[John Mayhugh]

Seriously?!, what about 1,700 courses don't you understand? Of the Golfweek top 100 modern 98 comp raters, of the top 100 classic only 94 comp raters. Is it worth $250 yet?  Sign up bud, it's an utopian metaphor that can't last. It's the best deal going.

John,
I realize you enjoy getting people wound up, but I'm amazed at how many are willing to believe "facts" like this.

I've been a Golfweek rater since 2010.  Since that time, I've remained a member of my local club, remained a member of one national club, and dropped another national club membership.  I don't have a rater bag, bag tag, or wear Golfweek rater gear.  I've submitted ratings for 119 courses since I have been a rater.  I've paid green fees at 103 of them (86%) and that includes all of the public courses.  I have never gone into a golf shop and flashed my rater card and asked (or hinted) for free golf.  I have no problem paying green fees at private clubs as well, so by your standards I must be the biggest sucker in the program! 

The biggest value, quite honestly, of being a rater is that you sometimes can arrange play at a private club without knowing a member or having your pro call.  (I have also been turned down a number of times, and not necessarily in peak season.)  If it means paying unaccompanied rate, that's fine.  I would not contact any course to play without being willing to pay.  But that also means that there are some courses that I won't see because I don't think they are going to be worth my time/money.  Does that help or hurt their ranking? 

I realize that there are some raters who behave poorly.  Like Jim Franklin (post 42), I wish courses would report this too.  Hopefully people will keep in mind that there is a percentage of jerks/morons/etc in the general population, and they appear everywhere.  Vetting doesn't keep them off golf architecture discussion groups, doesn't keep them out of your golf club, and doesn't keep them out of the ranks of raters - whatever the publication.

For all of the supposed poor quality of raters, I think that Golfweek's list does a nice job of promoting the kind of courses that I like to play.  Is it perfect?  Of course not, and sometimes ratings by state don't make a lot of sense, but that's the case with all of the publications.  It's why a lot of raters are needed, and even then there are courses that not enough people have seen. 

The Confidential Guide is great, but it would be impossible for a handful of people to see enough courses to tell someone visiting the Louisville Kentucky area where to play.  (An aside - Doak gave Del Monte in CA a 2 - which is too low - and it would be top 5 in KY!)

[John Kavanaugh]

John,


So you haven't taken the free Vegas golf trip? I thought Shadow Creek had a locker for you guys.


On a side note: The only reason I haven't played either Shadow Creek or Pebble Beach is because they comp raters. Some courses lose business and members over this crap.

[Mike Hendren]

Do any of the top clubs in the US comp raters?  Which ones?
What is the point of paying a fee except for free access?

Jim,


Seriously?!, what about 1,700 courses don't you understand? Of the Golfweek top 100 modern 98 comp raters, of the top 100 classic only 94 comp raters. Is it worth $250 yet?  Sign up bud, it's an utopian metaphor that can't last. It's the best deal going.

The late Southern humorist Lewis Grizzard once argued that any newspaper isn't going to bother telling the truth for a mere quarter:  "If you want the truth, we'll have to charge $4.95."  Not surprisingly GCA has a high BS quotient since it's "free."
 
Like John Mayhugh I must be a chump.  Since 2004 I've been comped at 2 of the 19 top 100 Classics and 5 of the top 25 Moderns that I've played.  Since Barney's an engineer I assume he understand mathematics. 
 
One of my closest friends played football at Rhodes College with R. J. Harper, yet I paid the full freight at Pebble Beach.  Also odd that Barney knows that Shadow Creek comps raters.  I didn't.  But in honor of our friendship I hereby pledge to never play there. 
 
I simply hope that on that One Bright Morning St. Peter doesn't ask me about my rater status so I can slip in.
 
Mike
 
 

[Keith OHalloran]

Kalen,
I understood the analogy.  I just want to be clear that the average course owner has no misconceptions about his property and certainly doesn't care to comp a rater.  He would prefer to comp the guy that comes thru there a few times a week more than some dude he doesn't know.  To be clear...the industry is not impressed by raters nearly as much as raters are...

I'm out also...have a Merry Christmas....cheers, Mike

Mike, why would a course with no misconceptions about its status and which does not want to comp raters do so?

[Mike_Young]

Kalen,
I understood the analogy.  I just want to be clear that the average course owner has no misconceptions about his property and certainly doesn't care to comp a rater.  He would prefer to comp the guy that comes thru there a few times a week more than some dude he doesn't know.  To be clear...the industry is not impressed by raters nearly as much as raters are...

I'm out also...have a Merry Christmas....cheers, Mike

Mike, why would a course with no misconceptions about its status and which does not want to comp raters do so?

I don't know why they often do.  I guess until you have seen one of these dudes in action from the other side it is not fully understood.  Let's call him Raterdude.  Raterdude pops in the proshop and announces to the young shop attendant that he is there and he is a rater.  Hasn't call but happens to be in town visiting his buddy and was going to play with his buddy today.  Explains that he is rater and should be comped.  You tell him no thanks we don't do that and he cops an attitude and you have ruined his day and his outlook toward your course. 

[Jim Franklin]

Kalen,
I understood the analogy.  I just want to be clear that the average course owner has no misconceptions about his property and certainly doesn't care to comp a rater.  He would prefer to comp the guy that comes thru there a few times a week more than some dude he doesn't know.  To be clear...the industry is not impressed by raters nearly as much as raters are...

I'm out also...have a Merry Christmas....cheers, Mike

Mike, why would a course with no misconceptions about its status and which does not want to comp raters do so?

I don't know why they often do.  I guess until you have seen one of these dudes in action from the other side it is not fully understood.  Let's call him Raterdude.  Raterdude pops in the proshop and announces to the young shop attendant that he is there and he is a rater.  Hasn't call but happens to be in town visiting his buddy and was going to play with his buddy today.  Explains that he is rater and should be comped.  You tell him no thanks we don't do that and he cops an attitude and you have ruined his day and his outlook toward your course.

I would certainly hope you tell your staff to NEVER comp a rater that just walks in and says "I'm Raterdude, comp me". That is what gives the rater business a bad name. And those are the people you need to report to whatever magazine they represent. If you are worried about how Raterdude will then react to your course, then be proactive and report Raterdude to the magazine. Raterdude will be booted and then you do not need to worry about said rater's flawed opinion.

Yes? No?

[Mike_Young]

Jim,
I agree with you.
And I have done as you suggest in the past.  The only time I get in a sticky sitution is when I'm on a golf trip somewhere and "Raterdude" is one of my friends and he pulls that crap on a guy.  I jumped a friend about it one time for putting the asst pro in that position and he saw nothing wrong with it.  I may be pushing the 'Raterdude" as the overall example for guys wanting comps and I apologize.  I'm sure you see the same i see with State Golf rules dudes, asst golf pros and even cart boys from ther places.  If they call and don't abuse it , fine but so often when people come south for winter it is a big issue. 

[John Kavanaugh]

Any club that reports a rater is nuts. I once visited a course with a rater who was reported for poor behavior and he was slapped with a six month suspension. Who knows what the course was told but a six month suspension is not a punishment and his score for the course still counts. No one is objective once they've been snitched on.


Of all the rater complaints that are called in very, very few are ever acted on in a serious manner. This is another reason that Golfweek refuses to publish the names of their raters. 

[Keith OHalloran]

Kalen,
I understood the analogy.  I just want to be clear that the average course owner has no misconceptions about his property and certainly doesn't care to comp a rater.  He would prefer to comp the guy that comes thru there a few times a week more than some dude he doesn't know.  To be clear...the industry is not impressed by raters nearly as much as raters are...

I'm out also...have a Merry Christmas....cheers, Mike

Mike, why would a course with no misconceptions about its status and which does not want to comp raters do so?

I don't know why they often do.  I guess until you have seen one of these dudes in action from the other side it is not fully understood.  Let's call him Raterdude.  Raterdude pops in the proshop and announces to the young shop attendant that he is there and he is a rater.  Hasn't call but happens to be in town visiting his buddy and was going to play with his buddy today.  Explains that he is rater and should be comped.  You tell him no thanks we don't do that and he cops an attitude and you have ruined his day and his outlook toward your course.

Mike,
I have no experience from your side of the ledger, but in my business, there is no better feeling than turning away clients you do not need or want. If a course has no illusion of being on a list, I see no reason to appease a rater. Further, a rater is not able to rate every course in America. If your course does not appear on the ballot, why allow raters?

[J_ Crisham]

Seriously?!, what about 1,700 courses don't you understand? Of the Golfweek top 100 modern 98 comp raters, of the top 100 classic only 94 comp raters. Is it worth $250 yet?  Sign up bud, it's an utopian metaphor that can't last. It's the best deal going.

John,
I realize you enjoy getting people wound up, but I'm amazed at how many are willing to believe "facts" like this.

I've been a Golfweek rater since 2010.  Since that time, I've remained a member of my local club, remained a member of one national club, and dropped another national club membership.  I don't have a rater bag, bag tag, or wear Golfweek rater gear.  I've submitted ratings for 119 courses since I have been a rater.  I've paid green fees at 103 of them (86%) and that includes all of the public courses.  I have never gone into a golf shop and flashed my rater card and asked (or hinted) for free golf.  I have no problem paying green fees at private clubs as well, so by your standards I must be the biggest sucker in the program! 

The biggest value, quite honestly, of being a rater is that you sometimes can arrange play at a private club without knowing a member or having your pro call.  (I have also been turned down a number of times, and not necessarily in peak season.)  If it means paying unaccompanied rate, that's fine.  I would not contact any course to play without being willing to pay.  But that also means that there are some courses that I won't see because I don't think they are going to be worth my time/money.  Does that help or hurt their ranking? 

I realize that there are some raters who behave poorly.  Like Jim Franklin (post 42), I wish courses would report this too.  Hopefully people will keep in mind that there is a percentage of jerks/morons/etc in the general population, and they appear everywhere.  Vetting doesn't keep them off golf architecture discussion groups, doesn't keep them out of your golf club, and doesn't keep them out of the ranks of raters - whatever the publication.

For all of the supposed poor quality of raters, I think that Golfweek's list does a nice job of promoting the kind of courses that I like to play.  Is it perfect?  Of course not, and sometimes ratings by state don't make a lot of sense, but that's the case with all of the publications.  It's why a lot of raters are needed, and even then there are courses that not enough people have seen. 

The Confidential Guide is great, but it would be impossible for a handful of people to see enough courses to tell someone visiting the Louisville Kentucky area where to play.  (An aside - Doak gave Del Monte in CA a 2 - which is too low - and it would be top 5 in KY!)

+1   Having hosted John I would add that he is a complete gentleman , adequate golfer and very knowledgeable architecturally. Great guy to spend a day with- a great representative for Golfweek. I sense there is a level of jealousy/animosity being leveled at raters. The vast majority that I know are great people who do a pretty effective assessment of the course being played.

[John Mayhugh]

So you haven't taken the free Vegas golf trip? I thought Shadow Creek had a locker for you guys.

On a side note: The only reason I haven't played either Shadow Creek or Pebble Beach is because they comp raters. Some courses lose business and members over this crap.

I've never played Shadow Creek or Cascata. I haven't played Pebble since I was a rater, but if I did, I wouldn't expect to play it for free. 

Do you really think that someone running a ratings panel would accept a complaint about one of their raters and still use the score the rater submitted for the course?  Maybe I'm just naive, but that makes no sense to me.

Jack,
Adequate golfer may be too generous.  You did tell the shop at Beverly that I was a rater so they wouldn't charge the green fee, didn't you?   

[John Kavanaugh]

I've played Cascata, not worth it even if comped. Now the Wynn is another story even though I am boycotting them since they went to 2x odds at craps.


As far as free golf goes I doubt that many people have received as much as me through the generosity of my rater buds. Thanks guys, I haven't forgotten.

[Mark Bourgeois]

Access has value and this gets to the heart of the argument I made earlier: at least a complimentary round has a comparable price. People seem to assume because there's no explicit price attached to access that it is not valuable.

When a resource is not priced properly it is not used properly. That's the issue.

A related mistake in this thread is this notion a round of golf doesn't cost the course anything. I think the argument *intended* is that the marginal cost of an additional round is low, that the course's costs are largely fixed. This is true from an operational cost perspective, at least on the cash flows (pretend depreciation doesn't exist), but not from an opportunity cost perspective, which I suppose is why many courses seem to ban rankers from playing during peak times.

[Jeff Taylor]

"When a resource is not priced properly it is not used properly. "
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What do you mean by properly?

[Mark Bourgeois]

Jeff, rankers do not pay for all the costs / value of their magazine panel memberships -- everything from the cost (value) of access to the harm caused to the entire panel by behaviors like boorishness as well as by "over consumption" of some courses. This thread provides many examples that are the result of these distorted economics.

If the economics of panel memberships incorporated more of the value as well as of the costs the distortions should diminish. That should produce a better outcome *overall*. But I guess most rankers would oppose such changes because they are free riders.

BTW I don't think the approach by GD and GW goes far enough to address these problems. It would appear they are attempting to  eliminate one specific negative externality: the transaction costs of running the enterprise.

[J_ Crisham]

I sense there is a level of jealousy/animosity being leveled at raters.

Really?  The "you're just jealous of me" retort?   

Dave- I applaud your taste in women:) they don't look like Southsiders:)

[Brad Klein]

Just to clarify some misconceptions perpetrated by people who mistakenly think they are in the know:

Our domestic US list has 2,766 courses on it, not 1,700. That's about 18 percent of all US courses. The other 1,000 courses are distributed worldwide outside the UIS.

I would estimate that the percentage of courses that actually comp individual raters is 50% of the top-classic courses and 65% of the top-modern courses, but that's only subject to advance planning and availability and open tee times. Raters are not allowed to ask for a comped round, simply access according to standard rules and fees of the facility. I am well aware of stories of raters showing up unannounced and slapping their rater card down. Anyone who think that is standard or effective is misguided. Sure, some folks try it, but it's against our policy, it's not very effective, and if I hear about it I get right back to the rater.

Whenever I am asked by a facility I encourage them to develop a rater policy designed to make the process work for them. I always tell them not to comp the rater. I also let them know -- if they ask me - that the facility is allowed to extend the courtesy of the course to an individual rater if they want. But they should feel free to refuse access, or they should charge, and they should never comp someone accompanying that rater.

I can't prevent clubs from doing what they do. Raters are instructed not to attempt access to courses that are not on the ballot list. Obviously, some do. if I hear about it from the facility - and whenever I hear about a rater acting inappropriately - I investigate and make sure it that the rater knows and the facility knows. In a few cases we revoke privileges immediately. I also spend a lot of time with raters and with policy, reviewing them to make sure we don't have the kind of person on board who is intent on exploiting the system for access. Of course some do, and if and when we can we deal with them. But it is impossible to oversee everyone at every facility. We can only try to select the kinds of people who are honorable. I'm glad some of the posters on this thread recognize this. I'm sorry that too many posters on this thread assume the worst about raters. Their assumptions about raters tells me more about the kind of person who posts on GCA than it does about the GW raters.

We count and aggregate all of their votes and that's what determines the ordering of our lists. Unlike one major magazine's panel, raters are nor reprimanded or brought in line for votes that deviate from a standard. Actually, we encourage divergence and a wide spread of votes. It's something I emphasize in the mow standard hour-long instructional course walks that are part of every raters event - along with my lectures and the guest lectures we have there. I also encourage raters to make detailed comments about each course and I read an awful lot of of those comments and try to get back to our raters, especially new ones, to offer advice on how they evaluate.

[Brad Klein]

Much appreciated, David. I love golf course architecture, obviously. Study it carefully, am pretty pedantic about it with others, determined a long time ago I was going to try making a living at it and work really hard at making it work for others in a tough industry.

[Tim Martin]

I don't recall Dave being as vocal about the "perceived" extortion when he was on the panel.

[Tim Martin]

I don't recall Dave being as vocal about the "perceived" extortion when he was on the panel.

You're right, Tim. I wish I had come to these conclusions sooner.  But that doesn't make me wrong, just belatedly right.

 

[Peter Pallotta]

On the other hand, it strikes me that all the actors in this drama (or all the agents in this marketplace) are and remain free to pursue and promote what they perceive to be in their best interests, either in the short and/or long term, and that a fair-minded director (or regulator) is in place to monitor for excesses/violations on that stage or on that Street. What's wrong with that? The American way, no?

[PCCraig]

So you go from this, when you were a rater:

JC Jones raises an interesting point: when you've played tons of comped rounds already in your life, how in the world could one more possibly sway you?

I never really thought about that, but even if I put rating aside, when I look back at the past 25-30 years of my golf-life, I've played for free WAY more often than I've paid. As a kid, I never paid - dad paid.  And that was every day, all day, all summer.

Then, for 4 years straight, I never had to pay.

We're talking about thousands of rounds from age 12 to 21. Usually 36 a day.

And even if you consider tournament entry fees to be "paying", (A) I didn't pay them and (B) I didn't pay them.

And what about all those free range balls? 

So, OK, that's college and that's different, but even as a adult, when I think about it, it's amazing how many times you don't pay:  charity events your firm sends you to, playing with your friends who happen to be pros, client golf, "thank you" rounds, last-minute calls to fill in on so-and-so's scramble team, and plain ol' invites where the host won't even consider letting you pay (and gets pissed at you when you try to sneak a C-Note into his shoes when they come back from the shoe shine guy). It all adds up to a ton of comped golf - rater or no rater.

When JC said that getting comped couldn't possibly affect his rating, I believe him 100 percent. At a certain point, there's just no way it CAN because you're basically just immune to it.

To this, now that you're not?:

when you strip away all the rationalization and justifications and flawed freedom of contract arguments, what you have is good people in a lousy system built on a foundation of tacit pressure on folks with inventory to give it away - or else. 

"    " is right....

[Tim Martin]

"    " is right....

If you understood the argument, Pat, you'd realize that those two statements are not contradictory.  The first is in the eye of the rater.  The second is from the perspective of the ratee.   But more important than that, this cute little attempt to discredit the messenger is weak. Really weak.  I have Brad thanking me and you taking shots at me.  I guess he was right about it being fairly easy to know where to thin out his ranks ...



Dave-I have to rate you a big fat -0- on credibility. And believe it or not nobody extorted that rating out of me. 

[Tim Martin]

"    " is right....

If you understood the argument, Pat, you'd realize that those two statements are not contradictory.  The first is in the eye of the rater.  The second is from the perspective of the ratee.   But more important than that, this cute little attempt to discredit the messenger is weak. Really weak.  I have Brad thanking me and you taking shots at me.  I guess he was right about it being fairly easy to know where to thin out his ranks ...



Dave-I have to rate you a big fat -0- on credibility. And believe it or not nobody extorted that rating out of me. 

I expected to take a few cheap shots like that, Tim.  So I hate to tell you that it doesn't really affect me.

So who do you rate for, Tim?   I'd like to gauge your credibility...

And by the way, you do realize that there is no inconsistency between the statement Pat cited and my current argument, don't you?   The panels consist primarily of people who have NOT received a ton of comped golf in their life.  So a statement about the minority that have is not the same as a statement about the entirety.

I love that you are going to try to make this about me now. You came in high handed and got snuffed. Show some grace and let it go.

[Mike Hendren]

I thought this topic was no big whup until I imagined Shivas' hourly rate and the huge opportunity cost of him participating.  Barney, not so much since the asphalt plants have likely closed for the season.
 
Mike
 

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