Areas Toughest Golf Courses

What are the most difficult golf courses to play in Northwest Arkansas?

Opinions vary, of course, but the national governing organization of the sport has an official rating system it uses to determine a course’s difficulty, and that’s what the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal used in its Executive Sportsmen edition to rank the toughest 18-hole golf courses in the area.

To see the list, click here.

The data is from ratings by the Arkansas State Golf Association, which is licensed by the United States Golf Association as the official rater of member golf courses in Arkansas.

The courses are ranked by the USGA’s most recent slope rating from each course’s most difficult tees.

A slope rating has nothing to do with how flat or hilly a particular course is. It actually tells a golfer how difficult the golf course is for a “bogey” golfer (less-skilled players who typically shoot much higher scores) compared to a “scratch” player, defined by the USGA as a player who can play a course handicap of zero on any and all rated golf courses.

The higher the slope number, the harder the course is for the bogey golfer, relative to the difficulty of the course for the scratch golfer. Slope numbers can range anywhere between 55 and 155, with the average slope in the United States being 113.

The term slope rating, invented by the USGA, comes from the fact that when playing on more difficult courses, players’ scores will increase more quickly than their handicaps would predict. The slope rating of a course thus predicts that rise.

Also included in the Business Journal list is a course rating for area golf courses, which is meant to rate the difficulty of a course for scratch golfers.

The rating established for the scratch golfer, according to the USGA, is known as the course rating. There is also a rating for the bogey player known as the bogey rating. The bogey rating is not normally published, but is used to determine a slope rating. 

So why are all these numbers needed just to play golf? Both slope and course ratings are important elements of the USGA Handicapping System, developed to allow a player to take his or her Handicap Index to almost any course in the world and be able to compete on an equal level with other golfers.

Because they are expressed in strokes, course ratings are considered simpler to understand.

But many golfers prefer the slope rating as a truer measure of course difficulty, because it’s a comparative measure.

It applies to a larger group of golfers at varying skill levels, but should not be considered an absolute measure of difficulty.

“There is a misconception about slope rating in that it measures absolute difficulty,” said Lee Rainwater, assistant manager of handicap and course rating administration for the USGA. “The higher the slope the more difficult the golf course is a little bit of a false statement. It’s really more about the relative difficulty of a course for the non-scratch golfer in comparison to the scratch golfer. The whole handicapping system is about trying to get everybody, regardless of handicap, back to scratch so there can be equitable games.”

 

By the Numbers

So which golf course is the toughest? The answer should not be surprising to those fortunate (or unfortunate) to have played there in the last decade.

“I’ve actually heard stories about the Blessings,” Rainwater joked.

Blessings Golf Club in Johnson, a high-end, exclusive course built along the winding Clear Creek and owned by Tyson Foods Inc. chairman John H. Tyson, tops the list of most difficult courses, with a slope rating of 148.

Blessings is followed by a pair of courses in Rogers: Lost Springs Golf & Athletic Club and Pinnacle Country Club, with slope ratings of 143 and 142, respectively.

A slope rating of 113 is considered average, according to the USGA.

In terms of course rating, Blessings, which is a par-72, has a course rating of 77.7, not only the highest rating of any course locally, but also tied with the Diamante course in Hot Springs Village for highest course rating in Arkansas.

According to the USGA, a course rating is the estimate of the average scores of the best half of rounds played by scratch golfers at a particular course.

A course that is a par-72 that is easy might have a course rating of 68.8; a difficult course may have a rating of 74.3.

Among courses in Northwest Arkansas, Stonebridge Meadows Golf Club of Fayetteville is second-toughest with a rating of 75.1 and the Bella Vista Country Club has a rating of 74.7.

Both course rating and slope rating are calculated for a golf course on the basis of a visit to the course by a state association rating team.

Slope and course ratings for women are also included in the Business Journal list. Although the women’s courses aren’t ranked in order like the men, it can pretty much be assumed that if a course is tough for the men, it’ll be tough for the women as well.

 

Terror Factor

The ultra-exclusive Blessings course was designed by prominent golf course architect Robert Trent Jones II of California and opened in 2004.

It is the home course and a major recruiting advantage for the University of Arkansas men’s and women’s golf teams, and has hosted national junior tournaments, as well as Southeastern Conference and NCAA championships.

The golf course has been tweaked over its first decade, to minimize certain areas of extreme difficulty.

But with tight, lengthy fairways, hilly terrain, challenging greens and intimidating shots waiting on the tee boxes, golfers are still tested on every swing at Blessings.

“Everyone tells you that [Blessings] is a tough golf course and you don’t believe it until you get here and play it,” Auburn women’s golf coach Kim Evans told the school’s website following the team’s one-stroke victory over Arkansas at the 2012 SEC Women’s Golf Championship.

Auburn, ranked fifth in the country at the time, won the three-day tournament with a score of 916 — 52-over par — over the 6,112-yard layout. Only four individuals finished the tournament better than 10-over par.

Jay Fox, the executive director of the ASGA since 1991, was working in the scoring tent at the tournament, and recalled the course reducing some of the top amateur players in the country to tears.

“There’s a girl out playing on [the LPGA] Tour now who came into the scoring tent. Played for Alabama. She slides her card over to me and mascara is just running down her face.

“You had some really good players shooting 87, 88. Now, it was 50 degrees that day and the wind was blowing 30 miles per hour. But that golf course just whipped their tails.”

Fox, one of the state’s most accomplished amateurs in his own right with more than 50 tournament victories, recalled his first round at Blessings, after the course had been open for about a year.

“Every shot had a terror factor to it,” he said. “Even the [first] tee shot is feast or famine. You can hit it in the fairway or you can hit it in the junk. And that is almost every hole out there.”

 

Professional Pair

The two courses in Rogers that are ranked No. 2 and No. 3 on the Business Journal list have a history with professional golf tournaments.

Lost Springs, designed by Lyndy Lindsey of Fayetteville and owned by Lindsey Management Co., opened in 1992 and has hosted Hooters Tour and Adams Tour men’s professional events in the past. (Tommy Gainey, a current PGA Tour professional, won the Hooters Tour’s Bentonville Open at Lost Springs in 2007).

Pinnacle, founded in 1990 as Champions Golf & Country Club, is owned and operated by the Hudson family led by Mike Hudson, son of the late James T. “Red” Hudson, the founder of Hudson Foods and an inductee into the Arkansas Business Hall of Fame in 2005.

Hudson, who died in August 2006, led a group of 21 local investors who bought the club in 1992 when it was on the verge of bankruptcy under the original developer, a promoter from Fredonia, Kansas, named Fred Berckefeldt.

Hudson eventually bought the country club outright for an undisclosed sum in 2002.

Pinnacle, designed by the late Don Sechrest, with PGA Tour professional Bruce Lietzke serving as a consultant, underwent a $6.2 million redesign in 2009, led by Randy Heckenkemper of Tulsa. The layout stretches to 7,001 yards and encompasses 100 acres of rough, 62 bunkers and 18 water features.

The club hosts one of the more popular stops each summer on the LPGA Tour, having hosted an official event every year since 2008.

 

Universal Formula

Bryant Fortin, director of junior golf for the ASGA, said the organization follows guidelines to review ratings of member courses and revise them as necessary.

New golf courses are rated once they are opened so golfers can post scores toward their handicap. The USGA then requires that courses are rated a second time within the first five years of the first ratings visit.

Past that, a golf course is generally re-rated every decade.

“There are times when a course is rated more frequently, often after a renovation,” he said.

Of Northwest Arkansas’ three toughest courses, Blessings has been rated most recently, last October.

A ratings team last visited Pinnacle in May 2009 and Lost Springs was rated in June 2011.

So how does a rating team determine course ratings? Following a universal USGA formula, every hole on a golf course is rated for 10 obstacle factors on a scale of 0 to 10: topography, fairway, recoverability and rough, out-of-bounds, water hazards, trees, bunkers, green target, green surface and psychological.

For handicapping purposes, nearly every golf course in North America, Asia and Eurpoe has a rating for each set of tees.

There are exceptions, however. Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia, maintains its own handicapping system for its membership, and has never granted permission to the Georgia State Golf Association to officially rate the course that annually hosts The Masters.

A little closer to home, the exclusive and secluded Alotian Club opened in 2004 just west of Little Rock in Roland but has never been rated.

It’s little wonder, considering that founder Warren Stephens’s father, Jack, was the former chairman at Augusta National from 1991 to 1998, and the Alotian Club has been portrayed by some golf industry analysts as Arkansas’ answer to Augusta.

“The vast majority of clubs and courses around the country see [course ratings] as a necessity and a service to the membership and guests, but state golf associations don’t require a golf or country club to participate in the USGA handicapping system, and it isn’t mandated to get their course rated,” Rainwater explained. “If we were lucky enough to go out and play one of those two courses next week, it’d be the time of our lives. We just couldn’t post the scores towards our handicap. That’s all it means.”