Overlooked Golf Courses: Gold Canyon and others you may not know
By Bill Felber
The majors seem to be locked into the locales they play. Here is a look at some overlooked golf courses that deserve a shot.
No knock on the U.S. Open and PGA courses we have become familiar with. But in their comfort level with this informal “rota,” the nation’s major golf entities have often failed to look beyond the narrow confines of their neighborhood, and have ignored some of the overlooked golf courses in the nation.
This trend is particularly true with respect to the nation’s major golf championship, the men’s U.S. Open. Looking ahead to the announced sites through 2027, between 2018 and that event the USGA will have sited seven of the 10 Opens in either New York or California.
The other three will be in North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. Golf fans in the vast area between Pennsylvania and California will be shut out…as they largely have been for years. Since 1980, the USGA has only seven times ventured into the 2,100-mile gap between Pittsburgh and the West Coast.
The PGA has done a better job of moving its flagship event around to diverse audiences. Even so, between 1993 and the sites announced through 2022, only 15 states have hosted a PGA Championship. Seven of those events were sited in either New York or New Jersey.
This recurring trend shuts out substantial populations from ever taking in one of these major events.
It isn’t due to the absence of quality courses. Today, every state has multiple tour-quality layouts. While the sheer number of these shunned courses is far too great to itemize, a sampling of just a handful will serve to illustrate the point.
What follows is a highlighting of a half dozen courses that, from a pure quality standpoint, would be quality major tournament sites while spreading the geography of such events to largely unacknowledged audiences.
They range in length from barely 6,000 yards to more than 7.500, While sitting a big event at any of them would present logistical challenges, doing so would also expand the horizons of major tournament golf today.