Needless to say, I played both versions of The Loop when I visited Forest Dunes recently. Needless to say, I felt compelled to make a statement on which is better because – despite arguments from some ranking agencies – The Loop is not just one course. One groundbreaking form of landscape design, perhaps, but two courses to be sure. I concluded that, as in metal and coffee, Black is best. But why?
My knee-jerk reaction was that I appreciated how Black showcased a wide range of length in par fours, both quite short and quite long. It seemed counterintuitive that a separate course, Red, could diverge so much while sharing the same corridors. And so I came up with a formula for figuring out whether there was any meat on my theory’s bone.
There was (more on that in a second). And this opened the door to a separate question: Could the test I ran with The Loops be applied to courses more generally, to provide a relevant indicator of whether a variety in par four lengths correlates positively to course rankings?
Let’s find out!
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