Steve,
I believe this is the list from Esquire that you are talking about the Tom Doak put together.
The Essential Eighteen: The Most Important Golf Courses in America
The game begins with the land on which it is played. Play these courses and you will understand where the game comes from, where it has been, and where it is going. And, oh, yeah: One of them is not in the United States.
by Tom Doak | Apr 01 '00
1. THE OLD COURSE, St. Andrews, Scotland. Three hundred years older than Old Tom Morris, the Old Course is the fountainhead of the game. The seminal American designers began there: Donald Ross was an apprentice in William Forgan's club-making shop. Charles Blair Macdonald and A. W. Tillinghast learned the game while attending St. Andrews University. Alister MacKenzie mapped the Old Course, and a copy of his map hung prominently in Bob Jones's office. And Jack Nicklaus won two of his greatest victories here, in the British Opens of 1970 and 1978. Every great golf course's design goes back to the timeless strategies of St. Andrews.
2. GARDEN CITY GOLF CLUB, Garden City, New York. Devereux Emmet and Walter Travis, 1899. A flattish landscape punctuated by deep pot bunkers in the best Scottish tradition. Its uniquely tilted greens are simply an extension of the fairways, but their challenge remains daunting through a hundred years of technology, and the reason is simple: It's hard to get the ball close to the hole when you have to allow for a bounce--and that's true whether you're hitting a fairway wood or a wedge.
3. OAKMONT COUNTRY CLUB, Oakmont, Pennsylvania. William and Henry Fownes, 1903. A club that has relished its role as America's toughest championship test of golf, most forcefully demonstrated in the U. S. Open of 1935, when only Sam Parks broke 300 over four rounds. Its huge, fast greens are full of undulations the likes of which were not found in Scotland, and they created a new standard for America's elite courses.
4. NATIONAL GOLF LINKS OF AMERICA, Southampton, New York. Charles Blair Macdonald, 1909. Conceived by the first U. S. Amateur champion as an ideal course to further the art of golf architecture in America--and it did just that, gaining worldwide acclaim as the first course outside Britain to rival the best links courses. Several holes are modeled after Macdonald's favorite holes overseas. There are some unusual blind shots, but it's a course loaded with imagination, strategy, and fun.
5. MERION GOLF CLUB (EAST COURSE), Ardmore, Pennsylvania. Hugh Wilson, 1911. A brilliant design crammed into just 126 acres on Philadelphia's Main Line. It was the scene not only of Ben Hogan's stirring 1950 comeback U. S. Open victory but also of Bobby Jones's clinching of the Grand Slam in 1930. The quarry that dominates the finishing holes is justly famous, but it was Wilson's "white faced" bunkers, rising out of the fairway to be visible from the tee, that were adopted by his pupil William Flynn and by other Philadelphia architects such as Tillinghast, George Thomas, and George and Tom Fazio, and that became America's standard.
6. PEBBLE BEACH GOLF LINKS, Pebble Beach, California. Jack Neville and Douglas Grant, 1919, with revisions by Herbert Fowler, H. Chandler Egan, and Jack Nicklaus. The famed California-coast resort is an American icon, and it invented the luxury golf destination resort. The nine holes along the Pacific make it famous, thanks to developer Samuel Morse's foresight in reserving the coastal property for open space and setting the homes back across a fairway. But for the pros and the amateurs in AT&T's annual clambake, it was (and still is) the small, tilted greens that make the course an enduring challenge.
7. PINE VALLEY GOLF CLUB, Clementon, New Jersey. George Crump, 1912-22. Half an hour outside Philadelphia, this epic course is laid out with island fairways surrounded by the sandy wastes of the Pine Barrens. Architects of the day recognized that its bold and difficult design could not be the norm, but modern designers have envied its grand scale, the isolation of each hole--and its reputation as America's best course.
8. WINGED FOOT GOLF CLUB, Mamaroneck, New York. East and West courses by A. W. Tillinghast, 1923. The epitome of the northeastern parkland course, with thirty-six holes of small, well-guarded, undulating greens, which the architect compared to human faces: "Of course, there are many greens [on other courses] which are no more impresssive than the vacant, cow-like expression of some people," Tillinghast wrote, "but then again there are some with rugged profiles which loom head and shoulders above the common herd." The woods from which the course was cut made such a dramatic impression that other famous courses routed across farm fields were planted with hundreds of trees to resemble it.
9. CYPRESS POINT CLUB, Pebble Beach, California. Alister MacKenzie, 1928. The most dramatic meeting of land and sea in golf. MacKenzie was the first to insist that a great golf course should be a beautiful one, and there is no more forceful example of his theory. There are fewer holes along the cliffs than at neighbor Pebble Beach, but the inland holes among the Monterey cypress trees provide a beautiful contrast of scenery, and then the course works its way across the dunes, building toward a climax at the rocky sixteenth and seventeenth holes on the point itself.