From the archive: How did this famous course get snubbed in Golf Digest's 100 Greatest?

The omission is as head-scratching now to us at Golf Digest as it was to reader Mike Clayton, a former top Australian amateur and professional golfer who has designed golf courses and writes and speaks about architecture frequently.

Clayton, who obviously was perusing the fabulous Golf Digest archive, tweeted on July 7 a photograph of the pages listing America’s 100 Greatest Golf Courses from 1977. Golf Digest has been doing the ranking since 1966, and just this week we posted our new World’s 100 Greatest Courses. (Royal County Down came out No. 1.)

The most recent America’s 100 Greatest for 2023-24 was released in May 2023, and in the top 10 were all the usual stalwarts, including Pine Valley at No. 1, followed by Augusta National, Cypress Point, Shinnecock Hills and Oakmont.

All of those vaunted tracks were in the 1977 edition, though Pine Valley stood at No. 6 and Cypress Point at a rather ordinary 13th.

(Golf Digest+ members get access to the complete Golf Digest archive dating back to 1950. Sign up here.)

But there was a current top-10 course that shockingly didn’t make the list of the top 100, as Clayton so rightfully pointed out in his post: National Golf Links of America. The links-style course on Long Island, less than three miles from the more visible Shinnecock Hills in Southampton, has a ton of history and sits at No. 7 in Golf Digest’s current 100 Greatest.

Founded in 1911, NGLA was designed by C.B. Macdonald, the Scotsman schooled at St. Andrews in the late 1800s. Working with New Yorker Seth Raynor, he essentially copied some favorite holes from the British Isles and as Golf Digest notes now, “Macdonald’s versions are actually superior in strategy to the originals, which is why National’s design is still studied by golf architects today, its holes now replicated elsewhere.”

In that same course snippet, we also slap our own wrists, writing, “Hard to fathom that National Golf Links of America was not ranked in the 100 Greatest from 1969 until 1985.” So it wasn’t just an oversight for that one edition. Somehow, it fell out of favor with our ranking panel.

In that ’77 Greatest, there were some other striking omissions: Fishers Island on Long Island, opened in 1926 and probably the best design produced by Raynor; it's No. 9 on the current GD list. And The Country Club in Brookline, Mass., the 1882 course only known for one of the greatest major victories of all-time—amateur Francis Ouimet’s hometown 1913 U.S. Open triumph. It’s 19th now.

Conversely, a few of the mighty from ’77 have fallen. Pine Tree Golf Club in Delray Beach, Fla., was No. 18(!) and can’t be found in the 100 now. Others from the top 30 that have disappeared: Cascades Golf Course (Hot Springs, Va.), Jupiter Hills Club (Tequesta, Fla.) and Point O’ Woods (Benton Harbor, Mich.)

We’d hope that there won’t be a hologram post 47 years from now laughing at an omission from the current 100, but check back with us then.