Although I’ve been writing course reviews here for almost 5 years, I’ve never written a piece that sums up my thoughts across courses. To be sure, I’ve included bits of these thoughts in many of my reviews. And if anything, these general thoughts and comparisons have probably become a more important part of my reviews over time.
But I’ve reviewed almost 100 courses (97 to be exact) which, assuming an average of somewhere just under 3,000 words per review, means that I’ve probably written around 275,000 words. One of my favorite novels, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, only has 206,000 words. So I’ve done a lot of writing about golf courses. And it’s probably time to say something about these courses in summation.
So I started trying to rank the courses I’ve reviewed. This is something I’ve done in bits and pieces in the past, but I’ve never sat down and tried to hammer out a list until now. It’s a tough thing to do. It’s tough enough for me to come up with a list of Michigan’s top 5 public courses. And although I’ve obviously thought about all of these courses intensely, I haven’t seen or thought about many of them in a long time. I also haven’t thought about many of them in relation to each other. How does Blackwolf Run’s River Course compare to Woking, for example? I don’t know—I’d never thought about it.
But now I have. I went through all of the courses that I’ve reviewed and come up with my top 40 plus 6 honorable mentions. These are all of the courses that I’ve reviewed that I would give a borderline 6/7 or higher on the Tom Doak Scale. Honestly, I started with the intention of doing a top 10 list. But then I found that there were about 13 courses that should be in the top 10. So I expanded it to 20 plus 5 honorable mentions. But then I figured, why not just make that a top 25? Then I had a bunch of near-misses for that top 25 and that list ended up having 15 courses. And that was pretty close to all of the courses that I thought were a 7 or better, but there were 5 or 6 more that I would either give a 7 or where it would be very close between a 6 and a 7. So I decided to write a bit about those as well.
Before we get to the honorable mentions and the top 40, here are some of the other contenders that just missed the honorable mentions. I would give each of these a strong 6 on the Doak Scale:
But I’ve reviewed almost 100 courses (97 to be exact) which, assuming an average of somewhere just under 3,000 words per review, means that I’ve probably written around 275,000 words. One of my favorite novels, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, only has 206,000 words. So I’ve done a lot of writing about golf courses. And it’s probably time to say something about these courses in summation.
So I started trying to rank the courses I’ve reviewed. This is something I’ve done in bits and pieces in the past, but I’ve never sat down and tried to hammer out a list until now. It’s a tough thing to do. It’s tough enough for me to come up with a list of Michigan’s top 5 public courses. And although I’ve obviously thought about all of these courses intensely, I haven’t seen or thought about many of them in a long time. I also haven’t thought about many of them in relation to each other. How does Blackwolf Run’s River Course compare to Woking, for example? I don’t know—I’d never thought about it.
But now I have. I went through all of the courses that I’ve reviewed and come up with my top 40 plus 6 honorable mentions. These are all of the courses that I’ve reviewed that I would give a borderline 6/7 or higher on the Tom Doak Scale. Honestly, I started with the intention of doing a top 10 list. But then I found that there were about 13 courses that should be in the top 10. So I expanded it to 20 plus 5 honorable mentions. But then I figured, why not just make that a top 25? Then I had a bunch of near-misses for that top 25 and that list ended up having 15 courses. And that was pretty close to all of the courses that I thought were a 7 or better, but there were 5 or 6 more that I would either give a 7 or where it would be very close between a 6 and a 7. So I decided to write a bit about those as well.
Before we get to the honorable mentions and the top 40, here are some of the other contenders that just missed the honorable mentions. I would give each of these a strong 6 on the Doak Scale:
Honorable Mentions
Arcadia Bluffs—Bluffs Course (Michigan, USA)
The Loop (Michigan, USA)
Caledonia (South Carolina, USA)
Pinehurst—no. 4 (North Carolina, USA)
Cleeve Hill (England, UK)
Keilir (Iceland)
Saunton—East Course (England, USA)
For me, one of the hardest lists to make—one which I’ve thought about far more than this list and which I’ve still never been able to pin down—is a list of Michigan’s 5 best public courses. There are six courses that I’d have in the top 5: Arcadia Bluffs (Bluffs), Forest Dunes, Greywalls, Pilgrim’s Run, The Loop, and American Dunes. Over the years, I have had many orderings of them. And that created a problem for this list too because the cutoff of 40 courses ended up running right through the middle of these six.
Over several playings between 2004 and a few years back, my thinking was always that the original Bluffs Course at Arcadia Bluffs was the best public course in Michigan, but just by a fraction over Forest Dunes, Greywalls, and Pilgrim’s Run. Others have always criticized it as being unwalkable and having too severe a set of greens. I always defended the greens as being interesting and challenging and the walkability as no worse than Greywalls.
But I played Arcadia Bluffs again in the summer of 2024 and this time, it finally struck me that there’s more to the criticisms than I had realized in 4 or 5 previous visits. Too many of the holes are overdone given the severity of the property and the ever-presence of the wind. A few of the greens (5, 6, 18) are blatantly over-contoured and a few of the green complexes are too severe at their edges (10, 14). I still think that some of the par 5’s (3, 11), long par 4’s (7, 16), and the opening 5 holes in general are among the best in the state. But I’ve become more sensitive to courses being over-the-top in difficulty in recent years and Arcadia Bluffs is one of my home state’s biggest offenders. Still, it’s hard not to include on my list a course that I thought for so long was Michigan’s best public course.
It’s almost as tough not to include The Loop. It has a similar problem: while the terrain this time is sedate, some of the areas surrounding the greens are just over-the-top. I have a real problem with the double plateau green on 2 Red/16 Black and some of the other very skinny greens with steep runoffs and deep bunkers at their sides. But it took real genius to develop this routing. And I love the look and playing characteristics of the course—it looks kind of like a heathland course but plays more like a links course than any course on my top 40, probably a third of which is links courses! It’s probably unfair for me to rank it this low because I do ratings in my head as roughly an average of what I think of each of its holes. That doesn’t give The Loop its full due credit for the genius of its routing and how it makes these holes work in two directions. But hey, it’s my list. If only some of the greens had been a bit larger, this could have been Michigan’s best public course. I don’t understand why Doak didn’t do large, randomly contoured greens here. It would fit the landscape and would recall St. Andrew’s, another famous (originally) reversible course.
Two other very fine courses that I would also give (low) 7s are Mike Strantz’s Caledonia and Pinehurst no. 4. Caledonia is my favorite Mike Strantz course and I’ve always found it to be the best course in Myrtle Beach—although really, it’s the only one that I’d say is worth driving any distance to play. It makes excellent use of a very small property which makes me think that Strantz would have been well-served by having such a limitation on his other courses. Although I like other Strantz courses like Tobacco Road and Royal New Kent, they suffer from a visual excess that probably wasn’t an option here. In addition to being a fine piece of landscape architecture, with bunkers and shaping that harmonize well with the surroundings, Caledonia has an excellent set of par 3s and par 5s. While I liked the previous Fazio version of Pinehurst no. 4, the new Gil Hanse version is clearly an improvement. There are several beautifully contoured greens and several green complexes with some very good, subtle shaping at their edges. At their best, these green complexes get closer to those next door on no. 2 than any modern course that I’ve seen. There are fewer standout holes here than other courses on my list but there are a few cool blind shots and the long par 4 18th is one of the finest in the North Carolina sandhills.
And across the pond—or in the middle of it in the case of the latter—are the English Cotswolds’ Cleeve Hill and Iceland’s Keilir. Cleeve Hill is one of the most epic courses that I’ve ever seen, playing across the treeless highest points of western England. The course is on common ground and a bit rough, with sheep (and their outputs) aplenty. But Cleeve Hill is a breathtaking course and features some of the my favorite holes, including the blind dogleg 7th and the par 5 13th, with its green in an ancient earthwork. The topography is notable at Keilir too; the front nine plays through an old lava field and the back nine is on a precipice of coastline, with several holes—including the great 11th, 14th, and 16th—providing a solid Icelandic response to Pebble Beach. The long par 4 finisher was one of my favorites anywhere. Since my visit, the back nine has been reworked to increase the ocean frontage of the holes. Looking at the new routing plan, Keilir is likely now an even better course than what I saw.
Another course from across the pond that deserves an honorable mention is Saunton's East Course. Originally, I classified this as one of the 'other contenders.' But looking through my pictures and going back through my review, there's too much positive here for it not to get, at least, an honorable mention. The East's primary assets are its greens, which were among the best sets that I saw in the UK. They're a bit more modern looking than typical for a links course, but are none the worse for it. It also has several excellent green sites. The drawback of the East is that the fairways are a bit flat and dull, surprising given the surrounding land (I've heard that they got flattened in WWII). But I also wonder if I would have minded this a lot less if they had been firm--2016 was a wet year. I think it's fair to give the course the benefit of the doubt for that.
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