Can you buy your way onto our list? No, our rankings are not for sale. But money matters when it comes to creating today's super courses

Golf Digest, May, 2005 by Ron Whitten

PURSUIT OF A SPOT ON AMERICA'S 100 Greatest Golf Courses has become a rich man's game. Forgive this blunt assessment, which stomps on the notion that every municipality has a rustic little course the caliber of No. 29 Bethpage Black just waiting to be polished up and rediscovered. Hooey. It's an inescapable fact that when it comes to contending for a spot on the 100 Greatest, money matters.

Not in terms of buying panelists' votes, which aren't for sale. (And they aren't even votes, they're category-by-category evaluations filed on secret ballots.) Nor in terms of lobbying panelists with food, beverage and parting gifts. Our 800-plus panelists are prohibited from accepting perks, and clubs can be banned from the competition simply for offering them.

But money matters. It matters in helping achieve that all-important first impression, often the only impression a visiting panelist might have. We're not talking about the chilled, mango-scented cart towels at Dallas National or the private wine locker each member has at Mayacama, on the edge of California's wine country. No, we're talking about the acres of zoysia grass sodded throughout Dallas National, not just in fairways but also in the rough, offering cushy lies wherever one hits. We're talking about the 25 ancient live oaks that were transplanted, at a cost of $30,000 per tree, to key locations on several holes at Mayacama, convincing the uninformed that designer Jack Nicklaus has a special eye for bending holes around magnificent specimens.

Golf courses have become increasingly extravagant to attract and keep dues-paying members, not Golf Digest panelists. And surely, the owners who spend astonishing amounts of money building courses these days don't have a spot on America's 100 Greatest foremost in their sights. What they want for the money is something extraordinarily special, someplace their friends have never been. More often than not, the model is Augusta National.

That's what inspired Jerry Rich, who made his fortune in integrated computer systems. In the mid-1980s, Rich played Augusta National but found he couldn't just up and join it. So he returned to his 1,500-acre farm west of Chicago determined to build his own back-yard playground, on a section across the road from the barn housing his collection of 80 automobiles.

Rich himself designed six holes of Rich Harvest Links in 1990, with multiple tees and flags to play as 18. He added three more holes one year later and finally expanded it to a full 18 in 1998. His model was always Augusta National--its strategies, bunkers, water hazards, locker room, even its club-insignia flower bed at the end of Magnolia Lane.

If Augusta National's conditioning is perfection, then Rich Harvest Links is perfection pluperfect, flawless in its grooming, far less frequented by golfers, and the hottest course on America's 100 Greatest, having jumped 44 spots to No. 45 since its debut at 99 two years ago.

Rich's money mattered at Rich Harvest Links. There are a hundred other golf courses scattered across the cornfields of the upper Midwest that will never contend for America's 100 Greatest. But Rich Harvest Links did, by knocking the socks off nearly every panelist who sought it out and discovered it wasn't what he or she expected.

Jerry Rich declines to discuss how much he has spent on his personal course, preferring, as rich guys often do, to discuss his favorite charity, in his case the Hook a Kid on Golf Foundation chapter that he established in Illinois. He denies ever coveting a spot on America's 100 Greatest but now savors the honor, proudly boasting of it on his club's letterhead.

Imitation Augustas are nothing new in golf course ownership. A generation ago, rich guys had the exact same itch (see "Monuments in Augusta's Image", Golf Digest, May 1985). The result was soda-pop king Jack Lupton's The Honors Course in Tennessee (No. 32), construction giant Hall Thompson's Shoal Creek in Alabama No. 49) and oilman Jack Vickers' Castle Pines in Colorado (No. 50).

But the newest imitations seem bent on someday supplanting Augusta National. At No. 78 Sage Valley Golf Club, half an hour outside Augusta in South Carolina, Tom Fazio--the architect retained by Augusta National for all its improvements since Tiger Woods came along--worked in a hilly forest of longleaf pines. Yet Fazio still had about 900 trees transplanted, some of them 70 feet tall. To add to the Augusta illusion, 9,000 azaleas were planted, and beneath every green was installed a SubAirbrand air-circulation system, a device conceived at, you guessed it, Augusta National. For more on Sage Valley's designer and his free-spending ways, see "Has Tom Fazio Been Good For The Game?" on page 179.)

No. 33 Kinloch Golf Club near Richmond, Va., has similar aspirations. Kinloch's turf consists of L-93 bent grass on tees, fairways and greens, a death-defying turfgrass extravaganza never before attempted so far south of the Mason-Dixon line. To help keep the grass alive, its designer, Lester George, prescribed 2,000 irrigation heads instead of the 600 to 800 found on most courses.