"The unanimity of their voice was powerful and absolutely worthy of mass scrutiny."

Steve Elling takes a closer look at the Golf World PGA Tour Player Course Ranking project, talks to yours truly, and offers his thoughts after reading all 9000 words in his issue of the magazine.

In a survey that took nine months and hundreds of hours to compile, one of the game's most influential magazines has completed a comprehensive survey of 81 tour veterans, assembling the first no-holds ranking of tour venues in history.

By a landscaping landslide, the older, established tour venues dominated the subjective rankings, and the newer tracks, including a spate of TPC courses designed with tournament play foremost in mind, were mired at the bottom of the list.

Forget the flat-billed orange hats, pink driver shafts, Poulter's paisley pants and the myriad Twitter accounts -- the young guys on tour these days have short attention spans but can still muster the long view. They recognize a gen-u-wine masterpiece when they see one, too.