By who I meant the people rating the courses not which courses are on the list. One ex Digest rater has already taken this to a personal level. I’m already sensing some tension from those requesting the names.
Perhaps a discussion of who the raters are and their qualifications would be better suited for another site. NLU for example.
John:
Fair enough, I doubt that Ran wants to do that analysis here.
I only did a quick browse of the list of panelists when the magazine sent all panelists a link to the magazine issue, a day before publication, so I certainly don't remember them all. As before, there are a lot of names that I don't know, and quite a few others that I do, but only as panelists. It's my firm belief that they should include MORE prominent players [men and women], MORE people in varied roles in the golf business, and FEWER amateur golfers who like to travel and rate things. But they've gotta get enough votes on courses to rate them, and Rory McIlroy has probably only played 30 or the top 100 [and less than 30% of the other contenders on the ballot].
I also think there are too many architects on the panel, personally, but most of us have gone out of our way to see the best work of past and present, and often on our own dime. I am not worried about their conflicts of interest in the voting, because what goes around comes around. I just think that the "architect's" perspective of why a golf course is good sometimes clashes with the "golfer's" view of why a course is good, and since the readers are golfers, that should be the primary point of view.
It does concern me that Joel, just above, and Ran himself think that the rankings should promote the great renovation / restoration work that has been done. I say this because they are attaching a narrative to the voting, when in fact they cannot [and SHOULD not] pretend to know exactly why I or any other panelist voted the way we did. They're the same as stock pickers on CNBC or political commentators on any TV network . . . they are just interpreting results based on their chosen narrative, which is a way of trying to control the narrative.
But it's not a narrative. It's just a ranking from a small bunch of people who think they know better.
P.S. I might care what you say about my courses, because sometimes you make a good point. I don't care about your rankings, or really anyone else's. They can be good for business, but I still prefer to believe that it's the course we built that brings us more business, not the ranking of it.