America's 100 Greatest Golf Courses & 100 More

Bill Love, a soft-spoken East Coast golf architect, has been a consultant to the Olympic Club in California. He started well before its most recent U.S. Open in 2012 and has continued to revise the club’s famed Lake Course, ranked No. 31 on Golf Digest’s 2017-’18 list of America’s 100 Greatest Golf Courses, up from No. 33 two years ago. Most recently he reshaped bunkers on several holes. Golf Digest panelists who evaluated the course praised his work (“significant improvements” . . . “spectacular new eighth hole” . . . “huge upgrade”), but one panelist decried the new “cresting wave” style of bunkers as not in keeping with its original 1920s architecture. Another commented that it was akin to “changing the hairstyle of the Mona Lisa,” and a third called it “perhaps the worst renovation in golf history.”

- Ron Whitten

In politics, such polarized opinions are a cause for consternation, because they lead to gridlock. In golf architecture, they’re to be celebrated, a reminder that variety is the essence of the game. Golf would be an intolerable endeavor should every course be stamped upon the landscape with the same template.

Golf Digest’s biennial ranking of America’s 100 Greatest Golf Courses has highlighted that fact for decades. It starts at the top, where this year rugged, sand-splashed Pine Valley Golf Club in New Jersey, the epitome of “penal architecture,” returns to the No. 1 spot, the position it once firmly held for decades but occupied only twice in the past five survey periods. It nudged out plush, manicured Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, the standard for “heroic architecture,”which had been our No. 1 in 2009, 2011 and 2015. The tussle between these two titans will undoubtedly continue, not because of indecision on the part of our panelists, but because golf architecture in America will never become homogenized.