Matt

For the same reasons that many people think that Centre Court Wimbledon is the finest tennis court in the world.  It's all about the context, not the content.

Rich

Actually, I think you have the question wrong. It took 350 years years for them to get it right -- not until the 1840s was the current double-green arrangement developed. The real question is how did the critics, media, R&A captains, town real estate developers and golf pros tolerate all of those centuries of constant tinkering and renovation?

Tim,

that would be the most optimistic intepretation.

By the way, The Old Course occasionally goofs. Witness all of those back tees that sit on or beyond the actually golf course. or the awful softening of Hell and Road Hole bunkers, which have rendered them lifeless of late.

Matt,

I wonder if it's not a little bit like Dante's "Divine Comedy”, which is considered the towering achievement of Italian literature in part because it INVENTED Italian literature (e.g. the northern Italian dialect in which it was written became the basis for the standardized Italian we read today). Similarly:

The Old Course is incomparable in part because it INVENTED the language and concepts by which all comparisons must be made.

Does that make sense?

Peter    

There are a limited number of places where you could build it, unless someone wants to truck in enough sand to fill the whole place 10 or 20 feet deep.  Then you have to have very accurate topology measurements accurate to within a few inches and figure out a way to shape things just right -- bulldozers won't do you much good!  I really doubt that's technologically possible today even with a Shadow Creek sized budget, and would take years since you'd have to account for settling that would necessitate going back and fixing things here and there and then it'd take a while to get the proper grass established and mature.

I mean, anyone with money and the desire can copy the basic layout of the holes, put the bunkers in the right places, recreate gross features like the Valley of Sin and Swilken Burn.  But if you don't reproduce the small features that you would never notice until you encountered them and the firmness of the ground just right, it won't be TOC any more than having an imitation of a Picasso on your wall is the same as having the real thing.  Its those little things that make TOC TOC, not what you can see in a Strokesaver.

Even if TOC was copyrighted, it wouldn't be valid any longer unless it was under that special copyright that keeps the King James bible and certain other works under official copyright of the Crown for perpetuity in the UK.  And even then the US doesn't recognize that, thus the King James is public domain in the US.