Explaining GOLF’s latest Top 100 Courses in the World ranking

GOLF printed its first World Top 100 in 1985. What has modified since? Not the world — it stays spherical and 57.5 million sq. miles of terra firma. But our strategy to the land — and the builders of the world’s golf programs — have modified dramatically.

At least at the very excessive finish, which is what the World Top 100 constitutes. More than half of the programs from GOLF’s 1985 ranking don’t seem in this 2023 version. Of these 52 programs that fell out, half have been constructed between 1955 and 1985. On at the moment’s record, solely Casa de Campo (No. 75) and Muirfield Village (No. 98) have been designed in that window.

Browse GOLF’s all-new Top 100 Courses in the World record for 2023-24

The modifications started in the Nineties, when Sand Hills (No. 11) after which Bandon Dunes (No. 94) burst onto the scene in the U.S. The destination-golf motion was underway, and it gathered steam when Barnbougle Dunes (No. 36), laid throughout rumpled dunes on the Tasman Sea, and Cape Kidnappers (No. 55), on cliffs that rise practically 500 toes above the South Pacific, vaulted onto our 2005 world rankings. The “build it and they will come” vacation spot mannequin was right here to remain.

And take a look at what these Southern Hemisphere gems have impressed! Following in the large footsteps of Julian Robertson, the entrepreneur behind Kidnappers, American financier Ric Kayne added New Zealand’s Tara Iti (No. 20) and Te Arai (South) (No. 85) to the World Top 100 menu. It doesn’t cease there — phrase is that the just-opened North Course at Te Arai could be the equal of the first two. Talk about a humiliation of riches!

Today, coastal programs comprise practically half of this ranking, which shouldn’t be a shock. These settings virtually assure two linchpins of nice golf: sandy soil and wind. Indeed, the sport began in earnest alongside the North Sea in the 1800s, finally turning inland in the early 1900s to be nearer to the place most individuals lived. Now we’ve come full circle, as world journey is inexpensive and accessible sufficient that increasingly more programs are being constructed in unique areas. Welcome for the first time to our record, St. Lucia and Norway.

GOLF’s different course rankings: Top 100 Courses in the U.S. | Top 100 Courses You Can Play | Top 100 Value Courses in the U.S. | America’s Best Municipal Courses | Top 100 in the U.Okay. and Ireland | Top 100 Short Courses in the World

The Spice of Life? Variety

The previous days, when most programs have been outlined as both parkland, heathland or hyperlinks, are gone. How, for instance, do you classify Gil Hanse’s Ohoopee Match Club (No. 81)? This inland gem in rural Georgia isn’t parkland, it’s… scrubland. What precisely is Ardfin (No. 65), on Scotland’s Isle of Jura? It isn’t a hyperlinks, neither is it cliff prime. How about Montana’s huge and rugged Rock Creek Cattle Company (No. 73)? You get my level — as architects work in a wider vary of environments, pigeonholing programs is more and more unattainable.

If you wished to play all 100 programs on our world record, you’d want to go to 14 nations, and that’s counting England, Scotland, Wales and (*100*) Ireland as one — the UK. Of this 12 months’s eight new entries, solely The Lido (No. 68) is located in the States. Historically, a median of 54 U.S. programs make the record. This 12 months, that quantity dips to 49. Still, the better of American golf stays tough to beat, holding down 10 of the record’s prime 15 spots and 29 of the prime 50.

Prairie golf in America stays as robust as ever, with Sand Hills, Chicago Golf Club (No. 17), Prairie Dunes (No. 26) and Ballyneal (No. 51) all inside or close to the prime half of the ranking. And one other, Nebraska’s Caprock Ranch, simply missed making the record.

The relationship between parkland golf and the World Top 100 is a bit more nuanced. On the 2005 record, over 40 programs have been parkland in nature. Today, that quantity is simply over 20, with the delta predominantly having been surrendered to coastal programs. Regardless, courtesy of phenomenal restorations this century, the finest parkland programs — stateside or elsewhere — are fairly darn invincible.

Thank goodness, too, as a result of most of us reside inland. Without a doubt, stellar placing surfaces are at the coronary heart of parkland golf’s enduring attract. Just take into consideration the better of the better of that style. They’re family names for a wide range of causes, however the frequent denominator of Augusta National (No. 9), Merion (No. 13), Oakland Hills (No. 27) and Winged Foot (West) (No. 29) is their superlative greens.

Rolling With It

The one main knock on parkland golf is that its fairways are not often (as a Scottish good friend likes to say) “rumpy-bumpy.” The emergence of Te Arai (South), Machrihanish (No. 97) and Royal Cinque Ports (No. 100) highlights the significance of swales and unpredictable micro-contours to our 119-person panel, and the want for fiddly swing changes introduced on by such undulating, rumpled and roly-poly fairways.

The king of all such fairways is, in fact, The Old Course at St. Andrews (No. 3). Today’s architects do a a lot better job of incorporating nature’s random actions inside their fairways than their friends did again in the day. Indeed, drink in the drone picture of The Lido’s 1st, 2nd, tenth and eleventh fairways under. Talk about lumps! That form of dynamic land motion helps clarify why the course makes the highest debut of all the prime 100 newbies.

An Encore for the Ages

Despite our waxing on about the predominance of coastal golf, The Lido unfurls in rural, heartland Wisconsin. Even extra apparently, its architects, C.B. Macdonald and his protégé Seth Raynor, died eight-plus a long time earlier than the course’s 2023 completion. How can that be?

Mike Keiser, the pioneering entrepreneur behind Bandon Dunes, lengthy harbored a fascination with Macdonald’s misplaced Lido course, which opened in 1917 alongside the Atlantic on the south shore of Long Island however was plowed over 26 years later. Macdonald professional George Bahto even drew up a plan for Keiser to re-create The Lido on oceanfront land that finally turned Bandon’s Old Macdonald course. While Keiser by no means fairly discovered the proper parcel to pursue his dream, his sons Michael and Chris did, although in an sudden spot: a big, flat tract of land adjoining to their Sand Valley Resort. Cleared of its timber, the featureless parcel turned the good canvas on which to color The Lido of previous.

Key to the effort was Peter Flores. He open-sourced lots of of classic pictures of the unique course and fed them right into a software program program to mannequin The Lido as meticulously as doable. Michael and Chris Keiser then employed Tom Doak to construct the course from Flores’ laptop rendering. Ultimately, the knowledge was fed into GPS-equipped dozers that formed the course with startling precision. Refinements have been carried out in the subject, however the finish result’s an amazingly correct reincarnation of the unique Lido.

Most of the nice template holes are right here, from the Alps at No. 10 to the depraved Redan at No. 16. Other fabled holes are current, together with my favourite, the fifteenth. The inexperienced is straight forward, some 405 yards from the tee, and walled off alongside its proper by two deep bunkers. A string of center-line bunkers punctuate the fairway. Look 75 yards left of the flag and notice some bunkers seemingly out of play. Well, goal for them. An strategy from the far left facet of the fairway opens up the inexperienced to perfection. The gap is known as Strategy, and, by all means, a caddie is important to discovering all the doable taking part in angles — and the way they alter with the wind — when taking part in this epic design.

The Wow Factor Refined

Point Hardy Golf Club, aka Cabot St. Lucia, joins the ranking at No. 76. If an image is value a thousand phrases, the one among Point Hardy on the latest GOLF Magazine cowl (above) speaks volumes. Still, nothing prepares you for the sensation that you just really feel standing on the island fifteenth tee and looking at the diagonal carry over a 100-foot cliff to a rolling fairway, with a view of the sixteenth inexperienced in the distance throughout an inlet.

This new Coore & Crenshaw marvel, which joins the Cabot household of beautiful coastal programs, options half its greens alongside the Atlantic — and units the tongue wagging. Still, to make the World Top 100, a course needs to be robust from prime to backside, and Point Hardy’s inside holes fascinate. No. 2 edges uphill alongside an inside bluff. The left-to-right wind off the ocean pushes you proper, however the finest angle/view of the inexperienced is afforded alongside the left, nearer to the bluff. It’s a recreation of cat and mouse between architect and participant — simply how a lot danger do you wish to take? Easy to see why it’s one among Bill Coore’s favourite holes. I contemplate the 448-yard, par-4 18th — which requires a second shot over a sandy cove — to be Coore & Crenshaw’s best ending gap, and that’s saying loads.

Otherworldly Awesomeness

Norway’s Lofoten Links (No. 88), which graced GOLF’s cowl in 2019, lastly obtained the minimal variety of votes it wanted to be eligible for Top 100 inclusion. Its visionary proprietor, Frode Hov, and British architect Jeremy Turner have achieved a beautiful job reworking their preliminary six-hole course in 1998 to at the moment’s stunner. I headed there in late May and, all issues thought-about, skilled maybe the single most exhilarating day I’ve ever had on a golf course.

The setting — whether or not you’re observing the 2,500-foot snow-covered peaks as you putt out on 13 or the uneven Norwegian sea as you stroll down the sixteenth fairway — forces you to achieve for a thesaurus to explain the attract of golf performed inside the Arctic Circle. Look at the tee ball requirement at the 420-yard 14th under: Hitting an influence fade at Hoven Mountain and watching the ball bend proper with the fairway earlier than it disappears over the tundra is an ideal match of golf to setting.

Imagine stuffing your strategy shut on No. 18 at 2:45 a.m. in the Land of the Midnight Sun. We have been instructed to come back again in late August for the (*100*) Lights, when the course actually shines. Good grief. If ever you’re going to reconnect with nature, it’s right here. Falsterbo GC, in south Sweden, was as soon as in our Top 100. Otherwise, the subsequent nearest world-class course to Lofoten is Royal Dornoch (No. 10), over 900 miles away.

Speaking of closeness, after greenskeeper Jerry Mulvihill bedded down Lofoten for the 2022 winter, he went to St. Lucia to assist his good friend and fellow greenskeeper Damon Di Giorgio with the grow-in at Point Hardy. The “band of brothers” camaraderie discovered inside greenskeeping is one among the actually particular features of that career.

The Venerable… and the Modern Age

I’ve but to talk about the prime 10 programs. Why? Because they hardly change. Yet once more, Pine Valley maintains a cushty lead at No. 1. In truth, there was zero motion in the prime 9 spots. Royal Dornoch, Muirfield and Sand Hills jostled for spots 10 by way of 12, with Sand Hills simply barely slipping out of the prime 10, which means no course constructed after 1950 cracks that prime tier.

Twenty-nine “modern” programs — these constructed after 1946 — occupy Nos. 11 by way of 100. On these 29, there’s no escaping Pete Dye’s affect. The late, legendary architect is immediately answerable for three programs: Casa de Campo, The Ocean Course at Kiawah (No. 62) and Whistling Straits (No. 91). But designers who labored for and discovered from Dye — together with Coore, Doak and Rod Whitman — tack a whooping 16 programs onto that tally. The “Dye Tree” shapes these up to date treasures.

Where Credit Is Due

More than simply architects deserve recognition. These 100 programs signify a few of the world’s highest requirements of greenskeeping. Stephen Rabideau at Winged Foot, Craig Smith at Chicago GC, Jon Wall at Shanqin Bay (No. 95) and their crews present taking part in surfaces that permit these designs to glitter.

And let’s not neglect the builders. After all, neither architects nor greenskeepers procure the land or decide what restrictions are positioned on it (housing, and many others.). It’s the developer who takes the formidable up-front capital danger for land acquisition, course development and infrastructure. Securing permits and sourcing tools to distant areas isn’t as glamorous as it’s possible you’ll assume.

Indeed, how programs come to be has modified considerably from the 1800s, when locals would get collectively to create a non-public membership, then contact the finest participant they knew to put out a course. Those days have principally been changed by visionary entrepreneurs prepared to put out gobs of cash for the sake of finally attracting a loyal buyer base.

Just in the previous few years, we now have misplaced a number of such pioneers who introduced us extremely compelling golf, males like Mark Parsinen (Kingsbarns, No. 86; Castle Stuart, No. 89), Herb Kohler (Whistling Straits) and Julian Robertson (Cape Kidnappers).

We are witnessing a altering of the guard. Trailblazer Mike Keiser enjoys an unmatched document of making world-class experiences for the leisure golfer. How fortunate are we to see his sons Michael, 42, and Chris, 35, stick with it that legacy with The Lido, their first entrant to this record? The pair have a number of extra thrilling tasks set to open over the subsequent few years.

Ben Cowan-Dewar, 44, is already tied to 4 programs on this record (Point Hardy, Castle Stuart, Cabot Cliffs, No. 52 and Cabot Links, No. 79) and has three different high-profile tasks effectively underway in the Canadian Rockies, Florida and the Scottish Highlands. What can Ric Kayne probably do for an encore after his Kiwi successes? Might Frode Hov observe on from Lofoten and construct one other course in his enchanting dwelling nation? Going ahead, look to those entrepreneurs to play a key position in the progress of the recreation.

The Great Equalizer

Few programs can compete with the pure fantastic thing about locations like Kawana (No. 53), with its views of Mt. Fuji to the northwest, and Ardfin, in the Inner Hebrides. Both transfer up 9 spots in this ranking. Yet, course structure is the nice equalizer — and it’s what makes our ranking greater than a magnificence contest. Plenty of programs constructed over muted landforms maintain nice favor with our panelists, together with Muirfield, Chicago GC, Pinehurst No. 2 (No. 21), Garden City (No. 48), Baltusrol (Lower) (No. 67), Les Bordes (New) (No. 83) and Yeamans Hall (No. 99). Superb golf structure is the frequent thread that runs by way of these seven extremely numerous tracks.

That’s what’s so phenomenal about golf at the moment. It introduces you to the full spectrum of wonders discovered in nature — from the audacious to the elemental to the elegant. The greatest problem is deciding the place to play subsequent. The incredible factor? There aren’t any improper choices.