The Artful Golfer: The Artful Best

Friday, September 11, 2009

The Artful Best

Like many golfers, my dream would be to travel the world and play the world's best golf courses (and break 80 on every one). However, I lack the time, the money, and the connections to realistically pursue this dream (but I could do the break 80 part!). I've happily accepted the fact that I'm fortunate simply to play a few new good courses each year on vacation, along with some pretty nice courses right here on the Central Coast.

Alister MacKenzie's Cypress Point

But, it doesn't hurt to dream. And if you're going to dream, you need to know what courses to dream about. Well, I think I've just discovered the best, and perhaps most impartial, list of top courses!

Jim Colton recently launched Golf Blog 100, a new website with its very own Top 100 list, compiled by some very artful golf bloggers who cover golf courses and golf course design. I want their job!

Each selected panelist rated golf courses they've played from a list of 540 eligible courses around the world. There was no set criteria or scale, allowing each panelist to use their expertise in evaluating golf courses and defining what makes a golf course great. The final ranking is the result of a sophisticated modeling technique that ensures that the output is the best representation of the collective view of the panelists.

So far, Jim's released the Top 100 U.S. Courses. Top Public Courses and Top World Courses are coming soon.

Jim plans to profile a few of these courses each week, as well as link to blog posts from its contributors. This should become a valuable resource for anyone interested in playing these top courses and for learning more about golf course design. Jim's goal is to make Golf Blog 100 the first and only stop for golfers looking for comprehensive information of the top golf courses in the world.

The list of panelists include the following golf bloggers:

Jim Colton, Wegoblogger31
Will Smith, Punchbowl Golf
Chip Gaskins, Golf Course Classics
Anonymous, Top 100 Golfer
Anonymous, The Itinerant Golfer
Tom Dunne, Out and Back
Rob Rigg, The Walking Golfer
Gary D'Amato, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Golf Beat
Jim Tang, Vagabond Golfer
Matt Bosela, Now on the Tee
Bill Satterfield, Golf Course Gurus
Mike Sutorius, Golf Course Gurus
Dean Sivara, A Golfer's Quest: A Journey to Play America's Top 100 Golf Courses
Jay Flemma, A Walk In The Park
Anonymous, The London Golfer

Maybe I'll see you on one of these courses one day!

Top 100 Golf - www.golfblog100.com

Labels: Golf Rated Courses, Top 100

1 Comments:

Andy Brown of GolfSwingSecretsRevealed.com said...

Picking out a list of the top-100 golf courses is always bound to be a difficult task. Why I say that is not because of the enormity of task at hand but also the perspective with which you set out on the task. For someone who has just begun playing golf, how he or she rates a golf course will be completely different from a pro looking to assess the qualities of a course. For them, the question in hand will be how strategically placed the bunker is on a par-4 dogleg left hole, whether it will become a factor in the decision that the golfer chooses to take. For others, it is simply the joy of knowing that the snow-clad mountains and the daffodils by the greenside are there to applaud your monster putt.

Personally I feel, specially for golfers like us, for whom golf is one might recreational activity that drives us mad, a course should be challenging enough but still offer enough opportunities for the average golfer to break 80. If that can be combined with mind-numbing natural beauty around the courses, much like Cypress Point, then we just have the perfect course in hand. I am really looking forward to the list on the top-100 courses around the world. That would be quite something, I suspect.