The Big Picture

Strantz triumphed with a pair of Virginia courses in the Upscale Public category in consecutive years, 1996 with Stonehouse, 1997 with Royal New Kent, but his true Everest of architecture, Tobacco Road near Pinehurst, finished tied for 10th in 1999, perhaps reflecting some of the media backlash that insisted his mammoth holes and dungeon-like bunkers were unmaintainable and unplayable. ("I don't care if people think my courses are too hard," Strantz said in 1998. "That's their opinion. But I know in my heart, they're not hard. People make them hard.")

His final work, the total redesign of the Shore Course at Monterey Peninsula Country Club in Pebble Beach, is lasting proof that Strantz was the game's consummate artist. Nothing outlandish or unplayable there, just sweeping grandeur, with every green, bunker and well-positioned rock outcropping seemingly backlit by a Pacific sunset. It came in second -- a stunning upset -- in our inaugural Best New Remodel competition in 2005.

Other architects have developed styles that have managed to challenge Fazio's dominance in our rankings. Jim Engh's work has earned four Best New wins since 1997, each displaying his unique Art Deco style of rhythmic shapes, repetitive lines and relaxing expansiveness. But he can be whimsical, too, with twin pines at Colorado's Sanctuary (Best New Private 1997) posing a field-goal approach shot, and mushroom-like rock outcroppings that turn a fairway into a pinball machine at Idaho's Black Rock (Best New Private 2003).

Just as compelling have been two Jeff Brauer winners in Minnesota, The Quarry at Giants Ridge (Best New Upscale Public 2004), with tilted fairways and punch-bowl greens that successfully merge a Doak-like bouncing ballgame into a lush, green Fazio-like setting, and The Wilderness at Fortune Bay (Best New Upscale 2005), far different, with alternate fairways, optional routes and heroic carries that favor golfers who prefer an aerial assault.

Best New Resort-Oyster Bay (1983): Mountains of money produced a blockbuster.
Illustration by Mark Ulriksen

ARMS RACE

The most disturbing movement in the past 25 years has been the insistence by some owners on having the meanest, toughest, hardest golf course in all the land. The trend probably started with Jack Nicklaus in the early 1980s. Nearly every Nicklaus client in those days insisted that Jack, the greatest golfer of all time, build the greatest championship course he could, and for years, Nicklaus tried to oblige, at Bear Creek in California, The Bear in northern Michigan, Valhalla in Kentucky, Renegade and Geronimo at Desert Mountain in Arizona.

In 1984, Pete Dye was told to make the Stadium Course at PGA West even nastier than a Nicklaus design. Then Tom Fazio created the hardest course he has ever done, Hallbrook near Kansas City, with 16 lateral hazards along its 18 greens, and the second-hardest, The Farm in Rocky Face, Ga. Then Arnold Palmer's company produced Commonwealth National in Pennsylvania, which boasted it had a higher course rating than Pine Valley, the No. 1 course in the land.

None of them bullied its way onto America's Best New, mainly because our criteria for judging courses didn't consider difficulty until 1996. In the years before Resistance to Scoring became a category, only Pete Dye's brutally difficult Ocean Course at Kiawah in South Carolina won a Best New award, Best New Resort 1991, the year it also hosted the Ryder Cup.

That was the exception. Panelists have mostly shunned monster courses in our survey. Rugged Ko'olau in Hawaii, assigned the highest Slope Rating ever (162) was nowhere to be found among Best New 1993. The closest any notorious layout this side of Kiawah came to winning was Dye's Whistling Straits in 1999, but it finished second in Best New Upscale Public to the equally scenic but more playable Bandon Dunes.

In recent years, the measure of a nasty, snarly golf course -- still the goal of some owners -- has shifted from a ridiculous Slope Rating to a ridiculous yardage: 7,800 yards, 7,900 even 8,000 yards from the back tees. We've yet to have a Best New winner break that 8,000-yard barrier, but it's bound to happen.

Now on the horizon is Sevillano Links in Corning, Calif. It's 7,823 yards, par 72, from the back tees. But, at co-designer John Daly's urging, architect Mike Stark laid out additional landing areas and back tees so the course can be played (presumably by masochists) as 18 consecutive par 5s. That's right: From the very back, it measures 10,500 yards, par 90.

It will be a 2008 Best New candidate. We might have to create a whole new category.