Not too shabby to make your first ace on a par 4, which measured 285 yards on the scorecard.
After more than 25 years in the golf industry and chasing top-100 courses around the globe with a missionary’s zeal, Greg Nathan finally made his first hole-in-one on Tuesday.
The 15-year veteran with the National Golf Foundation did it in dramatic fashion, acing the par-4 fifth hole of the Whiskey routing at Ohoopee Match Club in Cobbtown, Georgia.
Not too shabby to make your first ace on a par 4, which measured 285 yards on the scorecard. (Yardages were measured for the event, but a caddie thought it was closer to 260 yards. “It’s going to get longer and longer as the years go on,” Nathan cracked.)
Nathan played in the first group of the day and word spread among competitors in the Bernard Darwin Matches, a two-day team event hosted by course designer Gil Hanse. When the actor Bill Murray, who played in the event and was in the club’s dining room after the round, caught wind of Nathan’s achievement, he had an all-time response: he slapped Nathan across the face.
Greg Nathan of NGF and Billy Murray at Ohoopee Match Club. (Courtesy Greg Nathan)
Nathan, the self-proclaimed Mayor of Crazy Town, is chief business officer for the NGF. He thought his Murray highlight came before the round as he was walking past the clubhouse to the first tee.
“You can actually see into a window of the gym and Bill Murray is in there. He sees us and waves at us,” Nathan recalled. “The guys I was with were like that’s a memorable moment.”
Nathan celebrated by a fire pit after his round and before leaving he went back into the clubhouse, where Murray was engrossed in conversation with members of No Laying Up. Just as Murray got up from where he was sitting, someone congratulated Nathan on his ace. Murray spun around and said, “You? You’re the one. You made the hole-in-one?”
Nathan shook his head in the affirmative. That’s when Murray slapped him across the face with his right hand.
“It wasn’t like Will Smith (slapping Chris Rock at the Academy Awards) where he leaned his weight into it but there was a loud smack,” Nathan said.
Nathan smiled – “that’s memorable,” he thought to himself – and asked Murray to pose for a picture.
The first day of the event had been played on the Championship Course routing. The Whiskey routing is a separate layout that incorporates five completely different holes (dubbed A, B, C, D and E) and variations of 13 from the Championship course. (No. 5 on the Whiskey routing plays as No. 9 on the Championship routing.)
An aerial shot at No.5 at Ohoopee Match Club, where the NGF’s Greg Nathan made an ace on December 13, 2022.
With the Grateful Dead’s “Box of Rain” playing on his caddie’s speaker, Nathan took aim at the drivable par 4, but wasn’t even sure if he could clear the pot bunker guarding the path to the green.
His blast just made it over — “I was holding my breath that it wouldn’t dunk in there on the fly,” he said — and bounded to the green and climbed up its right slope.
Nathan remembers thinking, “Awesome, I drove the green at a par 4.” But the caddies in his group knew better. They knew the contours of the green and figured it had a chance of going in and began chirping. As the ball slowly descended downhill to the left it momentarily went out of view but when it re-appeared, Nathan could see it tracking to the hole and go straight in like a putt.
His opponent in their match had the best line: “I made birdie and lost the hole by two shots,” he said.
Golfweek’s experts have ranked the Top 200 courses built since 1960, such as Bandon Dunes, Whistling Straights, TPC Sawgrass, Kiawah and more.
Welcome to the Golfweek’s Best 2022 list of the Top 200 Modern Courses built in or after 1960 in the United States.
Each year we publish many lists, with this Top 200 Modern Courses list among the premium offerings. Also extremely popular and significant are the lists for Top 200 Classic Courses, the Best Courses You Can Play State by State and Best Private Courses State by State.
The hundreds of members of our course-ratings panel continually evaluate courses and rate them based on 10 criteria on a points basis of 1 through 10. They also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings are averaged to produce these rankings. The top handful of courses in the world have an average rating of above 9, while many excellent layouts fall into the high-6 to the 8 range.
To ensure these lists are up-to-date, Golfweek’s Best in recent years has altered how the individual ratings are compiled into the rankings. Only ratings from rounds played in the past 10 years are included in the compilations. This helps ensure that any course in the rankings still measures up.
Courses also must have a minimum of 25 votes to qualify for the Top 200 Modern or the Top 200 Classic. Other Golfweek’s Best lists, such as Best Courses You Can Play or Best Private, do not require as many votes. This makes it possible that a course can show up on other lists but not on the premium Top 200 lists.
Each course is listed with its average rating next to the name, the location, the year it opened and the designers. The list also notes in parenthesis next to the name of each course where that course ranked in 2021. Also included with many courses are links to recent stories about that layout.
After the designers are several designations that note what type of facility it is:
• p: private
• d: daily fee
• r: resort course
• t: tour course
• u: university
• m: municipal
• re: real estate
• c: casino
* Indicates new to or returning to this list.
Editor’s note: The 2022 Golfweek’s Best Classic Courses list for the top 200 layouts built before 1960 in the U.S. will be posted Wednesday, May 25. The Best Courses You Can Play lists and the Best Private Courses lists will follow over the next two weeks.
Count down the top 30 courses of the past three decades, as judged by Golfweek’s panel of raters.
It’s been a crazy string of decades in golf design, with construction going gangbusters through the 1990s and early 2000s before grinding nearly to a complete halt after the financial crisis of 2007 and ’08. Things have picked up a bit in recent years, especially when considering high-end destinations scattered in far-flung locales around the U.S.
Through it all, these are the best 30 courses opened in the past 30 years in the U.S., as voted by Golfweek’s Best panel of raters.
The hundreds of members of our course-ratings panel continually evaluate courses and rate them based on our 10 criteria. They also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings on each course are averaged to produce a final, cumulative rating.
This ranking is compiled from data included in the 2021 Golfweek’s Best Modern Courses list, and it focuses on the golf courses themselves, not on resorts or private clubs as a whole or other amenities. Each golf course included is listed with its average rating from 1 to 10, its location, architect(s), the year it opened and its status as a private club (p), a resort (r), a daily-fee operation (d) or a real estate development (re).
COBBTOWN, Ga. – In December the Presidents Cup was played at Royal Melbourne in Australia, giving golf fans a chance to see the game’s best compete on one of the game’s great courses. It also was a chance to experience the beauty of match play. …
COBBTOWN, Ga. – In December the Presidents Cup was played at Royal Melbourne in Australia, giving golf fans a chance to see the game’s best compete on one of the game’s great courses. It also was a chance to experience the beauty of match play.
“Match play is a completely different game. The focus shifts from beating the course to beating your opponent. Different dynamic,” Conrad Ray, Stanford’s director of men’s golf, told me recently.
Changing that dynamic makes the golf more personal. Match play adds layers of strategy and psychology to a round, and it brings out a wider range of emotions. All of it equals a heightened experience for players and fans alike.
Match play can yield thrilling and compelling golf on almost any stage (i.e. Hazeltine and Medinah), but the opportunity for excitement, creative shotmaking, risk-taking and disaster is far more likely at architectural masterpieces such as Royal Melbourne.
So what makes a great match play hole or course?
While that could be debated forever, the answer that seems to be consistent from players, caddies, designers and fans is options.
Giving players options requires them to think and execute. When you add in the head-to-head element of match play, the thinking becomes more complex. Providing options also leads to more aggressive play. Knowing that making an 8 only costs you one hole shifts the risk vs. reward calculation for players.
Firm and fast conditions add to the intrigue. Giving players the choice to use the ground contours requires much greater thought as different clubs, trajectories and spins are factored in. Courses that are wider, play firm and fast, and feature strategic hazards offer the best match play venues.
Former Aussie tour player and course designer Michael Clayton believes the 10th hole at Royal Melbourne West (No. 6 for the Presidents Cup) is a prime example. Players can lay up in the wide fairway or try to drive the green by carrying a deep bunker. High risk and high reward.
Royal Melbourne proved to be an epic Presidents Cup venue because it asks interesting questions and allows for players to answer in a variety of ways. It makes you wonder if it was specifically designed for match play? While we may never get a definitive answer to that question, we now know what such a course would look like if it were built today.
No. 5 at Ohoopee Match Club (Courtesy of Ohoopee Match Club)
More than 9,000 miles from Royal Melbourne in rural southeast Georgia sits the Ohoopee Match Club, a course that was specifically designed for match play.
The course in Cobbtown was developed by Michael Walrath, a New York businessman, and crafted by Gil Hanse, Jim Wagner and their crew of “Cavemen,” the amicable nickname given to the team’s shapers who handcraft features. Ohoopee opened in 2018 and already has garnered numerous awards and recognition.
The club sits on 3,000-plus acres of sand-based savannas and woodlands with the course radiating out from a collection of buildings overlooking a lake. Ohoopee offers first-class amenities and service but does so in a very casual and relaxed way. Spending a few days at OMC feels more like visiting family than it does a prestigious club. Music plays while players warm up on the range, a fire burns outside on the porch, guests toss bean bags while watching their friends finish on 18 and members serve as bartenders when the staff leaves for the night. Members and guests can stay in tastefully appointed cottages or in “the burrows” – what could be described as a trendy version of a wine cellar dorm.
The course gently weaves through different landscapes in a way that you typically only see the hole you are on. The layout is comprised of 22 holes, which the club used to make two distinctly different courses for morning and afternoon play. The Whiskey Routing, played in the afternoon and featuring a community whiskey bottle, utilizes 14 of the holes from the championship course, but often at a different angle and shorter length. It also incorporates four alternate holes dubbed the A, B, C and D holes.
What makes the design work so well for match play is the variety of the holes and the choices they provide the player. There is ample room off the tee, but usually an advantage can be seized from a particular spot. The firm and fast conditions require players to consider the ground contours that will help some shots nestle to the hole while rejecting others.
Like Royal Melbourne, OMC asks interesting questions and allows players to answer them in different ways.
Gil Hanse on Ohoopee
At a recent gathering of golf architects at Ohoopee Match Club, I sat down with Hanse and asked about the process of designing a course for match play.
JB: How did the concept of a match play course come about?
GH: It was Michael’s idea, Michael Walrath the owner. He had reached out to us about a different site, but that didn’t work very well for golf and we were familiar with this property and turned him onto the site.
Gil Hanse (Darren Carroll/Getty Images for the PGA of America)
JB: With match play as a design objective, what were some ideas that you thought about trying to incorporate into the design?
GH: The first thing that came to mind was the finishing stretch. How do we make it a compelling finish for matches? How do we sequence the golf holes to impact the way matches might be carried out? And then the thought process of more of a heroic school of architecture approach, where you’ve got a lot of big risk, big reward.
JB: Did your mindset change at all when it came to designing the holes or the features?
GH: Here we were able to build green complexes where occasionally we focused on a particular hole location. Normally we try to build greens that are based on slope and fit into their surroundings. Here we could do that, but also have a more acute focus on specific hole locations for a match and build green complexes around that. Giving players the choice to go big or go home depending on where they were in the match.
JB: How did the 22-hole course with morning and afternoon routing come about?
GH: We had a friend out walking when we were just getting started, and he felt the routing might be too long of a walk for 36 holes. So I started looking at ways for a shorter afternoon routing and originally thought about adding some par-3 holes after the first hole, and then we talked about adding some holes out at the far end into the prairie. Jim Wagner ultimately came up with the routing and how it actually works.
