granted, he makes the best of these sites, but who is to say another architect would not given the chance? How do you compare an architect working in the 80s on dead-flat land in a desert with a post-2000 architect who gets a site like Ballyneal or Cabot Cliffs? Just sayin'.
Is that like saying, other basketball players could make heroic winning shots if given the chance?
Players, and architects earn opportunities/great sites/plays designed to get them open , by what they produced in the past
(although some of the more mediocre were born into them, denying other potentially great architects opportunities. hence the mediocre results)
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Matt,
How do you think you get world class sites? Do you think clients offer world class sites to every Tom, Dick, and Harry architect?
Well, maybe that should say every Dick and Harry architect. ;)
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What, no Robert Bruce Harris? Colt at #1 is the most interesting thing here (calling Frank Pont). I'm not sure Tom would rank himself above Bill Coore if he were to entertain such a list.
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Any list that has Jack Nicklaus, Greg Norman and David Kidd higher than Perry Maxwell is just messed up.
Alister Mackenzie said of Maxwell, “Mr. Maxwell speaks of my ability to make a good fairway or develop a worthy green, but I wish to tell you that in laying out a golf course and to give it everything that the science and art of golf demand, Mr. Maxwell is not second to anyone I know.”
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Haven't seen the story so have no idea how the ranking was made. But, wouldn't one way be to take a top 100 course ranking (take your pick) and assign points to each placing. So No. 1 Pine Valley is worth 100, and so on. Add it up per architect. Couldn't be any worse.
No big deal anyway. It's only opinion, but it is cool to see Tom get recognition as the top YLG. (That's Young Living Guy.)
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Matt,
How do you think you get world class sites? Do you think clients offer world class sites to every Tom, Dick, and Harry architect?
Well, maybe that should say every Dick and Harry architect. ;)
Compare the world class sites of architect #5 (Doak) and #6 (Dye) on that list. I bet you Doak already has worked on a half dozen better sites than Dye ever got. Are you telling me that Dye was not good enough to earn great sites? Of course not. It was a different time. Fortunately we are now in a time where developers are seeking great pieces of land. Architects from the 50s through the 90s weren't blessed with the same quality of sites some of the leading names have been getting post 2000.
By no means is this a knock on the great architects of today. I am just saying you have to be honest when you compare courses and architects from different eras of design.
Would you say Doak and Coore are better because the designed Streamsong in Florida, while Dye designed TPC? Don't you see how ridiculous it would even be to compare?
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Compare the world class sites of architect #5 (Doak) and #6 (Dye) on that list. I bet you Doak already has worked on a half dozen better sites than Dye ever got.
Matt:
Except for Teeth of the Dog, I wouldn't argue with you at all about that. But, I did consciously try from the start of my career to stress the importance of working on great property, so it's not entirely an accident that I wound up with more great sites than other architects [including my mentor Mr. Dye] who never professed to care.
I'm not sure what this ranking is supposed to really be about. I've always said it doesn't make sense to try and rank architects, only our courses, because hardly anyone understands the difference between what we started with and what we did with it. I haven't seen the article that accompanies this, if there even is one, but I doubt they are pretending to have done that.
It's possible that they just made the list to be controversial and try to sell magazines ... putting me at #5 would help accomplish the former, anyway. ;)
It's more likely that they just gave out points for every course the different designers had in the two LINKS 100 lists, in which case I would have fared pretty well, since some of my courses are ranked higher by them than by any of the other magazines. That would also explain why Perry Maxwell and George Thomas are listed well below their sterling and well-deserved reputations, as each has only two courses on the top-100 lists.
I'm flattered and amazed by the #5 position. When you stop to think about it, no modern designer will ever be able to touch the top three or four, due to the breadth and depth of their lifetimes of work ... there is no chance any of us will ever build as many courses as they did, while keeping the quality so high. [C.B. Macdonald, with only twelve courses to his credit, is much more assailable, as this ranking shows.] So the best we can ever hope for is to finish #5. I may not be there, but I've got a few more courses to build yet.
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Tom,
I agree with you 100% It makes sense to rank courses since it is only the final product that counts. Trying to rank architects makes no sense.
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Wonder where they think Robert Hunter sits...
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Wonder where they think Robert Hunter sits...
Where do you think he sits, Matthew? He was a fascinating guy but he hardly has any golf courses of his own design to his credit.
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Tom, above Greg Norman for a start!
I suppose it gets back to how one assesses the architects. His book is one of the best texts on golf course architecture ever written. He only designed the one course as a lone architect, but his roles at Cypress Point, The Meadow and Valley Clubs as well as minor redesign work at MPCC and Pebble Beach should have had someone mention Hunter before Jud did.
Is Hunter one of the top two dozen most influential and significant golf course architects ever? In my mind, yes.
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What, no Robert Bruce Harris? Colt at #1 is the most interesting thing here (calling Frank Pont). I'm not sure Tom would rank himself above Bill Coore if he were to entertain such a list.
Jud,
I guess it is based on the combination of quality of work and the amount of courses built with high quality. On that measurement Colt will not easily be surpassed, since he built a lot of high quality courses. However if we talk about best work of the architect, I think architects such as Tom Simpson and Mac will probably score higher because they had more moments of brilliance.
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William Flynn in at 16???? Philly guys where's the outrage?? WTH are you boys asleep ?
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Old Tom at #9. If you took all his expenses at every course it might not equal one holes worth of a design today
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Old Tom at #9. If you took all his expenses at every course it might not equal one holes worth of a design today
If you took all his earnings as a professional it might not be as much as Phil Mickelson tips the locker room attendant every week.
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All the talk about having great sites to work with reminds me that the greatest architect of them all is The Lord himself.
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I never understood how people rate one architect better than another since golf architecture is one of the few disciplines where not all architects start with the same initial conditions. I'm not taking anything away from Tom Doak but in his young career he has arguably already worked on more world-class sites than any architect ever. Granted, he makes the best of these sites, but who is to say another architect would not given the chance? How do you compare an architect working in the 80s on dead-flat land in a desert with a post-2000 architect who gets a site like Ballyneal or Cabot Cliffs? Just sayin'.
Matt,
I think that quite a few architects would make a great job on a great site if given the chance today. But a lot of that is because the Tom Doaks and Bill Coores have been there before them and blazed the trails.
If you moved a lot of those architects working in the 80's on dead flat land directly on to a bunch of great sites at the time, then you wouldn't have seen the same great results.
Some of that is to do with trends. But a lot of it is that you don't get as many visionaries as you may think.
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It is hardly a scientific process because there are so many value judgements involved but perhaps the simpler statement that Tom Doak and Coore/Crenshaw are the most exciting modern (and likely to be high on the all-time list) architects would be less controversial, even if rather obvious.
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Any list that puts Harry Colt anywhere near the top 5 is highly flawed
Any such list that does not put Old Tom Morris @ #1 is highly flawed
Any list that includes Greg Norman and Jack Nickllaus but excludes Gil Hanse is highly flawed
Anybody who buys that magazine for information rather than titillaltion is highly flawed.
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Ian Andrew did a great blog series on the best archies of all time years ago on his blog.
http://thecaddyshack.blogspot.com/2007/05/top-25-golf-course-architects-25-mike.html
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I never understood how people rate one architect better than another since golf architecture is one of the few disciplines where not all architects start with the same initial conditions. I'm not taking anything away from Tom Doak but in his young career he has arguably already worked on more world-class sites than any architect ever. Granted, he makes the best of these sites, but who is to say another architect would not given the chance? How do you compare an architect working in the 80s on dead-flat land in a desert with a post-2000 architect who gets a site like Ballyneal or Cabot Cliffs? Just sayin'.
Matt,
I think that quite a few architects would make a great job on a great site if given the chance today. But a lot of that is because the Tom Doaks and Bill Coores have been there before them and blazed the trails.
If you moved a lot of those architects working in the 80's on dead flat land directly on to a bunch of great sites at the time, then you wouldn't have seen the same great results.
Some of that is to do with trends. But a lot of it is that you don't get as many visionaries as you may think.
Without the artificial period of the 80s the more naturalist period we are in now may not have happened. Most eras are reactions to the era that proceeded them in order to distinguish itself. I bet you if Doak or Coore were designing 30 years earlier their courses would have looked more artificial. They came around at the right time to be the trail blazers of a new style. Just like Pete Dye had done 30 or 40 years before them.
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I never understood how people rate one architect better than another since golf architecture is one of the few disciplines where not all architects start with the same initial conditions. I'm not taking anything away from Tom Doak but in his young career he has arguably already worked on more world-class sites than any architect ever. Granted, he makes the best of these sites, but who is to say another architect would not given the chance? How do you compare an architect working in the 80s on dead-flat land in a desert with a post-2000 architect who gets a site like Ballyneal or Cabot Cliffs? Just sayin'.
Matt,
I think that quite a few architects would make a great job on a great site if given the chance today. But a lot of that is because the Tom Doaks and Bill Coores have been there before them and blazed the trails.
If you moved a lot of those architects working in the 80's on dead flat land directly on to a bunch of great sites at the time, then you wouldn't have seen the same great results.
Some of that is to do with trends. But a lot of it is that you don't get as many visionaries as you may think.
Without the artificial period of the 80s the more naturalist period we are in now may not have happened. Most eras are reactions to the era that proceeded them in order to distinguish itself. I bet you if Doak or Coore were designing 30 years earlier their courses would have looked more artificial. They came around at the right time to be the trail blazers of a new style. Just like Pete Dye had done 30 or 40 years before them.
Matt,
perhaps-he definitely had a great mentor.
I don't buy the whole natural vs. artificial stuff.
just good vs. not so good.
Tom had the good fortune to have no relatives in the business ;), and had to start from the ground up and had the "opportunity" to do years of research and see thousands of courses, and actually study the work of the past greats,while also working with and for a current great, which no doubt shaped his thinking.
He didn't he the disadvantage ;) of immediately going out and being allowed to produce crap.
Did he consiously seek a new style to distinguish himself from the pack?
or did he simply do better work, which happened to appear more natural.
Eventually, and no doubt agonizingly slowly(writing a tell all book certainly didn't help in the short run ;)), his work was recognized, and better properties followed.
Plenty of well known 80's/90's signature architects have had marvelous properties, with average results.
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Did he consiously seek a new style to distinguish himself from the pack?
I think if you ask Tom that very question he will in fact say that he made a very deliberate decision to not design courses that looked like Dye, but to in fact go in another direction so that he would distinguish himself. If Tom made courses that looked like Dye he would not have gotten any work (why hire the copy if you can hire the real thing?). He instead chose to go down another path and thus became a trail blazer. It is very similar to how Dye saw the style of Trent Jones and made a concious decision to go in another direction.
Trust me, give it enough time and a designer will emerge that will distinguish himself from the current style and shift the entire direction of golf design into a new era. Mind you, to be fair, that might be more difficult since there are less and less courses being built.
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Did he consiously seek a new style to distinguish himself from the pack?
I think if you ask Tom that very question he will in fact say that he made a very deliberate decision to not design courses that looked like Dye, but to in fact go in another direction so that he would distinguish himself. If Tom made courses that looked like Dye he would not have gotten any work (why hire the copy if you can hire the real thing?). He instead chose to go down another path and thus became a trail blazer. It is very similar to how Dye saw the style of Trent Jones and made a concious decision to go in another direction.
Trust me, give it enough time and a designer will emerge that will distinguish himself from the current style and shift the entire direction of golf design into a new era. Mind you, to be fair, that might be more difficult since there are less and less courses being built.
It really would be better if you guys just asked me the question, instead of speculating about my answer.
Matt, I had only been working at Long Cove about a month when Mr. Dye told me the story of building Harbour Town and when he made the decision to do his own thing instead of following Trent Jones. [Honestly, I think he over-simplified a bit, because he had built Crooked Stick and The Golf Club prior to Harbour Town, but maybe that means he was trying to teach me a lesson instead of just reminiscing.] Anyway, the main reason you know that story is because I have repeated it, I don't know that Pete ever told it to any golf writers.
I never for a minute took his story to mean that he'd made that decision as a business decision. I took it to mean that he thought it was a shame that everybody was building the same stuff and that golf deserved better than that, so he ought to try something different. He had obviously seen enough great courses here and overseas to realize that not all of them were in the Trent Jones style. I also took his story to mean that copying Pete's style was the wrong thing for me to do, and that I ought to find my own voice.
So, that's what I did. I've nodded in the past to the idea that I didn't want to copy Pete's style because it didn't make any sense; I figured I would be competing against not only Pete but also P.B. and Perry, and if you wanted their style you weren't going to hire me anyway. But it was still more than a business decision ... it was a realization that I liked the Golden Age styles better. Even before I started at Long Cove, I'd spent a summer getting around to Merion and Pine Valley and SFGC and Riviera and all those great courses, and wondered why nobody built anything like them anymore. And I'd spent a little time talking to Ben Crenshaw, who wondered the same thing.
Also, being a child of the nuclear age, I was more likely to appreciate that even though we now had the power to destroy the earth, it would be better for the world if we never had to use that power.
What my little conversation with Mr. Dye did for me was free me of the notion that I had to copy his style to show my appreciation to him. I don't know if he had the same conversation with some of the other guys who worked for him, or whether they just didn't take it the same way I did.
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Doak's and C & C's positions are about right at this time. There are quite a few modern architects who should populate the top half of the list if nothing else because they're normally better educated, the science is greatly advanced, and they have access to all sorts of information and technologies. Perhaps commercial success, taking into consideration courses that went bankrupt, were greatly changed, or NLE in proportion to the architect's body of work, should be included in this assessment.
Craig E,
Dr. Mac was a great promoter. What would you expect him to say, that PM was only good at following orders? Maxwell is high on the list, but he is much more in the mold of a Ralph Plummer than the Good Doctor, Tillie, or even George Thomas.
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"What my little conversation with Mr. Dye did for me was free me of the notion that I had to copy his style to show my appreciation to him"
Lovely.
A great (and kind) mentor, a mature (and dedicated) student.
I wonder how much of the truly good and beneficial work - in art, theology, medicine, music, business, design - has come about because of this same kind of (still quite rare) mentor-student relationship.
Peter
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Craig E,
Dr. Mac was a great promoter. What would you expect him to say, that PM was only good at following orders? Maxwell is high on the list, but he is much more in the mold of a Ralph Plummer than the Good Doctor, Tillie, or even George Thomas.
I always get them confused, with all that great work that Plummer did at Pine Valley, Augusta, NGLA, Gulph Mills, Philadelphia Country Club, and of course all the courses he has ranked in the top 100... :P
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Does Mr Norman own any portion of Travel and Leisure?
Otherwise I cannot at all see his name being worthy of conversation with the others on this list,proposterous.
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All this talk about this list and no one cites the methodology. A number of people correctly assumed the general idea behind the method used in creating the list but here is the printed description from the magazine.
"Working with the top 250 courses on the LINKS100 World list, we assigned design points for each, using a sliding scale (the top 33 courses were given 10 points to be distributed to the architect(s) who shaped them, numbers 33 through 66 were given 9 points, and so on)."
The article admits the method used misses a lot but says the list is a "good place to start the conversation."
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I wonder what courses Greg Norman got points for? He has no courses listed in the world top 100. I guess Doonbeg and Nirwana Bali and The National might all be somewhere in the top 250 ... still hard to see him getting more points than George Thomas or Perry Maxwell out of those, however.
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I think it would be fun to give awards to the architects on this list based on certain categories:
Best routing -
Best greens -
Best par 3's -
Best par 4's -
Best par 5's -
Most fun -
Most difficult (but fair) -
Most playable (but still challenging) -
No need to respond to each category, but I think it will spark an interesting discussion.
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Michael,
You could award those, but the pros would cut up rough when six of the eight trophies went posthumously to George Crump!
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I always get them confused, with all that great work that Plummer did at Pine Valley, Augusta, NGLA, Gulph Mills, Philadelphia Country Club, and of course all the courses he has ranked in the top 100... :P
I have noticed it, your predilection with confusion. The learning on gca.com never ceases. Now I know why Bobby Jones didn't pay Dr. MacKenzie his full fee for Augusta National. In a very Obamaian way, "he didn't build that", Perry Maxwell did. ::)
I would be interested in your list of 10 Perry Maxwell designs (not where he might have scratched some dirt under the guidance of someone else, e.g. Crystal Downs), and you can include the nine holes at Prairie Dunes he did. I am only familiar with a few, Southern Hills and PD are outstanding and probably better than anything Plummer did. Can't think of anything else that gets me thinking you are little more than a Homer. ;)
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Lou,
How about you name 1 course that Ralphie did that deserves to be in the top 100, just 1 you think is better than Prairie Dunes or Southern Hills.
Name 3 existing courses that Ralph was ask to work on that are in the NGLA, Pine Valley and Augusta neighborhood.
I think Ian Andrew had Perry Maxwell in about the right place...
http://thecaddyshack.blogspot.com/2007/06/architect-10-perry-maxwell.html
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Mr. Plummer has two original designs that deserve consideration in the second 50- Preston Trail and Champions- Cypress Creek. I like Southern Hills better than either, and even with Press' nine at Prairie Dunes and the horrible gunch, I liked that one more as well. Of course, having superior topography (both courses) and a sand base have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the course. :o
Ralph Plummer was primarily a Texas architect where he apparently got enough work to make a living even during the Great Depression. Perhaps Perry Maxwell was so highly regarded that he was pulled to the places you noted to work under the guidance of someone else. Or maybe he had to chase deals to put food on the table.
Plummer had a very large hand in the three courses in Texas that have held the US Open- Champions, Colonial (he built it for Bredemus - two major tournament winners who knew Plummer intimately and a high ranking official at the club told me that Plummer did much of the design work there as well- and yes, I know that Maxwell was brought in post flood to work on three or four holes), and Northwood. His body of work of nearly 100 courses is largely intact today and is enjoyed by tens of thousands, mostly at very affordable prices. He may not be a rock star among the gca aficionados like Maxwell, but his work doesn't take a back seat, at least not in my admittedly limited perspective. ;)
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Maxwell's Old Town in Winston-Salem is fantastic and reportedly just got better (or, back to as good) with a C&C renovation.