As a member of the Golf Digest Rating Panel, it is my privilege to play and rate various golf courses all over the country.  These are usually outstanding layouts that seek a ranking as one of the “Best New” courses to open that year or a ranking among the country’s “100 Best” courses.  In other words, they’re not goat ranches.

            Of course, like the man says, somebody’s got to do it.  Still, it’s not all fun and games.  Golf Digest has a very structured ballot that we must complete after we visit and play a golf course.  The ballot asks us to assign a score within a certain range — down to a tenth of a point, no less — measuring the court’s playability, memorability, esthetics, conditioning, walkability, shot values, and other considerations.  Even so, while the process is highly structured, the scores that each rater assigns for these characteristics are inevitably subjective and totally within the discretion of the rater.

            In order to get the fairest measure of each course, the magazine insists that a minimum of ten different panelists play and rate any course that is under consideration.  That takes a little of the individual preference for one type of course versus another out of it, but the fact remains that it’s awfully hard to decide how different courses compare in these subjective categories.

            In my case, I’ve made an effort to understand golf architecture as well as golf course construction.  I know the difference between an Alister Mackenzie design and a Donald Ross design.  I can generally spot an A.W. Tillinghast course a mile away.  And I know the difference between a course designed by one of the Joneses (Robert Trent or his sons Bobby and Rees) and one designed by Tom Fazio or Greg Norman.

            But anyone who thinks they’re infallible about such things is kidding himself.  Architects, like anyone else, change, and so do their design philosophies over time.  Pete Dye started out designing some very conventional — and playable — courses like Crooked Stick, but grew bored and began pushing the envelope by inserting railroad ties, steep slopes, and different grasses into the landscape to find a different way to express himself.  The same with Jack Nicklaus, who started by apprenticing with Dye when he designed the Harbour Town Golf Links on Hilton Head Island, and then went through several design phases where he built very penal courses before settling more recently into building courses that are more playable and less severe.

            One architect to look out for is Greg Norman.  While most great players are not particularly good at designing golf courses that anyone besides Tour players can enjoy, I recently played a brand new Norman design called Shark’s Tooth at Lake Powell, Florida.  Like Ben Crenshaw’s work, it is what is best described as a “minimalist” design, meaning that Norman found the course in the land and moved very little dirt. 

            Of course, it takes a good piece of ground to do that, and Shark’s Tooth is a great location.  Norman designed greens that are subtle, and green complexes that feature chipping areas, a la Donald Ross.  It’s a great track, and I’m going to pay closer attention to Norman’s future designs.