The indispensable golf course guide

    Writing from Chicago
    Monday, December 24, 2012

    The big day, or, as Hammond’s very own Jean Shepherd, whose “A Christmas Story” tale was only about the 324th-best thing he authored, would have written – THE BIG DAY – is almost upon us.
    Those adults fortunate enough to be gifted with a childlike wonder likely no longer yearn for an air rifle. You can put someone’s eye out with a poorly-struck golf ball as well. But those who play more proficiently – and we trust in our audience there are only those who do so – need not only the equipment that ladies and gentlemen of a certain class deserve, but somewhere to play.
    That brings us to an uncommon publication, a guidebook that covers the six golfing continents and any island large and warm enough for someone to strike a ball in anger. The title tells all in its brashness – “The Rolex World’s Top 1000 Golf Courses,” by Gaetan Mourgue d’Algue, aided by his daughter Kristel and Bruce Critchley, a former Walker Cupper now covering the game for Sky Sport in the United Kingdom.
    It should be wrapped and waiting for you under the tree on the morrow. If it is not, then count up your Christmas money, hie yourself to Amazon.com, or the publisher’s website (www.rolextop1000.com), or your favorite bookseller after you ready this, and glom onto a copy.
    D’Algue is a longtime publisher and golfer who couldn’t resist the temptation to organize 200 what are called “inspectors,” a term lifted from Michelin’s famed gastronomic guides, to pick the best courses, then rate them, then tell everyone.
    Often, such tomes disappoint. This one does the opposite. It delights, it informs, it nudges one to find a way to get to a course long rumored to be a worthy test. It presents facts and opinions, but doesn’t mix them. What’s more, it goes into great detail.
    You will find, for instance, the best hotels and restaurants within a short distance of El Rincon de Cajica, a members-only club in Columbia designed by Robert Trent Jones in 1957, and one earning an 80 score on a 75-to-100 scale from an unnamed panel of experts. Each of the thousand courses in the guide, a 1,344-page hardcover nearly two inches thick, contains such information, as well as key statistics on the course, details about the club – to play Rincon you’ll need to know a member – and a small map where the location is indicated by the simple word “golf.”
    What it does not have is lavish color photos of each course in the honey light that golf course photographers lust for. This is a thinking golfe’rs guide to the game across the world, not a book masquerading as a real estate brochure. Instead, the descriptions conjure pictures in the mind as surely as Vin Scully does describing a pickle for a pitcher in the late innings at Dodger Stadium.
    Precisely one-third of the book, 333 courses, are located in the U.S. The same was true of the first edition, issued in 2010, an expansion of a European course guide d’Algue published. We marveled at the audacity when the inaugural came off the press, and still do. Are these the 333 courses we – or you – would pick? Certainly the top courses would be on anyone list of courses to conquer, or at least attempt to conquer. Therein is some of the fun, going along and checking off courses that should, or should not, be included.
    Only 15 of the thousand courses rate 100 points – the numbers fall off in increments of five, which nothing less than a “75” listed. Most of the usual suspects are there: Augusta National, Cypress Point, Pine Valley, the Old Course. One is not: Pebble Beach, a mere “95.”
    None of those 15 at the pinnacle are from the Chicago area, but Chicago Golf Club, that sublime Macdonald-Raynor creation of the 19th century, last revamped a large fashion in advance of a 1920s Walker Cup, is at the 95 ranking, along with Medinah Country Club’s often-changed No. 3 course, the Joan Rivers of layouts.
    Phil Mickelson won’t be happy to discover that Cog Hill’s Dubsdread course, the Rees Jones renovation of which he so heavily criticized during the 2011 Western Open/BMW Championship, was given a lofty 90 ranking, the same as Butler National, Shoreacres, and Lost Dunes, a summer hangout of many golfing Chicagoans in Bridgman, Mich. And that 90 for Dubs, a Dick Wilson-Joe Lee layout, was five points higher than the 85 registered for Pine Tree Golf Club in Boynton Beach, Fla., generally acknowledged to be Wilson’s best layout.
    The three other Chicago-area courses listed are all private and all rated at 80: Beverly, Conway Farms and Rich Harvest Links. Gather a group of Chicago golf architecture buffs in the same room – get an extra bartender if you do so – and you’ll find that Beverly and Conway Farms will rank well ahead of Rich Harvest, if Rich Harvest is ranked at all. As the horseplayer says when his nag in the fourth race finishes after the start of the fifth race, go figure.
    Each course gets a description of some 200 to 225 words, giving the reader the flavor of the course and a bit about its history. Curiously, the guide’s essay on Conway Farms has Tom Watson graduating from Lake Forest College, which will come as news to Watson and the registrar at Stanford, where he was an All-America player. (Perhaps everyone was thinking of Conway Farms member Luke Donald, the Northwestern alum who has had a fair amount of success in recent years.) That may call into question a fact-checkers fancy, but of the other courses with which we’re familiar, that’s the only howler.
    Consider the D’Algue guide the golf equivalent of Michelin’s unmatched hotel-restaurant efforts. At $35, the price is a trifle compared to the value received. (And you may eventually be able to finance a golf trip with it; Amazon has a seller trying to peddle a copy of the first edition for $1,600!) There is nothing else like it in the game.
    
– Tim Cronin