The Other Way to do a Ranking

[BCrosby]

I will be happy to serve, George, but I want to play with TEP and MacW. It's something I could tell my grand children about. For hours and hours.

Bob

[Geoffrey Childs]

Geoffrey:  Tom Fazio has candidly expressed his opinion in print that most older courses are very overrated and that everything he does is great.  Why would you have to include him?

Tom

That's a very good point. He has a written record of bias and so by that criteria I agree that he should be eliminated.  I was only striving for some balance.  Perhaps a Rees Jones (NGLA and Maidstone member) or a Steve Smyers or a Weiskopf instead?

[Tom Huckaby]

If you didn't want to include architects, that's fine, but that eliminates a lot of great players nowadays, too.  And generally speaking, the architects as a group have seen more courses than most other groups.

TD - that is all very true; I just think the potential for conflict of interest remains great, and with such a small panel you also wouldn't want to be sacrificing opinions (as I explained in my post to George).  

There have to be 15-20 qualified, knowledgeable, well-travelled people who don't have these conflicts.... Architects and players are not the only ones who get around these days....

TH

[Dan Kelly]

Bob Crosby:  I don't know exactly who D. Scott Chisholm was but he was from the west coast and his name shows up frequently on old articles about architecture going back to the late 1920's.  Not sure if he was a "golf writer" or editor or just an interested observer.

I tried to answer this earlier -- but what the hell. Second time's the charm?

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,846948,00.html

[BCrosby]

Thanks Dan. The answer is:

D. Scott Chisholm was editor of Country Life as of 1931. And probably the editor of whatever magazine published the 1938 rankings.

I can hear him now. You want me to publish your rankings, you need me to be on your panel.

Bob

[Dan_Callahan]

Journalists have their own conflicts. Whitten has his courses. Klein was very involved in bringing Wintonbury to fruition and is part of the Olde Macdonald group. Ran is developing a couse. Shackleford has Rustic.

They've all got a dog in this fight, and they are all close to some of the architects. I'm not sure you can find pure impartiality among writers or architects. You would be better served forming a panel of pure golf nuts.

Maybe start with that dude who's got the web site chronicling his quest to play the top 100 (and who hated Fisher's).

[Phil_the_Author]

Bob & Dan,

"Scotty" Chisholm was a talented amateur player who would become a talented golf writer. After losing in an earlier round in the 1907 U.S. Amateur, "During the small hours of the very morning of the battle [for the championship match] it cannot be said that the [bag]pipes were very much use to anyone who might betrying to sleep. As a matter of fact, no one in the clubhouse could be sleeping, and I think that this, too, could apply for neighbors for miles around... while a brawny Scotch piper in full regalia was draped all over mine. This was my first meeting with "Scotty" Chisholm, so well known now as an entertaining golf writer." A.W. Tillinghast, August 1933.

Their friendship would be strong and follow Chisholm's own move in the early 30's to California where he would become Editor-in-Chief of the Pacific Coast Golfer magazine. It was during Tilly's Course Consultation Tour stop out ther in early 1936 that he would encourage his friend to consider moving to the coast. He believed that tilly would find abundant work and re-introduced tilly to Bell with the idea of getting the two of them to form a design partnership.

He also hired Tilly to write for the magazine as an inducement to get him to move.

During the move, the galss plate negative of Tilly's famous photograph of Old Tom Morris broke. Scotty was able to repair it and then encouraged Tilly to let him print numerous copies from it that they the offered for sale.

I am aware of a famous club in Scotland that proudly displays the Tillinghast photograph of Old Tom in the belief that it was made on the spot in Scotland in 1898 immediately after he took it. They now know that it is one of these later copies because of the very visible thin black line cutting across the bottom right corner of the photograph; the indisputable sign of Scotty's excellent repair job.

Now, back to the rankings... I would strongly consider Mike Davis to be on the list.

[John_Cullum]

I prefer to make up my own questions and answer them in the way I see fit. (Less disagreement that way.)

You should learn to post in color.

[TEPaul]

Edward, Duke of Windsor??

Getoutatown! Or should I say Getoutaengland?  

Joe Kirkwood?

I've seen about three things he did to a golf course and it was a mater of ugly and uglier and ugliest! But the guy could sure play. May've been the best trick shot artist in the world at the time.

If I was to form a limited panel of golf architecture analysts and rankers the first one I'd put on the list is our current US Open champion, and follow him up with his new pal GeoffShac. I'd follow GeoffShac up with David Fay to create some instant dynamics and then I'd put TomD on there for completely obvious reasons. Then I'd put Ben and Bill on there, and follow them up with USGA Museum/Library director Rand Jerris, and while I was in the Far Hills office I'd go down the hall and put Mike Davis on the panel (he loves classic architecture). Then I'd put that pretender to the throne Tiger Woods on there and follow him up with Golf's Most Beloved figure, our own Ran Morrissett. I'd follow him up with another GOLFLCUBATLASER, the most level-headed one on here, Mike Cirba, and then that all time energizer bunny and the best American women amateur of the last half century Carole Semple Thompson, follow her up with teen phenom Michelle Wie, then Pete and Alice Dye. After that would be Merion Superintendent Matt Shaeffer followed by ex-LPGA star Dottie Pepper.

That's seventeen panelists and it's also a helluva representation of my "Big World Theory" that "golf and architecture is a great big thing and there should be something out there for everyone".

[Phil_the_Author]

Tom,

After reading how you would include Michelle Wie I realize that after 79.5 hours straight doing battle with Tom Macwood, Moriarity and others on both the Merion 10 and Pine Valley book threads that something snapped up there...

Please find the medication of your choice and take it... LOTS of it... and get some rest!  

[Patrick_Mucci]

Tom Doak,

Is it possible for an architect to take a blind taste test ?

In judging anything, the judge should be knowledgeable and impartial.

In order to rank/judge courses, while architects might be far more knowledgeable, they'd have to disqualify themselves because, they could never be deemed to be acting in an arms length fashion and their views would always be perceived as "tainted".

Good architecture comes in many styles, hence any judge has to be impartial to style, which makes finding judges very difficult.

[JohnV]

I'd go with:

Tom Doak
Brad Klein
Ron Whitten

Just those three and let them battle it out.

They've all run rating systems so they obviously know it all.

My second choice would be to take the top 12 architects in the business and tell them they can't vote for any course they've worked on.  Augusta might not even make the list because of that rule.

[Dan_Callahan]

Do you disagree with the premise of the thread?  If so, why, and if not, who would you select?

I disagree with the premise because it is founded on the assumption that there is such a thing as a useful ranking of golf courses. The rankings are in place to sell magazines. Beyond that, they are largely indefensible. How can you possibly compare Pine Valley, TOC, Ballybunion, Cypress, NGLA, and Sand Hills and say that one is better than the other?

In a top 100 list, you could take the bottom 30 courses and replace them with any combination of about 50 courses out there without being  too controversial.

I'd much rather see the rankings replaced with honest course reviews. At least with a review, you can get a sense as to why the critic liked or disliked a given course. Issues that are important to that reviewer—such as too many holes going in the same direction—might not matter to me, so I know to discount that factor when I assess the course.

Which brings me to a final problem I have with all of this . . . It is a rare magazine that takes a course by a major architect and picks apart its problems in the way that is done every day on this site. There is too much money involved in advertising and too many close freindships within the industry to get a true critique. That's where this site fill an important niche, even with all of the OT threads that ditract us from time to time.

[Tom_Doak]

Dan:

The other person who has always said the purpose of rankings is "to sell magazines" is Ron Whitten, but this weekend I listened to his publisher tell an audience of panelists about the sanctity of their job and the need for GOLF DIGEST to do it better than anybody else.  So, one of the two of them is lying, or maybe both.

As for honest course reviews, I've written those before, but nobody else will ... even the esteemed founder of this site focuses only on the good so as not to offend any constituency.  By providing this Discussion Group, in which he rarely participates, he lets others do that for him.

Thanks for that, Ran.

[Michael Dugger]

My 20

1. Tom Doak
2. Peter Alliss
3. Tom Macwood
4. Tommy Naccarato
5. Jack Nicklaus
6. Gary McCord
7. Joseph Mark Passov
8. Ran Morissett
9. Nick Faldo
10.Ben Crenshaw
11.Gary Player
12.Alice Dye
13.Charles Price
14.Geoff Shackleford
15.Ken Venturi
16.Bradley Klein
17.Karl Olson
18.Mike Keiser
19.Patrick Mucci
20.Jimmy Kidd

I think this list has peaks and valleys plus great balance amongst preferences and biases.  I'd love to see their list!

[Tom_Doak]

Mdugger:

Charles Price passed away about ten years ago.  Perhaps you should replace him with someone who has a better handle on the courses of Asia, since practically no one on your panel has seen many of them.  (I've only played the best courses in Japan, and most of the others have not even been there.)

[TEPaul]

"The other person who has always said the purpose of rankings is "to sell magazines" is Ron Whitten, but this weekend I listened to his publisher tell an audience of panelists about the sanctity of their job and the need for GOLF DIGEST to do it better than anybody else.  So, one of the two of them is lying, or maybe both.

TomD:

That's funny--very funny. You really don't care what you say on here, do you? Why is that?

Thank you sir---it's refreshing, particularly coming from one in the business.

[Tom_Doak]

Tom P:  Oh, I am very careful in choosing my words here, since they are sometimes quoted in print later.

I would only say what I did about the GOLF DIGEST rankings because I was just a guest at their meeting, because Ron Whitten has been a friend for 22 years and he secretly agrees with me some of the time, and because Mitch Fox the publisher of GOLF DIGEST was serious and might be in need of a wake-up call.

[Eric_Terhorst]

Tom H and Patrick Mucci,

Any time you have more than one human on a committee, you have the potential for conflicts and biases as soon as personalities rear their ugly heads.  It’s impossible to have a conflict-free panel—look at the implosion that happened recently on the Hewlett Packard Board of Directors, all of them supposedly upholding a common goal of protecting the shareholders’ interests!  

Tom Doak,

I agree you can’t “define” what is a great course, but I think Patrick has a point about criteria.  As everyone comes to the table with different experience, the panel has to have some guidelines to help them distinguish great from good from mundane.  It’s easy enough for all of us to distinguish Sunnyvale Muni from Pasatiempo, but even expert panelists might need to agree on some criteria that would distinguish Cypress Point from Pasatiempo. I recall Jack Nicklaus being lukewarm on the Olympic Club Lake course, so his criteria and mine are clearly different.

To all who made lists, I'm not well-read enough to produce my own, but these lists look pretty "golfy."  Shouldn't the list include people from outside the golf community?   Isn’t there a potential for a meaningful contribution from someone who understands artistic or architectural merit but nothing about golf?  

I agree that golf course architects of all stripes must be on the panel, and their votes should be made public like the BCS coaches poll, so the self-promoters would be exposed.

Dan Callahan,
isn't a sense of humor required to enjoy any Top 100 or Top Ten list or Oscar or Golden Globe award?  These rankings may indeed impact careers, but have any animals been harmed in making of this movie??  It seems to me that truly remarkable achievements  usually find their audience...

[TEPaul]

I believe, if you could take the 17 best golf architecture analysts in the world today and let them rank the 100 greatest courses in the world, and they did it just in the context of golf architecture as a course should probably be ranked in an all-in-all and in an overall sense for all golfers, I'm confident that the course that would come out on top would be Shinnecock.

Why? Because, it's so effective for all golfing abilities across the board---ie it let's the hackers play and it tests the best and yet the reasons why that is so on that course are about as subtle and eternally mysterious as great golf course architecture can possibly get.

Is Shinnecock the ideal course and architecture even if there are 1000 golf courses in the world that are more visually dramatic and apparently sexier than it is?

[Michael Dugger]

Mdugger:

Charles Price passed away about ten years ago.  Perhaps you should replace him with someone who has a better handle on the courses of Asia, since practically no one on your panel has seen many of them.  (I've only played the best courses in Japan, and most of the others have not even been there.)

doh!!  who knows Asia??

[TEPaul]

TomD:

All I can say is you're a lot smarter than I am. If I get 50% of what you just said in that last post, that would be a real stretch. Or would it?

[Tom_Doak]

Eric:

One of the Australian magazines requires every participant to agree to posting their own top 25 ranking publicly -- that would be a great caveat, because ANY conflict of interest (not just architects' own) would be out there for everyone to comment upon.

But, I still don't agree with you that you need a definition.  You are right, Jack Nicklaus does have way different criteria than you or me for what is a great course ... but who are we to tell him his criteria are wrong?  Either we want him as a panelist, or we don't.  And he IS Jack Nicklaus.  

In my opinion, writing a definition doesn't work anyway.  GOLF DIGEST gives everybody their definition, but I think many panelists go back and redo their numbers so that the courses they liked the best come out ahead in the accounting.  [They are expressly told not to do that in the instructions for voting; why else would that be?]  If I tell you not to give points for coastal scenery, but Cypress is your #1 course, isn't it still going to wind up #1 with your numbers?

[Jim Thompson]

I've never had a problem with a large group of raters and would like to point out just how hard it would be for the "A team" to rate all those that deserve consideration in a given year.  What I would like to see is a group of fifteen or so individuals used to review the top 15 in each category as sorted by a general mass of raters.

[Tom_Doak]

PS to Tom Paul:  If we are trying to draw close parallels to the previous committee it just dawned on me that there is a perfect parallel for the Duke of Windsor ... actually two, successive former Presidents who love golf and are the world's guests ... the one I was thinking of had some personal issues and is not universally liked because of it.