Hello, and welcome to the Frida Egg Podcast. I'm Garrett Morrison, and today we delve into the world of golf course ratings and rankings. But first, this episode is brought to you by the Frida Egg Pro Shop. So I don't know if you've noticed, but spring is on the way, golf season is on the way, Winter and fake winter alike are almost over, and it's going to be time to think about sun protection. Now. Nothing beats sunscreen, obviously, but an additional thing that really helps is a bucket hat.
A Fried Egg bucket hat, to be precise. You can find one in our pro shop at proshop dot, Thefrida Egg dot com. Good looking bucket hat with the classic Frida Egg logo pro shop dot, Thefrida Egg dot com. We have things other than the bucket hats too. So today's episode is all about golf course rankings, and I'm talking about the magazine rankings, the top one hundred, Top two hundred lists that are put out every couple of years by Golf Digest, Golf Magazine, Golf Week, and other
golf publications. These lists have been I think enormously influential in shaping tastes about golf course architecture, and frankly, I'm very skeptical about the impact that they've had. I'm not sure it's been healthy. That said, I've never had a super clear idea of how these lists are created, and so I was excited when last year a book came out that got into the nitty gritty of the golf course rating industry, because that's truly what it is, an industry.
The book is called The Raiding Game, and it's by Jonathan Cummings. John is a longtime golf course raider for Golf Week and a long time presence in the community of golf course architecture enthusiasts. He knows everyone, He's seen every course. He is deeply, deeply knowledgeable about how the rating sausage gets made, so to speak. And hats off to him for coming on the podcast and talking to
me in spite of my avowed skepticism about the whole deal. So, without further ado, here's my conversation with John Cummings.
I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.
And when I find my ball in a fried egg Friday egg, the dreaded Friday, egg Frida, egg Frida, egg Brian, egg Frida, egg bride, egg Lie. I'm about ready to run off.
Of the hump.
Tell me about the path from being an enthusiast and a traveler somebody who's seen a lot of golf courses to becoming a raider for the magazines.
Well, it's a little bit amusing. It's part of traveling around. I got a wild hair of my butt to write an annual travelog of what I of the course that i'd seen, and I actually started rating them on my own, associated any panel one to ten rating and kept the database in the back of this thing Excel spreadsheet, continually sorted and ranked my stuff, and I sent this letter out. I wrote it for five years, thirty or forty pages long.
It's just a travel log, unsolicited. I sent it out to about one hundred people, including writers and architects and media types, and got responses back. You know, you're a looney tune if you think this course is better than that and the common kind of things. But anyway, at the end of that Ron Witten got a hold of these, or maybe he was a recipient of the letter. I
don't remember. And he called up Topsy sitter Off, who was kind of running guid just at the time, and said, you get this wacky engineer that's traveling all around doing golf courses down in Washington, d C. You know, he seems to fit our model. Call him up and see if he wants to be digestrator. And so she called and I said sure, and they sent a package down to me and I filled it out an application. I'll send it back to her and got a frantic phone call a couple of days later. I, oh my god,
we didn't realize you're washing DC. We're oversubscribed in that area. Could you go on a waiting list? Sure, I don't care, and Watten. At that time, Brad Klein was just constituting Golf Week's panel and went and called clientup and said, listen, we can't use this guy right now. They probably would fit your model. Why don't you call him up? So Brad Klein called me out of the blue and said, I got eighty people I'm starting Golf Week's rating panels
nineteen eighty four, nineteen ninety four or ninety five. Now, would you like to be one of them? I said sure, And so I became a Golf Week grader. I still have one today.
So tell me a little more about this travelogue that you were writing. It sounds like you were writing a letter. Were you printing it out and making copies and then just sending it to various people?
All hand done too, you know, go to what's the Kinkos and stuff like that, and there actually things cost a ton of money and mailed these out all these clowns. Most of them threw them away too, probablly, but you know it was I got responses, plenty of responses too, but most of them were you're a wacky guy. You know. Whoever listened to what you're doing anyway? But so I said, it was only five years. There was a lot of work, I mean, two hundred and fifty pages with of stuff.
But it was interesting and the architecture thing that you talk about inside these letters, and not only just write a I went to Kui, I played k was an awful day. I didn't like the golf course. I gave it a six. You know, I interjected in these letters parathentically, the little stuff I'd research about the history of rankings,
the prominent people in the rankings. I actually interviewed people do incline and people like this, and that parathetical part in that became the genesis of the book, the rating game, and so that stuff that, the stuff that was in those five letters I stripped on out and became the genesis and the start of the rating game.
Right. So this was essentially like a blog, you know, but done by hand and sent out physically through snail mail. The distribution mechanisms have become quite a bit easier to use these days, I suppose.
Cheaper, but throw away too. I mean, it took a lot of effort to do something by hand, and the more you formalize printing. I don't know if you've written books before, but if you formalize printing and put the effort into it, there's a little bit more integrat in it. To write a book, you got to be passionate about something, and you got to have some depth and knowledge of it. And really the only thing I have depth and knowledge in, and I've studied and read bunches of books on its architecture,
and so that that launched it in itself. Now, I was a professional engineer, and I didn't have time to do this thing until I retired. I'm sixty nine years old and retired four or five years ago, and at that time that really I've always had back my mind that those letters could metastasize into some kind of book, if you will. And it took the effort of being retired.
I lived in washingt d C. And I have a little researcher card at the Library of Congress, and so I spent a year down there with all every historical magazine for Digest, Golf Week, Golf Magazine, and I just did it properly. Spent three days a week down there, eight hours a day wrote the book.
Maybe we could start with what you did your research on it. Sounds like in the archives the history of the golf course rankings. When did golf course rankings start and when did they really start to gain momentum and purchase in the golf world.
A few folks CEB McDonald put together a little ranking thing low did, and so they're early nineteen hundreds, nineteen tens. There are a few people that went on out there and tried to categorize in some way the components of character of golf of course character and how that's measured. But really nineteen sixty six when Digests jumped into this, and it really was by mistake they got into it.
The Digest it was a big publishing company or a big golf magazine I guess the biggest golf magazine at the time, and they've had the energy and the wherewithal and they started to get the curiosity of the thing. And that really started in the magazine of seventy three, and then Golf Week, where was ninety five, and there have been some spin off others Cup and hundred. Golf more recently is a pretty good one, especially if you travel and there's some Australian ones, there's a South African one.
You know there there area regional a top on hundreds. But in America, the big three or Golf Week, Golf Digests, and Golf Magazine and Golf Digest pioneered this mid sixties would be the genesis of the modern rating lists.
Could you tell me a little bit about the early I suppose years of the Golf Digest ranking and how it evolved.
It was Bill Davis, I think it was was the original that may have been an editor or publisher of Dice at the time. He was approached by I believe it's a real estate company or real estate efforts some kind, and said, are we be interested in you putting together a list of golf courses, And we wanted to be the hardest golf court, the hardest golf courses in the United States, called the top two hundred most difficult golf courses.
And at first I just said they had no interest whatsoever doing it, and then Bill Davis thought about it for Whelm said, you know, it's mildly intriguing. And they published a list and I think the first list was based only on course rating difficulty, so I mean six point by wingfoot or whatever. It was seventy five point five. And they just went right on down the US and listed these things, and then they thought that that was
the next year. They thought, well, we ought to keep on doing this thing, and so then they constituted a panel and a panel. Herbert wore Win was on the panel, I believe SM Steve was on the panel, and this little core of who's who in the mid sixties, and they became the executive panel to oversee this. But soon afterwards they start actually getting volunteers in there, which were called raiders. And those books are the executive panel or the filters, and what the raiders gave the ratings to them.
They'd actually fudge them in situation that could be published for Digest, and they put at irby two years since I think sixty eight.
Now. The next big stage in the evolution of these magazine rankings, as far as I can see, was Tom Doak's entrance into the scene with Golf Magazine. How did he change the process a little bit? How was what he was doing different from what Golf Digest was doing.
Well, originally they didn't have orders, they didn't have rankings. They had clusters of good courses in the initial couple lists like that. And Tom was a young kid, and I think George Pepper maybe was the was the editor at the time. He contacted Pepper and said, listen, you're going about this all wrong. You need to rank them literally in order. So what they proached them said, well, Tommy, you got such a great idea, was you run the panel? And he had only done one golf course high point
in time. It was a precocious little I knew him at that time, I've known for thirty five years, just
very confident self. I guess came on in and said instead of a category based method like Digest was starting the formula, I wanted to put some kind of numeric system and it was an abcdef that related to what that ranking if you, as a raider, Garret said that that was an a golf course you were tailing Golf magazine, that it should be ranked them though one to ten you said it was a c golf course, it's fifty
to one hundred ers. There was some scale that was related to that, but all kind of now you was tying that into actual rankings and I just did not do that. DI just assign you. And again I'm not sure the year that they did this, but it was pretty early. He assigned you as a Digest raider to go out and give ratings on categories, and the executive board mixed these in such a way that they came up at the rankings. And Brad was much much later.
Brad was Bradston come on till ninety five was the first Golf week.
List, right, So Bradley Klein took over the Golf week List and then take it over he inaugurated it, right, And so how was what he was doing then different again from Golf Digest and Golf Magazine.
Each one of them had the little foothold. And what Golf Week did is there was a pitcher in Atlanta. He pitched for the triple A braves. He's probably still a panelist, I don't know, but he came to climb when Climates formed this panel or formed the idea of a pianel and said, listen, Digest and magazine are taking old traditional golf courses in the golden age of architecture like that, and they're mixing it with these modern basio
and theliss highly engineered type golf courses. Never really apples and oranges. Golf wek would have their own foothold and the soul ranking things that they segregated the two of them, and that's what they start off with. The top hundred classical list that's up till nineteen sixty. It was kind of an arbitrary number, and then nineteen sixty was the
architect and so that's their foothold. And then they also ten to fifteen years ago they also took that expanded both lists from the top and top two hundred, and so effectively you're getting four hundred top four hundred golf courses every time you see one of those lists come out and Golf Week and that exposes some wonderful, wonderful tradition New England courses that no one will ever hear of like that, And so it's a very it's a
good idea, it's good advertising for Golf Week. It's these little clubs are early and the enamored by the fact that they're on these lists, and digestin magazine don't have that interesting.
And in order to have a list that's that long, that includes that many courses, you need a fair amount of raiders. And the issue of recruiting raiders and assessing raiders is a really interesting one that you take up in your book. Maybe we could start by talking about what you perceive to be the differences between the raider panels at Golf Digest, Golf Magazine and Golf Week. How are the bodies of raiders different at those three publications.
I think they have distinct equalities. Digest always is proud of the fact that the raiders are They're not architects, they're not industry people, and they're low handicaps and they're supposed to go back and evaluate golf course from the back. Teams and so this is a very special group of accomplished golfers that now are going out in view from only that lens the golf Course magazine now the hand Ran Morrison now runs Golf Magazine. You probably know this.
What RN has is eighty to one hundred luminaries in the golf world. And these folks are very well traveled, no question about it. And they have a small ballot. They only have four or five hundred courses worldwide that they're supposed to see, so they are more who's who in golf. I mean, Nicholas Palmer was a panelist at one time, and Jan Stevenson and Wise Cough and Jones brothers, you know, you can run it on down. So they were getting the cream of the crop up there Golf Week.
On the other side is the pedestrian panel. They've got a to z, they've got couples, they've got people are good golfers, bad golfers. Frankly they have It's more of a panel of eight hundred people that really like to go out and see golf courses. But their criteria, their their qualifications, you know, are not as is looked at so hard. It's more of their willingness to go out there and see golf courses, which is a very important parameter on a good raider.
There's a lot of interesting issues in there. Now. I think you agree with me on this what I'm about to say. But the handicap requirement, the low handicap requirement that Golf Digest has, strikes me as absurd on its face. I have no idea what being an expert golfer has to do with having insight into architecture. And so why why does can you speak to this? Why why does Digest have this requirement?
Well you have to interview them, get written on here and tell you it was a wrong approach. The only in my opinion, the only thing that would cost the best raider out there is one who travels a lot, sees a lot of different golf courses. So when he sees a new course, he kind of knows where this goes his own personal ranking. I think of a deck of cards, or find valleys on the top and lemuni up. The road is on the bottom, if you will, the
courses that you've seen. When you see a new golf course like that, the whole thing is to slide that card in where the courses above it are better and the courses below it are worse. And I think the Digest in their method of doing this thing is flawed. They should look at people see a lot of golf courses and not people play the game well. And then the other thing is they've got a criteria system there
which I think is just completely flawed. And there's a chapter in the book about categories, and I think Ron Wooden is not wildly pleased about that chapter. Freely.
Well, maybe we could take that side road for a second. What is in essence your objection to using categories to determine the quality of golf course? Now, Golf Digest you spoke to this a little bit earlier, but just to be clear, Golf Digest has what number of categories? Is it?
They change it all the time.
Yeah, I can never keep track. But it's you know, different components of golf course excellence, and you can imagine what they are. Basically, the one that really sticks in my cries on beyond which you know, I have no idea what that means. I think it has something to do with tradition. But for some reason, bethpage Black score is super low on ambiance and I'm like, wait a minute, doesn't Beth Page Black have amazing tradition. But yes, there
are these different categories that Golf Digest uses. Your objection to them is not so much that they're the wrong categories, but just that the category system itself is prone to error.
You know, if I asked you to rank, of course as you mister panel, the new individual and whole panel like that, why in the hell would I want to introduce an intermediate step in there? As it does is offuscape the end product. What I really want is to get a bunch of raiders to give me their rankings and for me to come somehow merge those rankings together
in one list and publish a rankings list. But when you have a bunch of numbers in there, one, I don't believe they can publish or they can these raiders have the ability to resolve these numbers, these seven point two to eight out to these decimal points. It's a ludicrous, But they like to keep this. They think they're in the science world doing that, and I think it's just humorous. But I would take the whole category thing. It's an
unnecessary step that introduces air into the thing. You have bias air, you have resolutionaire, we have all the simple little measurement airs that happen when you make the measurement anywhere in the world. And it's something that should be cast aside. And the great evidence that I believe it doesn't work is they change it all the time. They're continually fiddling with it after sixty years of this piano
fifty years, sixty years. And if that's not evidence that you know, something's flawed, right.
Yeah, So maybe we could get back to the issue of raiders. Who raiders are, who's able to be a raider? So who, in your mind, what kind of person makes the ideal radar?
Oh, I can be biased. It's someone older like myself, who's retired and has the ability to get in the car, getting an airplane, getting curiosity, do that travel and see a number of golf courses. That also has some financial means because none of these panels they don't pay raiders like that, and so people travel maniacally and they pull
those travel fees out of their pocket. And I think that the best raiders are the ones that have seen the broadest spectrum of golf courses, classical courses, modern courses, geographically diverse courses, because now they have the best thing when they see another course to weigh it against. And really, that's what it's all about. Is if I've only seen twenty courses around my local area and I get a Raider card and I'm so happy and I'm running out and see cog Hill, I think it's a ten. It's
the greatest thing I've ever seen in my life. And
this is why that the best raiders. And if I would formulate my own pianel, I wouldn't care about anything other than how broad a number of courses they see, how willing they are to travel and see other courses, and that really would be And to some extent, seem to see some great golf courses, so they have to weigh augustus are to get on and find valley insite person all these But if they've seen things that they've seen great golf courses, they have some barometer to wait
what they just saw on the course up the street against it. And that's important. But see a lot of golf courses is the most important thing. Willing to travel, have the means to travel.
Right, it makes good sense that a raider should have a broad range of experience to draw on and has seen a lot of courses so that they don't go, you know, see a course that might be somewhat mediocre and think, hey, it's the best course I've ever seen.
So it's a ten. But of course, the problem that's introduced here is I think a significant one that in order to be a raider you have to not only travel, but have the means to travel and have the time to travel, which to an extent limits the range of people that can be raiders. And so what ends up getting rated is the taste of a specific subset of golfers, a specific social class of golfers, really, and so how can magazines address that problem or is that just inevitable.
I'm not sure I can answer that thing. I mean, if you don't have means to get around, and I'm asking you to go around and see golf courses and you can't afford to go there, that's a problem I'm not sure how you can solve. You know, college game gets out of college, he's got a fascination about golf course architecture. He's been starving for four straight years. He's
got a twenty thousand dollars year job. How in the world can he get around and you know, how can he go to some of these outings, these these architectural summits that they magazines sometimes ask for. I don't know how to solve that.
You know, yeah, I don't either, And you know, I think it really is a problem because you know, raiders are predominantly coming from kind of one class of golfers, but their opinions are pulled and then presented as somewhat objective. I suppose that's the framing of these lists. These are the one hundred greatest golf courses in America. It's not the one hundred greatest courses according to this particular band of the golfing population. Know, these are the greatest courses.
I mean. The issue with this that I see is that, you know, when people are forming their impressions about what makes greatness and a golf course, often they go to these lists. I know I did when I was a kid and I got an issue of Golf Digester. My dad got it, and it was tremendously exciting to see these top one hundred golf courses ranked, and it was really formative in my impressions about what made a great
golf course. And what made a great golf course, according to those Golf Digest rankings, was not only a hard course that might appeal to a low handicap, as we discussed earlier, but predominantly ultra exclusive private clubs or really expensive daily fee courses. There just weren't a whole lot of courses that struck me as being very accessible to me. And so I began to think of greatness as something that was just out of reach or or something that
potentially I could aspire to later in my life. But it wasn't really connecting with my own existence as a golfer, and I was fairly privileged. And I'm not sure that this problem can be solved. But from what you've seen, is it something that the people who run these rankings are concerned about that you know, they might be presenting the tastes of a pretty specific set of the golfing population as being authoritative.
No, the thing that drives them are advertising these less sell and that's the number one thing about it. Real estate to some extent, oh and travel too. Just like you just said, is when I go to the best golf courses in the state, the best you can play in a state and I know I'm traveling to Missouri or something like that. I go down these lists and I say, oh gosh, I can get on this one, this one, and this one. You know, it kind of
defines if I'm going on a golf trip. It defines where I want to focus my efforts, the highest quality courses, assuming I can get access to them. But as far as a niche exposing just a small niche, not one of these magazines is going to say that. They're always going to say, you know, this represents everybody. But like you said, I don't know you ever could solve that in any way, shape or form unless the magazine. You've
had a very deep pocketed owner of a magazine. He underwrites this whole thing and sends these raiders out and signs them courses and they don't pay anything like that, which is not going to happen.
But in fact, as you alluded to, many raiders pay to be on these panels. I don't know if I'll do. I know they do a golf digest.
I do golf week, two half of them do. It's a very bizarre thing that there's a legacy membership of two three hundred of them, I think that are veterans that do not pay, but the majority do. And I think Milstein has actually talked round about monetizing Golf magazine.
And you have to check on this because I don't know this is true, but I think that came back and said, we have one hundred panelists, you know what kind of money you're going to make amiss and he realized that that was kind of kind of fiction, but digest is very much money. They followed golf Wey was the first to do that, and they followed Golfee and
they really monetize it. A thousand to get in and two point fifty years with two thousand raiders, I mean they're generated a million bucks with their revenue out of this panel.
Yeah, there's there's perhaps a realization that this is a kind of exclusive golf club that the rating panel itself is functioning in somewhat that way. There's access so obviously to a tremendous number of courses there are, Yeah.
But you know, it's also we know now what three pounds now thirty two hundred United States raiders now, and these poor courses are getting innovating with raiders. At one time there weren't that many out there before Golf Weak was around. I just had a panel of four or five hundred. Magazine was sixty or eighty people, and so it was much rareer to get the knock on the door, can I play the golf course? And now they get
them all the time some of these courses. How many raiders do you guys have, because they made so many phone calls? Go to a Florida golf course middle of winter like this, when the raiders in the northeast or snowbound, they come down here and they knocking every door they can.
Oh my goodness. Something I was interested to find out in your book, something that I didn't really put together before think about before, is that raiders themselves are getting assessed. So what are the ways in which you think a raider should be judged once he or she is part of a rating panel. What constitutes good performance on the part of.
A raider certainly the number one thing I know that Dean k Nuth has kind of formalized the policing of his panel on Golf Digest Golf Week probably less so it's informal, but they've got it's an online you look at performance and it got to be the number one thing is are you active? You know, if you have a radar card and you spend a year you didn't rate a golf course like that, you know, hello, are
you still interested in this? And so you write a check for two and fifty dollars you never each year, and you never attend any of the events you never you know, heard of. That's got to be the number one thing. You've got to actively participate in this thing,
or thank you very much for find someone else. And there are other things that you have to watch their numbers too, because you imagine a bell curve of one hundred votes around a golf course like this, and you see a person's way outside this consistently outside high or low, that's a bias and that's a warning bell. And we have the wherewithal and these magazines, with websites and with software if you will, to police this a little bit and have warning flags come up when someone is voting
way outside of range. It's reasonable like that, and that should be recognized quickly by a panel, and a person should be given a little education and say, listen, you're way outside here, and the rest of your fellow raiders and that's a policing that can be done and it is reasonable own.
I'm particularly interested in the bias piece of this. Where would you locate the difference between a valid variety of opinion and bias? In other words, at what point does somebody's individual opinion, which might be different from other people's opinions, become an unuseful bias.
We got to identify it first. If again you use a little bit of statistics and you look at this one golfer goes to Donald Ross's golf court, which he loves old time architects. Is every single one of them are high from the rest of his brethren, they're voting for it. That as a bias, a clear bias. Constantly. If he hates Fassio and every one of them is low like that, this is a bias that's not only recognizable,
it's also measurable. I can measure the bias from the central number of the mean, if you will, and actually calculate a number that he's biased by. I don't know, it's pretty much a numeric thing that you can identify and you can call out on this person.
What if you went to a raider who was overrating, say tom Fazio courses compared to other raiders. That where the scores for tom Fazio courses for this particular rader were much higher than normal. And you went to this raider, and the raider just said back to you, well, I think Tom Fazio is the best golf architect in the world. I think he's way better than everybody else. That's my opinion. Then what would the response be to that, Well.
You can't contaminate these numbers, I mean, and if you are contaminating those numbers with known bias, I as if I were policing these things, I'm going to get rid of your ratings, not put them into the mix if you will, or get rid of you. You know, it's if there's clear bias. There's by all kinds of bias. There's people who have told me before that that they there's no good golf course that has been built by a living architect, and so all the great golf courses
by dead architects. And right there, that's a bias. Or you know, how can you work with that? He goes out and sees a modern golf course, he is it a three? Even care what it is and be you know, whistling Straits or Eui. I don't care stream saw, but anyway, that's that's a clear bias. But there are others. There's bias towards geography. There's bias towards seaside. Some folks, you know, go to a links golf course and they just they melt. They're so in love with it. I don't care what
it is. It's just there at the sea in there and Ireland and they're they're playing golf and everything's nirvana. And those can all be identified if you watch, if you study just a little bit on the distribution of the scores of a person, your scores, if you are a raider, shouldn't be like it's not lockstep with everybody giving the same number, but within reason, they should be
distributed around a central number for Eddigven golf course. And if you're varying way outside of that, that's identifiable and it's policeable and correctable.
I would be the guy who melts in front of any seaside golf course, I'll admit to that. So the serious question, though, is is there a danger when you're policing bias like this, which is an understandable thing to do. If you're running a ranking panel, I mean, this is an obvious thing to do. If somebody is just crazy different than everybody else with their numbers, then you've got to address it. But at the same time, does that policing of bias risk developing a herd mentality as you
refer to it in your book. Does it end up encouraging incentivizing raiders in fact to be conformists, Because of course anybody who's a of these rating panels wants to keep their membership on the panel, there are significant privileges that go along with it. Is there a danger that working against the bias in the way that you're talking about it encourages people to try to settle around a kind of mean number for each course and therefore produce kind of predictable rankings.
I think there is a little bit of danger if you have that in very well traveled, well versed golf raiders who have a big spread of numbers, If they never give tens, nines, and eights because it'stead I've never seen one, then they're biased on one side of this.
But I think generally speaking, the small distributions that you see within the bell curve of various raiders for a given golf course is a rich enough variation and an important enough variation to give me a solid average like that that I can get rid of these outliers and I don't need them, and I don't they're more harmful than they possibly can be good. I'm kind of searching for an answer here. I can see what you're saying, but I'm I still think that they're more harm than
good on these people that have our big outliers. And the last thing I want is golf Course ABC to be ranked in the twentieth in the country, and because I've had a couple of outliers in there, it goes to the ninetieth the next year or some radical change, and that's unrepresentative of what should happen. These things should move unless a redesign is happened or something like that, that they should move within no small amounts really, especially the classical side. For Golf Week.
Yeah, perfectly understandable and logical answer. So in general, keeping in mind that the three major magazines that we've been talking about, Golf Digest, Golf Magazine, and Golf Week. Keeping in mind that those three institutions do golf course ranking very differently. What would you change about the way magazines conduct rankings today?
Like Tom Doke says, the best rate ranking in the world is for me. Asked Garrett to rank his top one hundred and he writes them on down in order. I can argue with you that you're you're crazy. You know one is B is so much better than C and you've got to reverse and all that. But what I can't argue about is your the methodology. The methodology, it's one hundred percent subjective, that's all it is. There is no methodology. It's your opinion, and dok always says
that's the best thing. The problem is that I worried about is I was writing this book and I didn't have it when I got halfway through the book. The solution, it took me a while, is Garrett's top one hundred list. John Cummings is the top one hundred list, Next, next, next, next, next person has merged these together latterly into one list,
and I didn't know the math involved in that. As it turns out, I got some help from two nephews who both getting doctorates and masks, so they're pretty smart kids, and they say there's a there's a method that was discovered three hundred years ago in France. That's a voting thing that's called cair wise comparison, and I'm not going to go into it with anyway. What it does very effectively merges these things together into one list. So what I would do for all three magazines is I would
use it's easy to do with computers. Now, it's simple. I would use this kind of thing, and that would eliminate all this bias, all the air in it. It wouldn't matter if you've got a guy who put fasciest courses of one through ten on there. Really you've got
way too many of these lists together. You're merging laterly, and the beauty is you wouldn't have all these resolutionaires almost the simple math airs of once you get into the measurement game, and what you come out with is a composite, merged lateral rank list of all my panelists. And I think that to me seems like the best method to reduce air and maximize the subjectivity of this whole thing, which is really what you want.
It should be sad that a fair portion of your book is taken up with considering this question of what is the most rigorous way of retaining the representation of a panel's opinion as purely as possible. And you go through these various ways in which that community opinion does tend to get distorted through the methodologies the magazines use. And I certainly would have you know, no ability really to object to the methodology that you settle on it.
It seems quite thoughtfully arrived at. I suppose my question starts at the very beginning of it. Though. If we say that the ideal ranking is an individual's ranking, then why do we do these lists? Have you ever thought about whether we should be doing this at all?
Magazines have published and Arta Palmer stop one hundred. You know, Jack Nicholas says, I don't know that's true, but I got to believe you could search and find that somewhere. I'm not sure it has the pull a reader will look and say, Jack Nicholas Thinkspeble Each is the numb one course in the world. I believe that's true, and that's a rarity. Very few people would rank that as number one in the world for a bunch of reasons.
But you know, and it's just one person's opinion. I think it's just not as interesting as having a panel formed. It sounds like there is a congress of folks going out and they're definitively, you know, determining what these this annual ranking list would be. And I don't know, I just get the sense that that the herd of raiders out there has got more pulled than just an individual. What do you think. I mean, that's just my opinion, and I'm not sure I'm even right.
No, I think you're definitely right that these panels. Certainly in the way that the lists are presented as authoritative as they are. This is this well respected magazine's list of the best courses in the world, or the best courses in America or what have you. Certainly they have
more polls. Certainly they have a huge impact. But I sometimes wonder what their impact has been, and I wonder how it's changed changed the golf course industry, the way golf courses get built and the way golf courses get designed.
Well, it sure could. There are owners and I'm sure you know this too, there are owners that hire a tony architect like that and they say, first thing, build me a top one on a golf course. Right, Like there's a magic ingredient that this poor architect isn't go out there, and you know, he's got to get a great piece of land first to have something to work with. It's a tough question. I don't know.
Yeah, yeah, I mean what what these architects and owners in your hypothetical scenario are dealing with is trying to divine what the opinions of these panels might be. And you know, I think it's I think it's too bad if architects and owners are thinking have that thought at the front of their mind that we want to be a top one hundred golf course, because to me, it's not entirely clear how you get there. You know, I'm not sure what constitutes a top one hundred golf of course.
Have you ever had anybody ask you like, how can I how can I make this a top one hundred golf course? Have you ever had an owner kind of put that question to you in some form not.
That say, but it's very uncomfortable. And raiders have this for owners after they host you in a place, to sit you down and say, now, what can I do to make this golf course better? And theoretically, a raider is supposed to be able said, I had deficiencies when I saw the character of this, this and this out there, and I saw very positive things with this, this and this out there. Landforms conditioning, you know, the verious thing one looks at when you when you determine character of
a golf course. You know you're supposed to not piss them off for one thing, and you know, oh I, you know this is a piece of junk. I can't stand like that. You So you got to be somewhat diplomatic on this thing too. But also, even if you really really played the course many times had a good sense of the golf course, you wouldn't have the same sense of another raider that's coming in there, and you might see positives and negative slightly different and give this
guy other information. An owner sat a person down and then sat me down before and asked these questions like that. Probably doesn't understand this and probably shouldn't ask that question. He should ask, all right, you should go to the magazine and say you've seen you we've post twenty thirty raiders. What are their comments. I want to know their comments of those And that's a fair thing to ask. And someone may be wacky some of them may be inaccurate,
and others might give them interests. Oh my gracious, I didn't realize that four or five these raiders took issue with X y Z. That can't change a golf course. I'm not going to re route a golf course because a bunch of raiders come in there and you know,
give it a poor rating or something like that. But there may be individual things that they can address, sitelines and may be a barn and there may have may be a ferris wheel in the distance, and people like us a grocery trees and ask it out or something.
See barnes and the ferris wheels sound sound great to me by all the golf course owners. Let's let's have more barnes and Ferris wheels. Maybe not in the middle of the fair way. So I mean, I think that one thing that we could agree on is that these rankings really aren't going anywhere. They're They're a big business at this point. They're you know, every year. I'd have to imagine that each of these magazines, one of the most popular issues is their top one hundred golf courses issue.
And so you know, you've been in this in this community for a while. You've seen a lot of different versions of the rate and ranking business, and I think you've probably seen golf course tastes shift over time. Have you seen that? Have you sensed that that tastes are beginning to shift? And how would you describe that trend?
Oh? Sure, the fair Boys, the gill Hants and the Tommy Doaks and the now Andrew Green is you know, a new one that's coming on up, and people are enjoying going back to the roots. These courses that built yesterday, it looks like they've been there one hundred years. They're
getting very highly ranked. And in fact, it has been proposed informally internally the Golf Weight that the classical and modern viifurcation of these two lists should now have a third one called the Renaissance and the back to the roots or something like that. And where you draw the line, I don't know.
Nineteen ninety six sand Hills or something is a turning point that a lot of people point out. But there are a few courses before that that people would want to put on that kind of list, you know, the Second Golden Age or whatever you call.
It, the Second gold Age, because the intermediate, the modern one isn't engineering is the highly The Clusive Pines and Shadow Creek are great examples of just pure engineering. They're marvelous places, absolutely marvelous, but they are constructed completely, every square inch of it. And you get the other things like Crunchhaw saying at the first green at sand Hills like that, it costs three hundred dollars, and those grass seed for the green, you know, through three hundred dollars
with a grass seat. Now the whole was finished. I think he's exaggerating a little bit. Also, kids a great example his Mammoth Dunes and his Gamble Sands there. These are marvelous golf courses that are highly playable. They're relatively easy. Instead of making the hardest golf course in the world, is the goal of these folks getting back to something that plays a little easier, more friendly, bold landing areas, bold greens where mishots are cycled back towards your target line,
and feel good golf courses, if you will. And that's another class of the modern golf course. It's also kind of a renaissance too, and kids leading it, and I think I'd be very surprised if that isn't a little bit of a movement. Now they're very successful for one thing, but they get great reviews. People go there that if they want to go back, they feel great about Gamble Sands. They shot their first seventy eight and you know, oh my god, you know it's nirvana.
Yeah. So no, it's an extraordinarily smart move you know, it's so savvy on the part of kid, because people do feel wonderful when they go to those courses and they come away saying, not only was that a beautiful course and there are some cool strategic scenarios and all that kind of stuff, but also they usually played well, you know they And I wonder if that's going to
prompt a change. You know, certainly Golf Magazine and Golf Week are are well prepared to adjust to this emerging trend in golf course architecture and to give these kinds of courses high ratings. But Golf Digest might be a little held back by their resistance to scoring category, which is another category of golf digests that people often object to. Kind of wondering why that should be a factor in
determining the greatness of a golf course. I wonder if Golf Digest at some point is going to be forced to get rid of that category or to reinvent it.
I hope so.
Once again. John Cummings's book is called The Rating Game. You can get it wherever you get books. One thing before you go, though, The Frida Egg twenty twenty one event schedule is about to start. Sign Ups are currently live in our online pro shop for the Boomerang at Seoul Park in Ohio, California. Wonderful course and a great location, and this coming Friday you'll be able to sign up for a new batch of events. Just to follow the announcements in our newsletter or on Twitter