For a golf course to become timeless, it first has to make a pit stop at timely.
When a course clearly represents the times in which it was created and manages to somehow stand the test of time without compromising its aura along the way, well, that’s the formula for achieving the goal that so many courses seek to obtain: timelessness.
The best courses in America offer the special combination of telling you where on earth they are, for there’s no mistaking the geographical differences between Pine Valley, Cypress Point and Augusta National. Yet they do not necessarily reveal when they are. If you close your eyes and look closely, there aren’t too many clues as to what year it may be. That’s true even of modern wonders such as Sand Hills.
The danger zone for so many courses is when they fall into the no-man’s-land between classic and contemporary. The new kid on the block and the stalwart institution both do just fine in every era, but to be dated is to be doomed. It’s an old story in golf, and life.
What then can we learn from the breakdown of the top 100 from Golfweek’s Best, both Classic and Modern? What decades dominate and why? Where are we going with golf design, and what kinds of courses might have a chance to continue to stand the test of time?
First things first: Who are the winners and who are the losers?
The 1920s have 54 courses on the Golfweek’s Best Classic list of top 100 courses, and the 2000s have 38 courses on the Modern list. Those decades dominate their respective eras.
In the Classic era, the 1940s and 1950s register just one course each, while the Modern 1970s claim just five.
What made the 1920s and 2000s such fertile ground for celebrated designs, while the post-war boom years of the late 1940s and 1950s, in contrast to the stagflation-bound 1970s, remain so barren of enduring courses?
Well, in non-golf terms, the 1920s and the 2000s were two of the most economically prosperous eras in American history. Golf, as a leisure activity, requires the dual ingredients of disposable income and disposable time to thrive. Economic booms provide both. But that does not account for the paucity of courses from the thriving 1950s.
Crucially, the 1920s and 2000s represented the maturing of architectural ideas that had been sown in the decades prior by voices in the wilderness such as C.B. Macdonald and Harry Colt in the first few years of the 1900s, and Pete Dye and his many disciples in the final quarter of the 20th century.
The middle era of the 1940s through the 1970s, though vastly profitable for golf in terms of the growth and attraction of the game, suffers in the eyes of Golfweek’s raters for several reasons I believe worth spending a moment to unpack.
There was a great deal of emerging professionalism in architecture coming out of the war years of the 1940s. The founding of the American Society of Golf Architects at Pinehurst in 1948 and the emergence of Robert Trent Jones as a one-man factory of new course design – along with competition from Dick Wilson, George Fazio and others – was supported by the rise of mass consumerism in America. This created an environment ripe for the modernization of tired courses from the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s that had suffered through war and depression, in addition to the thousands of new courses needed to meet growing demand.
As a result of America’s economic prosperity, many “dated” pre-war courses were renovated out of all recognition. New tracts of land ripe for the development of “championship courses” like those seen on the new invention of television (with just a few hundred homes surrounding them for good measure) sprouted up in every community touched by Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System. The same cultural priorities that replaced handmade regional cheeses of the pre-war years with factory-made Velveeta, which tasted the same anywhere in America, often produced golf courses that tasted the same no matter where they were built.
However, another thing happened to those courses from the 1940s to the 1970s that once seemed so modern but now seem so unloved. Mid-century modern courses that have been worn down by years of neglect and disfiguration, the same ironic fate suffered by their predecessors from the 1910s and 1920s, means that a whole generation of modern-era courses are primed for the kind of restoration work that has kept “Golden Age” restoration specialists busy for the last two and a half decades.
Just as the leading courses from the 1920s all have their moment on the restoration wheel of fortune, there will need to be a new market to keep talented architects and shapers busy in the years to come. History tells us that when contemporary minimalism eventually becomes too popular for its own good, train your eyes on a mid-century modern comeback in golf design, too.
I’ve generally found that 30 to 60 years is the danger zone in any kind of architectural design. Think of houses, stores, condos, buildings and golf courses. All suffer the same pressures of being out of touch with contemporary fashions. We tend not to favor the things our parents loved. It’s just human nature. But when it comes to our grandparents, there’s no accounting for the power of nostalgia. Golden Age courses were once out of fashion, and it took time for them to come back into the spotlight. The mid-century modern courses are next.
The other striking element in this list, and this is where my personal bias toward Victorian-era courses reveals itself, is just how few courses of renown there are from the 1890s and 1900s, the foundation era of American golf. Chicago Golf Club, founded in 1892, has a course that’s really from the 1920s, redesigned by Seth Raynor. The same is true of others from the same category, including Pinehurst No. 2
Only Oakmont, Myopia Hunt Club and Garden City are true remnants from the penal Victorian era of golf design. And I personally just can’t get enough of them. When you’re there, you know you’re nowhere else. As for when they might be, you’re as likely to see a ghost from the 1898 or 1902 U.S. Opens emerge from the locker room as you are to see the latest technology and fashion from those playing today.
Timelessness is the highest ambition of a great course. Analyzing the Top 100 Modern and Classic in Golfweek’s Best shows us how many routes, in how many decades, a course may take to get there.
Design by the decade
The number of courses built by decade as represented on Golfweek’s Best list of Classic and Modern courses, with 1960 serving as the split between the two lists:
| Decade | Number of courses |
| 1890s | 4 |
| 1900s | 3 |
| 1910s | 25 |
| 1920s | 54 |
| 1930s | 12 |
| 1940s | 1 |
| 1950s | 1 |
| 1960s | 9 |
| 1970s | 5 |
| 1980s | 9 |
| 1990s | 23 |
| 2000s | 38 |
| 2010s | 16 |
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