What’s missing from Golf Digest’s inaugural compilation of the World’s 100 Greatest Golf Courses?
The answer is intriguing, especially when one considers all the attention our industry pays nowadays to the growth of international golf: Golf Digest’s evaluators didn’t identify even one truly elite golf property in South America, the Middle East or India, and they found precious few in Europe (two), Africa (two), the Caribbean (one) and Mexico (one) – all places that are supposedly teeming with high-quality golf venues.
Instead, the magazine’s freshly minted World 100 is packed solid with courses located in the United States (40) and Great Britain & Ireland (32), as such lists always seem to be.
Golf Digest predicts that its rankings will “change dramatically” in the future, as emerging golf markets begin to produce world-class tracks, but these days there’s no reason to believe that its evaluators will ever be inclined to trade the classic old courses they’ve long revered for recently opened upstarts.
