A short time at a top 100 US course like Bethpage Black isn’t expensive, but would GOLF readers pay for it?
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Our expert course evaluators have their say in rating the most sublime golf courses on American soil every two years, as they did for our 2024-2025 Top 100 Courses in the USA rankings. But our readers – you! – have thoughts, experiences and dreams to play Pine Valley too. Here we’ll break down some factoids and fantasy that emerged from the 2024 Top 100 Golf Courses in the USA Readers’ survey.
The great philosopher Epictetus first posited that true wealth was not in having great wealth, but in having few needs.
But where, in the grand scheme of things POSSESSIONis it an experience?
Take, for example, GOLF’s new ranking of the top 100 courses in the US A list of this kind is, in essence, a wish-listing exercise. To attribute the ranking to the best golf courses in the United States is to admit a certain level of desirability. And desirability is often best described in terms of cold, hard cash.
How much do you want? you pay for a tee time at Augusta National? In what is an afternoon Valley of the Pines is it worth Would you pay more for a 36-hole day at Pebble Beach and the Monterey Peninsula? How about a 54-hole weekend at those two plus Cypress Point?
The point here is that money it fuels much of the golf world as we know it. To pierce the pinnacles of power, you need riches of the literal and metaphorical kind. And to drill all 100 of them, well, that wealth would have to be substantial.
But that assumes you they want to pierce the pinnacles of power and here we find the friction of today’s history. As part of GOLF’s annual exercise in ranking the greatest golf courses around the world, we sampled youour readers, for feedback on a host of questions about golf course architecture. The answers we got were as revealing as they were enlightening, lifting the curtain on how the golf world sees … the golf world.
One question that came up of particular interest to the GOLF editors was the following: What’s the most you’d pay for a short time on any of our top 100 courses in the US? The responses, as listed below, were astounding.
A remarkable 35 percent of GOLF readers responded that they would not spend more than $100 on a date, while nearly 25 percent said they would pay $500 or more. The majority of our readers (50.58 percent) said they wouldn’t pay more than $200 for an afternoon at the Top 100.
See our full survey results below and for more coverage of the top 100 courses, you can check out New American list here.
