Orlando based Golfweek magazine has released its fourth-annual Golfweek's Best Tour Courses You Can Play list as part of its April 22 issue. Featuring layouts from the PGA Tour, Champions Tour, Nationwide Tour and LPGA, the new list highlights the top 50 courses on the professional golf circuit in 2010-11 that allow any golfer to tee it up where the pros play.
"The quality of this list attests to the public nature of golf today, even at the big-time tournament level," said Bradley S. Klein, national director of Golfweek's Best Courses ratings program. "The list runs the gamut of wonderful courses here in the U.S. and elsewhere: from Pebble Beach Golf Links on the PGA Tour at No. 1, to Fallen Oak in Mississippi on the Championship Tour at No. 11, Kinderlou Forest Golf Course in Georgia for the Nationwide Tour at No. 16 and Pumpkin Ridge's Ghost Creek in Oregon on the LPGA circuit at No. 26."
Pebble Beach Golf Links (Pebble Beach, Calif.), St. Andrew's Old Course (St. Andrews, Scotland) and the Straits Course at Whistling Straits (Kohler, Wis.) take the top three spots on the list once again, while Royal St. George's Golf Club (Sandwich, England) and Carnoustie Golf Club's Championship Course (Carnoustie, Scotland) break onto the 2011 list at No. 4 and No.5, respectively. Royal St. George's will play host to the 140th Open Championship July 14-17; two weeks later, Carnoustie, site of seven Open Championships, will stage its first Ricoh Women's British Open.
Additionally, though many of the iconic courses on the list have considerable greens fees, the Golfweek's Best Tour Courses You Can Play rankings also feature a handful of municipally owned and operated layouts - including Torrey Pines' South Course (No. 29) and North Course (No. 45) in San Diego, TPC Scottsdale's Stadium Course (No. 32) in Arizona and TPC Harding Park (No. 41) in San Francisco.
To produce the Golfweek's Best Tour Courses You Can Play list, an expert team of 675 evaluators rated each layout on the basis of 10 criteria, including routing, conditioning, variety and memorability of holes. The result is an average of scores, which then dictates a course's overall ranking.
Visit Golfweek.com/GolfweeksBest to view the complete list of Golfweek's Best Tour Courses You Can Play.
