This is the time of year that any of us who write about golf and golf communities receive press releases from golf communities touting their placement on Where to Retire magazine’s list of the “50 Best Master-Planned Communities in the U.S.” That sounds pretty good when you consider that there are thousands of master-planned communities in the United States.

Simply Not The Best
        The fact is that the universe for Where to Retire’s choices is probably a couple hundred communities at most, and a fairer title for the award would be “50 Best Master-Planned Communities that Advertise in Our Magazine.” For example, the only two ads on the Where to Retire website page that lists the Top 50 are from two of the winners.
        If you want to know which communities made the Top 50, you can access the list by clicking here.
        I am not going to disparage those communities in this space because I have visited some of them and they are of high quality, including Brunswick Forest, Carolina Colours and Compass Pointe; I have even helped clients purchase homes in a few. And according to some communities I spoke with – see below – they were assured advertising in the magazine did not necessarily mean they were going to make the list.

Customer Disservice
        Many retirees rely on Where to Retire for guidance, thinking the magazine makes a purely editorial judgment about the best communities in the land. If you choose to consider and visit only the communities on the Where to Retire list, you will be missing dozens of others that will meet your requirements and that, possibly, exceed the qualities of the relatively few on the magazine’s list.
        It is understandable that some communities choose to advertise in Where to Retire in order to get their names in front of the magazine’s 200,000 readers, many of whom are looking for a place to live. Such exposure is the purpose of good marketing. But Where to Retire, which bills itself as “The Authority on Retirement Relocation,” does its readers a disservice when it fails to make clear that its Top 50 are culled substantially from its advertisers.

No Quid Pro Quo Here
        To avoid any quid pro quo – “advertise and we will name you to our Top 50” – Where to Retire’s sales reps are coy about the connection between ad spend and the list.
        “My sales rep heavily encouraged my advertising,” one community’s marketing executive told me, “but made it clear that advertising would make no bearing on the decision to include [our community] in the list. [However] I [later] answered a very long questionnaire and did a telephone interview. I also had to give the names of three residents for an interview.” This marketing executive told me her community found out it was in the Top 50 the day the magazine published the list a couple of weeks ago.
        A general manager from another community that I know well and admire was not sure why his community made the list.
        “We do advertise in WTR but on a pretty limited basis, less than we did in the past,” he told me. “I suspect, but do not know, that the pool of the best is picked from among those communities that advertise, and perhaps those that have in the past advertised, and perhaps those they are hoping would advertise.”
        When you see a press release from a community touting its status as a Top 50 Where to Retire community, understand that they paid for the honor whether they knew it at the time or not. Caveat emptor, dear reader.

         The private Metacomet Country Club in East Providence, RI, was losing money and conditions had become iffy when former PGA Tour player Brad Faxon, a Rhode Island native, and other investors bought the club earlier this year for a couple million dollars and began the process of restoring it to its former glory. It is well worth the effort, especially the front nine.
        Metacomet was incorporated in 1901. The golf course was re-designed by Donald Ross in 1926, the Golden Age of classic golf course architecture in the U.S. The greens are vintage Ross with lots of crests and bowls that demand thoughtful approaches, literally and figuratively. Approach shots played to a “bad” spot on the putting surface can easily result in three strokes with the flat stick.
Over almost 100 years, industrial structures have imposed themselves on some of the vistas at Metacomet.
         Of course, when you play a course like Metacomet for the first time, you have no clue where to put the ball, especially if you are flying blind without a member in tow. Blind is the operative word on a number of holes at Metacomet, with blind tee shots up steeply sloped fairways and blind approach shots where the bottom half of the flag stick is covered by false fronts.
        The front nine at Metacomet is a bit of a roller coaster, with dramatic changes in elevation and many of those aforementioned blind shots. The greens are exquisite, and will only get better as the weather -– and turf growth – improve. The second nine is a bit of a letdown, still classic in design but with only a few of the flourishes encountered on the way out. But it is still Ross, and only diminishes slightly the soaring shot values on the front and the overall experience.
        East Providence is quite the mecca of renowned private golf clubs. Agawam Hunt Club (1897) and Wannamoisett (1914), another Ross course, are just a few miles up the road from Metacomet and, like it, adopted the names of native American tribes from the area. But “progress” has not been kind to the area’s natural vistas, or membership stability. From Metacomet’s higher elevations, the view of the Providence River must have been breathtaking before the Industrial Revolution, but today you get a heavy dose of smokestacks and industrial structures along with the water view. Many former residential neighborhoods are gone, and as in other once-thriving urban centers, suburban golfers just won’t make the drive into the city more than occasionally to play golf. (The famed Agawam Hunt Club lost a few hundred members in the wake of the 2008 recession and was saved from bankruptcy a couple of years ago by the combined investments of wealthy members and a nature conservancy.)
Donald Ross did an outstanding job of squeezing a terrific golf course into just 120 acres. From some points on the course you can see multiple greens.
        I look forward to a round at the still-private Wannamoisett in July, but the once extremely private Agawam Hunt now accepts outside play. (See tee times at GolfNow.com). And if you call Metacomet, as Brad Faxon and his partners seek to restore the golf course and its reputation, they will almost assuredly book a time for you. You could do a lot worse than a couple of days of golf and dining in the Providence area, and the famed Portuguese restaurants of Fall River, MA, are only a few miles away.
Given the sloping on the greens, the par 3s look easier than they play.