A tee time at a Top 100 Course in the U.S. like Bethpage Black isn’t expensive, but would GOLF’s readers pay for it?
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Our expert course raters get their say in assessing the most sublime golf courses on American soil every two years, like they just did for our 2024-25 Top 100 Courses in the U.S. ranking. But our readers — you! — have opinions, experiences and dreams of playing Pine Valley, too. Here we’ll break out a few factoids and tee-time fantasies that emerged from GOLF’s 2024 Top 100 Courses in the U.S. Readers’ Survey.
The great philosopher Epictetus first posited that true wealth was “not in having great possessions, but few wants.”
But where, in the grand scheme of possession, is an experience?
Take, for example, GOLF’s new ranking of the Top 100 Courses in the U.S. A list of this kind is, in its essence, an exercise in wants. To ascribe rank to the top 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 would you pay for a tee time at Augusta National? What’s an afternoon at Pine Valley worth? Would you shell out extra for a 36-hole day at Pebble Beach and Monterey Peninsula? How about a 54-hole weekend at those two plus Cypress Point?
The point here is that money fuels a lot of the golf world as we know it. To pierce the pinnacles of power, you need fortunes of both the literal and metaphorical kind. And to pierce all 100 of them, well, that fortune would need to be considerable.
But that’s supposing you want to pierce the pinnacles of power, and that’s where we find the rub of today’s story. As part of GOLF’s annual exercise in ranking the greatest golf courses around the world, we sampled you, our readers, for feedback on a whole host of questions relating to golf course architecture. The responses we got were as telling as they were illuminating, lifting up the curtain on the way the golf world views … the golf world.
One question that came of particular interest to the GOLF’s editors was the following: What’s the most you’d pay for a tee time on any of our Top 100 Courses in the U.S.? The answers, as our listed below, were stunning.
A remarkable 35 percent of GOLF’s readers answered they would spent no more than $100 on a tee time, while nearly 25 percent said they’d pay $500 or more. A majority of our readers (50.58 percent) said they would pay no more than $200 for a Top 100 afternoon.
Check out the full results of our survey below, and for more Top 100 Courses coverage, you can check out the brand-new U.S. list here.
