Pebble Seaside, left, and Pacific Dunes each are visible stunners.
Getty Photographs
What’s in a quantity?
GOLF’s new rating of High 100 Programs within the U.S. is precisely that: a listing of the finest programs within the nation, organized in numerical order, “1” being one of the best.
Sounds easy. Laborious figures, onerous details. However as anybody who follows the rankings is aware of, whereas the roster itself is cut-and-dried, the pondering behind it’s not. It displays the views of our course raters. Eager-eyed and well-traveled, these of us know their stuff. However in the end what they’re providing are their opinions. Which brings us again to the query on the prime.
What’s in a quantity? Or, put extra straight, what makes one course “higher” than one other that occurs to take a seat decrease within the rankings?
To offer a deeper understanding of the concerns behind the rankings, we’ll be asking our raters within the days forward to take a aspect in a “which is healthier?” debate: a comparability of programs meant to make clear how our panelists take into consideration design. We’ll begin with two outstanding public-access programs, Pebble Seaside Golf Hyperlinks, in California, and Pacific Dunes, in Oregon, ranked ninth and nineteenth, respectively, on GOLF’s new High 100 U.S. record.
Which is healthier? Learn on.
Pebble Seaside is healthier!
by High 100 Course rater Tom Brown
The current development amongst golf architects is to talk in breezy tones about “pure golf” after which change gears the subsequent minute into studying topographic LIDAR survey knowledge to elucidate the utmost potential of a website from the standard of the land’s humps and bumps on the map.
No high-tech readings are required at Pebble. The response it triggers is visceral, uncooked. Relating to golf, the Monterey Peninsula continues to be one of the best nature on supply. The largest difference-maker for a course that payments itself because the “biggest assembly of land and sea” is, in actual fact, proximity to the ocean, nowhere extra dramatically than on the seventh and 18th holes, the place the assembly occurs at grade. It simply can’t be beat.
Pacific Dunes wins on grassing, inexperienced complicated selection, bunkering, circulation. However Pebble edges Pacific Dunes total on the stroll, the ending gap and the seaside golf aesthetic. As for LIDAR knowledge, who is aware of which website is healthier, however quite a lot of golf architects hold submitting plans to enhance Pebble’s routing. Good luck with that.
As a last level to tip the dimensions, I’ll discuss with Jack Nicklaus, who named Pebble’s eighth his favourite gap in golf.
Pacific Dunes is healthier!
by High 100 Course rater Jeff Lewis
The extra choices there are for pictures, the higher the golf course. Hyperlinks programs are inclined to have extra greens on floor stage that may be approached in numerous methods. In addition they are inclined to have extra selection as a result of wind shifts from hour to hour and everyday make them extra attention-grabbing.
Pebble calls itself a “hyperlinks” however it’s actually a parkland course by the ocean. A nice parkland course by the ocean. However it’s not a hyperlinks. Pacific Dunes is a part of Bandon Dunes Resort, which has achieved the truest illustration of UK/Eire hyperlinks situations in the US. I might say that solely Cabot Hyperlinks in Nova Scotia is as true to the British Isles in its situations.
The climate alongside the southern coast of Oregon is so much like that of the UK that the greens workers, mainly from the start, have been in a position to recreate the turf situations discovered on traditional hyperlinks programs. That’s crucial. Simply since you design a course with greens that enable a number of strategies of method doesn’t imply will probably be attainable if the course is simply too darned comfortable. Too comfortable is absolutely by no means the case in Oregon.
Clearly, Pacific Dunes can also be beautiful. In all probability simply as breathtaking as Pebble on any given day. However for me, it will get the nod as a result of I’ll all the time take a hyperlinks course and all that comes with it over a parkland course.
