What this is not:
This is not a criticism of the “Minnesota’s Top 30 Courses” thread — which, by all accounts (including mine, though I have not yet read the whole thing), has been both informative and insightful, letting those of you who live elsewhere know that our North Star State has not only 10,000 lakes (many more, actually; that 10,000 number is indicative of our trademark Nordic modesty!), but also many excellent golf courses. I applaud Pat Craig, who started the thread, and all of the Minnesotans who contributed course descriptions, photographs and observations. I would have added more to that discussion (some of it, perhaps, worth reading!) had I not been enjoying the immense good fortune of the longest vacation I’ve taken in more than 30 years: 12 days in Maui. Couldn’t force myself to do much GCA.com “work” when there was snorkeling to be done and mahi-mahi to be eaten!
This is not an attempt to second-guess those rankings. Not having played all of the courses under consideration even once, let alone enough times, under enough conditions, to reach a final personal judgment on their relative virtues, or the lack thereof, I consider myself unqualified to make any such second-guesses. You might guess that I think the same could be said of those who did participate in the ranking project ... and you would be right about that! What I am certain of, from my own experience and others’, is that opinions of courses change from the first play to the 10th to the 100th — sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Few (if any) of us have played enough rounds on any course, except our own, to know it thoroughly. My Doak Scale ratings, had I been willing to guess at them, would have changed the rank order only minimally.
This is not a criticism of the ranking of my home course, Midland Hills CC — which would be higher on my list of favorite courses in Minnesota. That is why I joined Midland Hills. But that is neither here nor there. I would be happy to host any of you at any time, and you can have your own impressions.
What this is:
This is an argument that my fellow Gophers’ efforts, in that thread (and the the Wolverines’ and the Buckeyes’, in their threads) were all in service of a false god: a ranking of golf courses, from (in Minnesota’s case) No. 30 to No. 1. But it is not just that. It is an argument that all such ranking systems — whether conducted by a dozen Minnesotans or by hundreds of well-traveled raters from all around the world — are, in the words of Tom Doak, “silly and subjective.” That quotation by Mr. Doak has appeared below every one of my posts for almost two years now — but my opposition to course rankings goes back many more years than that, to the time when I arrived at this website. I declined to participate in the Minnesota GCAers’ project because I did not endorse its ultimate aim, and had said so many times in passing.
After all these years, I want to lay out my anti-ranking case in detail — and then propose a new scheme for rating golf courses that would tell people what they need and want to know, without the false objectivity of ratings taken to two decimal points.
I realize that I am tilting at windmills; most people, apparently, love ranking things. But I want to put this out there, once and for all — even if it turns out that I am, in E.B. White’s felicitous phrase, “a member of a party of one.”
Why rankings are a bad idea (using the Minnesota thread as an example of the kind):
(1) Ratings (from which rankings are compiled) are inescapably subjective. Your excellence is yours; mine is mine. If you like one course better than another, and I like them in the reverse order, neither of us is “right,” because there IS no right or wrong.
And adding up the subjective views of a dozen or a thousand raters does not make them any less subjective.
Nor does averaging ratings to two decimal points make them in any way scientific.
In the case of the Minnesota thread:
No course was rated by more than 10 GCAers. One course in the top 30 was ranked by just two golfers.
Ironically, at least to my eyes, they used the Doak Scale (“rankings are subjective and silly”) to achieve the ratings — and the resultant ranking. All of the courses below Hazeltine — from Windsong Farm and Golden Valley (T6) down to Giants Ridge Legend (30) were in an approximately 1-1/2 point range (1.61, to be precise, from 6.11 to 4.50.) Hazeltine was 0.19 higher, in 5th. Minikahda, 0.26 above Hazeltine, in 4th. Northland, 0.19 above Minikahda, in 3rd. Interlachen, 0.25 higher than Northland, in 2nd. And White Bear Yacht Club, a whopping 0.90 above Interlachen, in 1st.
Most of these differences — 0.88 points between No. 8 and No. 23 — are so small as to be insignificant ... yet this sort of ranking MAKES them significant. Which leads to Point 2:
(2) People, I believe, rely on such rankings (the magazines’, their websites’, GCA.com’s) when they decide where they want to play. Henceforth, Google searches for “Minnesota’s top golf courses” (or any similar query) will quickly find their way to that “Top 30” thread. That thread will tell them, for example, that the early-21st-century Windsong Farm is a far better course than the early-21st-century StoneRidge, and that the classic-era Golden Valley or Minneapolis is a far better course than the classic-era Oak Ridge or Midland Hills — both of which propositions I think you’d have a very hard time demonstrating (as Jason Topp is wrestling with in a different current thread).
People visiting from elsewhere will NEVER get far enough down that list of 30 to discover the unique pleasures of many of the courses — all of them excellent golf courses, in many people’s eyes — that fall below No. 5 on the Minnesota ranking. And that’s a damned shame — for the visitors, and for the courses and their staffs.
(3) Golf courses (those worth rating, at any rate) are not just feats of engineering and construction; they are works of art. The best of them are masterpieces. How can one rank masterpieces — or, for that matter, any artistry less than masterful? Is the Mona Lisa greater than Guernica? Is “Charlotte’s Web” a better book than “In Cold Blood”? Mozart or Beethoven — who’s da man? Ridiculous questions — but those are the questions we’re asking when we try to rank the best golf courses. (We are also, of course, trying to say what are the better and worse works when we are speaking of courses no one thinks are masterpieces — perhaps an even sillier venture.)
(4) How can anyone divorce the golf course from its ambiance, its history, its reputation? How can Minikahda, for example, NOT get a bit of juice from its extraordinary clubhouse, set above the beautiful Lake Calhoun, with the Minneapolis skyline in the distance? How can Hazeltine not benefit from its long history of national and international competition? How can you set aside Bobby Jones’s footsteps (and lily-pad shots) as you attempt to size up Interlachen? How can White Bear not get a boost from the praise of its architects and its admirers (and maybe from the fact that Scott and Zelda lived there till they were bounced out on their ears)? How can you disown the sublime pleasure of being the only group on the course at Woodhill? And how, by contrast, can one drown out the noise coming off Interstate 94, in the case of StoneRidge, to judge the course JUST as a golf course?
I think the answer to all of those questions is: You can’t. The best you can do is try.
And YET:
We all want to know which are the best courses, the not-quite-best, the not-quite-not-quite-best-but-nonetheless-excellent. Which is why we need ratings.
I am here to suggest that the Doak Scale is not the scale the rest of us should use. It has too many levels — too many by exactly 100%. I propose, in the alternative, a five-point scale that will tell us what we want and need to know, without pretending to be producing objective assessments or to generate scientifically valid rankings; these are the five points’ meanings, for me (and I will note that most courses, I believe, will sort themselves into these five categories with only a few playings).
Five stars (*****) = One of a kind. Eye-opening and satisfying from start to finish. Holes you’ve rarely or never seen elsewhere. Efficiently routed, producing a reasonable walk. Well conditioned. Play it if you ever get the chance, to broaden your view of what a golf course can be. (Of course, every course is unique — but most are not excellently unique from start to finish, and most don’t open your eyes to golf’s potential.)
Four stars (****) = Outstanding. Excellent from start to finish, with strong or otherwise engaging holes from 1 through 18 — but not consistently eye-opening. Ditto re: routing, walking, conditioning. Play it if you ever get the chance, to enjoy a very fine round of golf.
Three stars (***) = Excellent. Some outstanding holes; some not-so-outstanding. You will not regret having played it, and might want to play it again — soon.
Two stars (**) = Ordinary. Meh. No reason to play it a second time.
One star (*) = Forget about it! Not worth playing even once, unless you have some very good reason.
I have outlined my five-star scale to one other contributor here. He wrote back: “Your scale seems somewhat akin to the Doak scale with a 5 being scores of 7.5-10, a 4 as a 6.5-7.5, 3=4-6, 2=3 and 1=2 or less.”
That is exactly right! I am proposing to edit the Doak Scale, for those of us who are not Tom Doak — and the Doak numbers my fellow contributor suggests are, I think, perfect.
My Minnesota ratings, for what they are worth (in alphabetical order):
***** Northland Country Club. Terrific holes, one after another, on extreme topography — but still easily walkable. Great par-4s. Bewitching greens.
***** White Bear Yacht Club: As Jason Topp wrote near the end of the thread: “At times I have thought it the clear-cut best course in the state. At other times I have thought it simply fits in with the top group of courses.”
Since finishing my rating scale, I’ve given it quite a bit of thought — and have decided that WBYC is, in my experience, one of a kind. It has one magnificent hole after another (from No. 1 on!), on really interesting land where a level lie is nearly non-existent, with several holes the likes of which I’ve not seen elsewhere (including the tiny No. 3, No. 11 green, No. 12 approach and green, No. 14 green, No. 16 green). The crazy blind approach to No. 9 and the crazy blind tee shot on 18 only add to WBYC’s exceptionalism. And it has not one but two great par-5s (a rarity): No. 7 and No. 16.
**** Hazeltine, Interlachen, Minikahda. As described above.
*** Every course in the Minnesota ranking from No. 6 through No. 30, with the exceptions of those I have never played (Spring Hill, Rochester, the new Olympic Hills). All of the 6-to-30 courses that I have played have legitimate claims to Excellence. All have some very fine holes, and some not so fine.
Do I think some of those *** courses are “better” than others of those *** courses? Of course I do. I’d be tempted to give a few 2.5s and a few 3.5s — but then we’re back to the Doak Scale. And it’s all just a matter of taste! If you ask me MY splitting-hairs preferences, I will tell you (I like Minneapolis better than Golden Valley, Oak Ridge over both Minneapolis and Golden Valley, Minnesota Valley over North Oaks, Stillwater over Edina, etc.) ... but I will not imagine that they are anything more than MY preferences.
There you have it. Maybe something to think about.
Dan