Detailed Discussion on the Art and Evolution of Golf Course Rankings with Steve Hennessey
Steve Hennessey, Deputy Managing Editor at Golf Digest, discusses his role in overseeing course rankings and consuming golf content. The Golf Digest course ranking system evaluates courses based on seven categories and scores provided by a panel of course rankers. These scores are averaged to produce rankings every other year, making the process democratic and objective. The rankings primarily consist of Golden Age architecture but newer courses have also made their mark.
The transcript also delves into the impact of technology and distance on golf course renovations. Hennessey emphasizes the importance of defending the green complexes and testing all aspects of a player's game, rather than solely focusing on distance. The rankings now reward clubs that prioritize firm and fast conditions, embracing the concept of "brown is the new green." Major renovations can have both positive and negative effects, depending on how well they adapt to the modern game.
The evaluation process after renovations is another aspect discussed. Golf Digest communicates with clubs and architects to determine when a renovated course is ready to be evaluated. In some cases, previous evaluations are disregarded if the renovation is transformative. Rankings can change accordingly, as seen with Wingfoot, whose rankings dropped after renovations, while others like Sandhills and Fisher's Island improved. The rankings are based on long-term goals and the overall quality of the golf courses.
The transcript also touches on the ongoing debate about a distance rollback in golf. Hennessey believes changes may be made by governing bodies, potentially for tournament players only. However, convincing average players to accept a significant distance reduction might be more challenging. The possibility of bifurcation, allowing different equipment rules for tournament play and casual players, is suggested. Course rankings could be minimally affected, as they are based on the average golfer's experience. The future could also see different sets of equipment for players at different skill levels.
Steve Hennessey
My name is Steve Hennessy. I am the deputy managing editor at Golf Digest. I've been at Golf Digest a little over ten years now, and I oversee our course rankings at Golf Digest. That's my main responsibility. I also co host a podcast called The Loop with my buddies Alex Myers and Chris Powers, talk about a bunch of topics in golf, including gambling on golf, which is especially fun to me, and also edit stuff for our website.
Sajiv Mehta
Cool. And how would you say you primarily consume golf content these days?
Steve Hennessey
Yeah, a lot of the golf content I consume is from Golf Digest, obviously being an editor there. But with Twitter, social media, all forms of social media, it's so easy to find golf content that's interesting to you. So whether it's YouTube videos about golf courses, that's especially interesting to me. We have a series called Every Hole at that golf Digest started a few years ago that kind of comprehensively studies the architecture of a great golf course around the world. And so we've done that at a bunch of really exclusive private clubs as well as public venues. So that's been especially rewarding to work on. But there's a lot of other great golf content out there too. And I think the great thing is it's exposed so many people who maybe in the past were not a traditional golf audience. They've been exposed to why we all love the game, and that's just great for the future of golf. And that's really exciting to see grow since I've been in the industry.
Sajiv Mehta
And speaking of rating courses, what do you look at when you're rating courses? How in depth do you go, and what are the aspects of a course that you really dissect?
Steve Hennessey
So, Golf Digest course ranking system is very comprehensive. We have seven categories that our course rankers evaluate courses on, ranging from shot options to esthetics, character conditioning, etcetera. And we have definitions of each. And we have about 1900 course rankers around the country in Canada, who all evaluate courses for us based on those criteria. And they rate each course that they evaluate based on a one to ten scale. And then Golf Digest basically just averages all of those scores together every other year. And we produce our 100 greatest rankings, our best in state rankings. We've done that since 1966, so it's still seen as the gold standard in the industry, and it's really cool to be a part of that. And the cool thing is to kind of see the new courses that have come about since I've been involved in it in the last eight years or so, and how they've kind of gradually come up in the rankings and how they compare to the more traditional golf clubs that people know.
Sajiv Mehta
And in that rating process, how many times does a course have to be rated? Or does a Raider go play it, and then a few others have to play it or how does that work?
Steve Hennessey
Right? Yeah. Every golf course to be eligible for our 100 Greatest and second 100 Greatest has to be evaluated 50 times over a ten year cycle. So we produce our rankings every other year, but we also carry rankings for ten years. So we're about to publish our next set of rankings in the spring of 23. So for those rankings, we're counting all evaluations from 2013 to 2012, and then we'll cut it off at the end of 2012 or 2022. I'm sorry. And there's a bell curve in which there's a recency bias to the more recent rankings, are rated more heavily and weighed more heavily than the old ones. And so, yeah, any course that's evaluated 50 times by our rankers is eligible. And yet there's some other advanced mathematics involved as well. We throw out any extreme outliers that deviate from the mean by more than two are deemed to be extreme. So if anything's higher or lower than the mean of our entire panel by more than two standard deviations, we deem that to be extreme. That's not considered, but other than that, it's just the scores. It's a pretty democratic process, which we feel like separates us from our competitors, which is cool.
Steve Hennessey
The numbers are the numbers. There's no editors in a room kind of smoking cigars, considering golf courses should be higher than the others because the turtle soup is better at one course than the other. It's really based on our rankers experience, and it's just about the golf course, too. It has nothing to do with the hospitality or how well they're treated, how nice the pro shop is. It's really about the course architecture, which, again, we think, separates us.
Sajiv Mehta
Yeah. And so you have so many raters around the country. Obviously, there's a lot of differences in architecture around the country. Whether you go to the Northeast or Arizona, where you see more like desert type golf. How are you able to compare those kind of different styles, and how does that work?
Steve Hennessey
Yeah, that's a great question. I think that's part of the toughest thing to be a golf course ranker is distinguishing those different types of styles. And as anyone who has studied golf course architecture extensively knows, there's a big difference, even from the classic age of a Donald Ross to a Tilling Haas to a Seth Rayner. Even though the course might have been designed at the same time period in the 20s, there's different styles of architecture in place. So how we teach our panelists to do it is to come up with an ideal score in every category, and then the next golf course that they see, they compare it to their ideal in that category. So if Wingfoot happens to be your ideal in whatever category, say in shot options, then the course that you play next, you're considering well, is this maybe a full point less than how I think Wingfoot does in shot options. So if I'm giving Wingfoot 8.2 in shot options, I think it's about a 7.2. Our guys and gals can go to four decimal points. You could kind of distinguish pretty well there. And yeah, it's really based on your experience over the years.
Steve Hennessey
Some of our panelists have been doing this for 40 years. So I think the toughest thing is to distinguish what makes the number 120 golf course to the number 170 golf course. There's so many great golf courses, to your point, in Arizona, in Colorado, in New York, in Florida. How do you really separate those little decimal points? Well, the nice thing is the individual panelist doesn't have to necessarily say, this is the difference between the number 120 and number 170 golf course. Their numbers sort of say that, but it's really, like I said, democratic in terms of this is the total culmination of what everyone's scores say. So even if someone might be a little higher, someone might be a little lower. It's the average that does it. And the end result is based on everyone's opinions. So, of course, there's certain biases that are always in play. Some people might prefer the classic traditional Northeast golf Course, some people might prefer the Desert Golf Course, a parkland course versus a Links golf course. But we teach our panelists to try to remove that bias when they're at a course and really study the architecture for what it is and only study every category as they're out there.
Steve Hennessey
So it's a really tough job, but our folks really enjoy doing it, and it's a fun process to be a part of, for sure.
Sajiv Mehta
And that definitely covers old versus new golf courses too, right? Like when you see a traditional versus new. But how many new golf courses are really getting really far up the ranks? Or has there been a change in how gradual the like arises in the last 20 years or so?
Steve Hennessey
It's a great question. And for someone who has studied our course rankings throughout the years, if you look at the top ten, the top 20, it's most unchanged. It's pretty tough for a new course to get up there. There's a Friar's Head, which is in the top 20 in New York that's kind of risen pretty quickly in our rankings Sandhills in 1995. Now, that's in our top ten. Bally Neil in Colorado has risen up each of the last five ranking periods. So over the last ten years, it's continued to get incrementally better. Per our evaluators, there's the Kiawah, there's the Whistling Straits, all the courses, abandoned dunes, those are in our top hundred as well. But it's pretty tough. You look at the top 50 overall, the majority are still Golden Age architecture. Whether that's just based on the biases of our panelists, I would like to think not. I would like to think that it's just an indication that that old architecture still stands the test of time, they still host championship golf courses at those venues. If you look at the courses that Gil Hanse has renovated over the past ten years of his career, a lot of them are Golden Age architecture, but they're now ready to host major championship golf like we've seen in 2022 with Southern Hills, with the country club.
Steve Hennessey
There are ways to make those golf courses still stand up to the great players. So it's really intriguing to see how new courses kind of get introduced in our rankings. Shadow Creek in the 90s, when it came out, that was the first time in our rankings history that a new golf course was ranked inside the top 15 in Golf Digest rankings. It's about now like 25 to 30 in our rankings, but still very high. And the interesting thing, I think, for people in the know will be Gilhand's recent signature individual design, a Ohoopee match club in Georgia. People who really study this stuff anticipate that being in the top hundred, it finally has enough evaluations to be eligible. So to see where it breaks into the top hundred come our next ranking period, I think, is fascinating. And the cool thing is, when the rankings do go out, it's the anticipation that everyone kind of senses waiting to see. They'll scroll down to see where their favorite golf club is ranked, and that's kind of the fun part of the process. It's like the March Madness of golf courses, for sure.
Sajiv Mehta
And speaking of renovations, and obviously, old clubs definitely have to beef up to protect against newer, modern golf and distance and technology, right? And how do you think those renovations have been affected by technology and distance, and how is that playing into the rating system?
Steve Hennessey
Man that's probably the biggest question in terms of golf course architecture over the last 20 years. And as modern technology continues to evolve and get better, and the modern Tour player and the modern great amateur player continues to get better, it's how these golf courses can contend against that. And there's only so much room at a lot of these Golden Age clubs to move the tees back, know, defend par. But I think a lot of what we saw, for instance, at Southern Hills and what Gilhands did was not necessarily make it overly long, but you make it really wide off the tee, so people have options, but then you really make it tough around the green. And how you defend against the best players in the world is really make them think and defend the green complexes. And if you shave everything off around the greens and really test their short game, that's a complete examination of their game, instead of just being about distance, which at this point, pretty much any modern Tour pro is hitting the ball 300 yards plus. That's not a great examination of one's game. But if you could get firm and fast conditions and really test all the facets of their game.
Steve Hennessey
That's how you do it. And how golf digest has kind of evolved in that realm is our conditioning category now, is solely focused on how firm and fast are the fairways and the greens, how receptive are the greens. And so we're really rewarding clubs who are going in that firm and fast direction, and not necessarily being about how green and how lush and how beautiful your golf course is, but embracing that brown is the new green has been the slogan the USGA. Has used over the last ten years. But that's something that we implemented in our rankings about ten years ago, and we think that's had a positive influence in the industry. To embrace the fact that you don't have to overwater these golf courses. Water use is a big factor in golf course maintenance. That's a big hot button topic as well. So to regulate that, and also, again, to test the best players in the world, it's focusing on those firm and fast conditions.
Sajiv Mehta
And when courses do undergo major renovations, how much of an effect does that usually have on their course, and is it usually up or is it usually down? What does that do to the course?
Steve Hennessey
A great question. Again, so if there's a complete renovation transformation at a club, we will typically will be communicating with the clubs way in advance. We'll talk to them, we'll talk to the architect who did the work, and they'll let us know when the work is ready to be done. And we'll communicate with them. If they think the work is so transformative that the golf course is completely new, we'll throw out some of the old evaluations. So, for instance, at Wingfoot, we threw out all the old ballots for all the evaluations before Gilhand's work, and our last set of rankings was based solely on any evaluation post Gilhand's work. Now, interestingly, Wingfoot went down in our rankings at that time from, I think they were ten and went to twelve. So sometimes that happens. It's more of a long term goal. That's what we tell clubs when you do something like that. And if you look at Wingfoot West score from, say, 2018 to 2022, maybe it went down by a couple of hundredths of a decimal point, but Sandhills went up by a few tenths of a point. Fisher's island went up by a few tenths of a point, and then all of a sudden, Wingfoot West dropped out of the top ten.
Steve Hennessey
It wasn't necessarily an indication of any poor renovation work. It's just a matter of all, these golf courses are so good. So to discern what the difference is between number eleven and number twelve, it's so close. But the East Course at Wingfoot, after Gilhand's changes, it's continued to go up, I think, over 25 spots in our rankings over the last four years. So it could go either way. And you would think that a transformation of a golf course would net great results for the club, and that's typically how it's gone. Philly Cricket Club, which also went, underwent a complete transformation in 2014, 2015. It has risen up in our rankings, close to the 100 Greatest now. So that's the most common influence of how a major transformation will work.
Sajiv Mehta
Okay, and when you think about distance and how that's affected the game, we just went over that. How do you think the governing body is threatening a distance rollback? Do you think that's something that is plausible for courses? Do you think that would change how they look, how you rate them?
Steve Hennessey
That's another great question. I know it's been something that's been talked about. Even if you look back at comments, Jack Nicklaus made in the 1950s, 60s, 70s - he was calling for the ball to be rolled back. And even more modern comments from his still are. I think that's definitely on the table for the ruling bodies to do something, whether or not that's only for the tournament players and not for the average players, I think that'll be the most fascinating thing. I think that would be the solution that would make the most sense to me. The average weekend player to go from hitting it 220 yards off the tee to now, all of a sudden barely hitting it 200 yards, that's going to be tough to sell people on, making the game more fun. Everyone wants to hit it far. So I Think if There's A Way To bifurcate the equipment, which Is Not A Term That The equipment companies love, but If There's A Way To Figure That Out, that Works For The Tournament Game and The Average Player I think that's on the table and how that influences our course rankings, since it's really not based on tournament play and really based on average people going out and studying the architecture just based on being a guest at a club.
Steve Hennessey
That shouldn't affect things too much. If golf courses kind of get out of control in terms of really pushing distance, our challenge category evaluates how difficult, while still being fair, a golf course is. So I could see a golf course that goes too extreme in that direction kind of falling in our challenge category. So it's interesting to study. And while I anticipate something happening in the next year or two, or at least something being announced in the year or two, then there would be another period of time in which all parts of the industry kind of get to weigh in and give their opinions and thoughts, so nothing would be imminent. But I think if you read the Tea leaves, that's kind of how it's going. So in ten years, if you and me were talking, I wouldn't be surprised if we were talking about a different set of equipment for every level of player.