Please just pick one of the three courses, and give your reasons for favoring it - preferably without denigrating the other courses.
I'll start. Keeping my own work out of it
, I will express a preference for the Red over the Black. Of course, I know the Red course better; I helped to lay it out, as the two courses were routed together to make 36 holes out of Bill's original attempts to route 18 holes on the site. So I have to take some of the blame for the long stretch of 10-12 Red, which was necessitated in order to get around the end of the Blue course and get 36 holes into the site.
What I like about the Red course is that there are some truly original holes, and that Bill and Ben were less happy to settle back into their comfort zone when they had a hole they didn't know what to do with. Red #9 is the epitome of that -- that green was emphatically NOT there to begin with, and I don't know where Bill came up with the idea for it, but it's spectacular.
Red #8 is another true original -- it wasn't even in the original plan, but Bill was unhappy with the walk from #7 green to #9 tee and he didn't want to make #9 longer, so he removed a short hole between #2 and 3 and managed to make a diabolical short hole where there was going to be that long walk. There are some combinations of tee and hole location that just shouldn't be put together here, and there's occasionally an impossible shot around the green, but it's only 110 yards so you should not have left yourself with that.
Even Red #5, a water hole of the kind Bill and I generally try to avoid, is a really neat hole, thanks to the contour at the front left of the green which complicates a shot from the safe side of the fairway, or almost any recovery after a bail-out second shot. What you guys don't know is that nearly all of that fairway was
part of the lake when we first saw the ground ... there were a lot of mounds right along the edge of the lake that Bill liked because they would shield the view of all the open ground to the west, so he filled in enough of the lake to get a fairway on the east side of them. [He could have done it differently, but he liked the native vegetation that had grown on those mounds, so he didn't want to move them and try to get them to look that way again.]
And #17 might be my favorite hole on the course. They really struggled to get the tee in just the right position for that hole, and they moved around some of the stuff to the right of the fairway more than once, but it's a difficult green if you get out of position to the right, and if you go too far left you can't see it at all. You can tell that Bill worked for Pete Dye right there.