The Big Picture

To commemorate the 25th anniversary of Golf Digest's annual ranking of America's Best New Courses, we went back to our first Resort Course winner, Oyster Bay Golf Links in Sunset Beach, N.C.

If time hasn't stood still at Oyster Bay, it certainly has been in no hurry. The Dan Maples design still flows gracefully across the property with no excessive earthwork, the greens seem perfectly proportioned to the required shots, the bunkers have their crisp edges. Most of all, the place still has some gorgeous holes, like the fifth, a postcard of gussied-up turf and boutonniere bunkers arm in arm with undisturbed marsh.

For all its strengths, Oyster Bay also represents a direction golf architecture was headed back in 1983 -- an unwavering path that many architects have followed, some willingly, ever since. For starters, it's a residential-development course, so you cross countless streets between holes, even trot across somebody's driveway to reach one tee.

The course was constrained by environmental handcuffs in its formative years, so today there's an untouchable wetlands in front of the 18th green, turning a pleasant closing par 4 into a high-handicapper's final nightmare.

Worst of all, it was fashionable -- which is to say, approbative of that era's high priest of architecture, Pete Dye. So Oyster Bay has not one but two island greens, a response, in duplicate, to Dye's death-or-glory island 17th at TPC Sawgrass, now known as the Players Stadium Course. Another tribute to Dye's proclivity toward harsh edges and abrupt changes is Oyster Bay's 13th green, elevated high above a lake. Where Dye might have piled up railroad ties to achieve the 10-foot vertical wall surrounding the green, Maples did him one better, creating a pile of concrete and oyster shells, much like a tabby wall of similar materials used in making forts along the Atlantic a century before.

That was one direction golf architecture was headed in 1983, but hardly the only one. Golf design has never been a monorail. It's a labyrinth, a jumbled network with a couple of major tracks, a bunch of side rails branching in various directions, some looping back and crisscrossing, a few even working against the general flow.

Over the past quarter-century, Golf Digest has occasionally identified and promoted new architectural movements. We made minimalism mainstream, we reached the frontiers of Nebraska, New Mexico and North Dakota before the competition, and if we didn't exactly establish Tom Fazio's reputation, we certainly helped him upgrade his airplane.

But the truth is, it takes years for genuine movements to develop fully, and our survey is an annual event -- just a snapshot, not a time-lapse. On top of that, we've based Best New awards on single visits and first impressions by our panel of amateurs and club professionals (a group of fewer than 150 in the beginning, now more than 800). Though many panelists are quick studies and can readily identify architectural strategies and options (or their absence) during a single round, some of our choices, in retrospect, focused on the flash and glitz, the lipstick, not the bone structure.

Hence, the double-island-green glory of Oyster Bay as our first Resort winner, along with our first Best New Public, SentryWorld in Wisconsin, with its haughty (some might say hideous) par-3 16th, where five acres of flowers -- 75,000 geraniums, petunias, snapdragons and marigolds -- surrounded the green.

Thankfully, America's Best New has been more than just special effects and calendar art. Let's review the past quarter-century in terms of which architects and courses have had a lasting impact.

AUSTERITY

Our review begins, as do most things involving golf architecture, with a very rich guy. He is William Frederick Dreer, a Philadelphia seed merchant who died in 1918 but left an annual endowment to the Horticulture Department of Cornell University. In 1982, while Golf Digest was gearing up for its first Best New survey, a graduating senior at Cornell, Tom Doak, persuaded the Dreer trustees to award him the $5,000 grant. Using it, he spent a year -- from July 1982 to July 1983 -- walking, playing, photographing, sketching and studying courses in Great Britain and Ireland. Not just the big-name courses; 172 in all.

At the conclusion of his postgraduate study, Doak decided the bouncing, rolling nature of the modestly irrigated courses over there were a lot of fun and made a lot of economic sense. He returned to the U.S. with a vision for golf design that had nothing to do with hosting tournaments or selling homes. After a stint working for Pete Dye, at age 27, Doak set out on his own.

His approach was to use the lay of the land in his routings rather than forcing golf holes into the ground. He scattered bunkers that affected some golfers on some holes, other golfers on others, and used putting surfaces that weren't afraid to mimic the local topography, even tumbling landforms. Golf Digest tagged Doak as the first minimalist architect, but that's not always accurate, because Doak has, on occasion, moved massive quantities of earth to make his holes look absolutely natural. Regardless of the process, the result appears as if Doak just mowed out fairways and greens from the existing land and scratched out a few bunkers.

But Doak's early work barely registered on our Best New surveys. His first, High Pointe in northern Michigan, opened in 1989 with fescue greens and fairways that weren't lush or pretty, and they required a ground game few of our panelists played. His second, the Heathland Course at The Legends in Myrtle Beach, a distillation of Doak's odyssey across Britain, fared no better. His third, the Black Forest Course at Wilderness Valley, not far from High Pointe but with better land and bunkering, likewise failed to win its category.