[Matt_Cohn]

Most of the best courses in the world have changed a lot since they opened - Augusta, Pebble, Pinehurst, and Oakmont would hardly be recognizable to most current golfers if they saw them on opening day.

I started thinking about how good some of these courses were on Opening Day. If you were to rank the World's Best Courses based on the day they were opened, which course would top the list? Which courses would rank much higher or lower on such a list than they do on current lists that rank courses based on their 2010 incarnations?

[Brian_Ewen]

Matt
What a funny "World" you live in !

[Dan Herrmann]

Matt - What was the opening day at St. Andrews (TOC) like? 

To your question, I think they get better with age.

[Phil_the_Author]

If one is to believe what was written in the papers and magazines of the day then EVERY golf course was the next greatest course in America if not the world...

[TEPaul]

Matt:

In my opinion, of the old courses the one that was probably the best and the greatest of all of them on its opening day of all eighteen holes it would definitely be Pine Valley!

I even suspect there is a ton of documentation that many felt it was the greatest in the world even before it opened all eighteen holes.

[Melvyn Morrow]

The Eden Course
 The Course Opened in 1914 but this is the 1919 report.











Hope its of interest.

Melvyn

[Tom_Doak]

This is one competition where the best modern courses really shine.  I was lucky enough to attend the openings for Sand Hills and Pacific Dunes ... I think Mike Keiser and I are the only two who can say that ... and they were both pretty good on the day, even by the standard of the best classic courses.  There are a lot of excellent modern courses that have needed little to no tinkering so far.

That said, it is much easier to look back eighty years and see what has changed on the classic courses, than it is to look forward eighty years and imagine what might change in the future.

[Gary Slatter]

Thanks Melvyn, loved that info on the Eden and how at that time they were hoping Scottish golfers would stop this lengthening of courses.  Good stuff, I'm sure the Eden of 1919 was a better course than the Eden of 2010.

I worked at Mad River Golf in Ontario when it opened.  It was a superb Bob Cupp design.  Within a week of the opening (July 95) the super (who was a partner in the course) starting removing bent grass from the chipping areas and replacing it with rye grass (to make it easier).  So I would say Mad River was better on the day it opened.  It's still better than Cupp's other course in Ontario.

[Peter Pallotta]

I can't answer your question, Matt - but in reading about many of the golden age American courses that are considered great today, it is amazing to note that the vast majority of them were considered great the day they opened. How can that be -- unless the principles of great golf course architecture haven't changed in a 100 years?  (That's what I assume to be true). And yet, many of those very same courses - great then, great now -- have been tinkered with continually, for decades, sometimes in a one-step-forward-too-steps back kind of way, suriviving through successive green committees and tastes and economies.  So something 'essential' must've been there that could not and has not been altered, I assume. And what is that? Ah, 'upon what meat do these the golden age classics feed that they have remained so great?!"  

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