Interactive
This interactive map shows which modern golf courses have held up as truly great
It’s rare that the PGA Tour heads to a new course, but this week’s World Golf Championship will be contested at a venue, Concession Golf Club, unknown to most of the golf world.
This private Jack Nicklaus and Tony Jacklin layout, which won Golf Digest’s Best New private course award in 2006, was built during a particularly fruitful period of golf course construction. In fact, 49 courses that opened between 2000 and 2009 have gone on to earn placement on Golf Digest’s America’s 100 Greatest Courses, Second 100 Greatest Courses or Best Courses in Canada lists, comprising roughly 21 percent of those rankings (Concession is ranked 135th in the U.S. on our most recent ranking).
This led us to the exercise of wanting to chart the progression of each of our most prominent Best New winners of the past two decades. After a boom in construction in the early 2000s, the number of courses has tapered in the past 10 years, which is best visualized in the interactive below.
Beyond a trip down memory lane, a look back through the last two decades of Golf Digest’s Best New Course of the Year winners reveals a compelling snapshot of modern architecture at various stages of life. These maps are evidence of how tastes in design change. Enjoy the retrospective. (Note: Some recent Best New winners, like Congaree in South Carolina and Ohoopee Match Club in Georgia, do not appear on this interactive as they haven't had enough evaluations to appear on one of Golf Digest's national lists.)