To all you non-golfers; It may appear on TV that all golf courses are the same. And, believe it or not, I once thought that too…at least for a period of time.

As some of you may know, I’ve played many, many different golf courses in my 20+ years on the links (including my quest to play all the public 18-holers in my state). But after you play so many, they tend to mesh together in your mind like a hodgepodge of flag sticks, sand traps, ponds and grass.

When you’re new to the game of golf, typically you frequent one course that you feel comfortable on. And that level of comfort pretty much keeps you loyal until the day a golfing buddy invites you to play somewhere else. Going to that “new” course can be exciting and it will seem like everything is different – the scenery, the layout, all of it.

And in reality, it was all different. But then you play a another course and another and before you know it, they all start to look similar. Well, after playing at all these different places, I developed a problem:

If a person mentioned a particular course to me, I would quickly tell them, “Oh, I’ve played there and it was decent.” When they’d follow-up with, “What did you like about it?” I would hesitate. I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember any details of said course! I would try to remember – I’d think of a particular par 3 with a pond and 30 par 3’s with ponds rushed into my mind.

So what did I do? Were all those courses I experienced – that I spent my hard-earned money on – lost somewhere in that vast (and mostly empty) noggin of mine? I prayed not. The solution? I began writing reviews for each course – complete with my own rating system – which seemed to jog the old memory!

Much of that system is still intact and can be found on golfstinks.com – except now I’ve gotten your input too. If you took the survey (see the results HERE), you had a say in how the rating system should work. I know there are more of you out there – golfers that love playing at different courses. Well, you’ll never have to forget the details again – just rate and post a review for any of the thousands of courses in our database.

But, shameless plug aside, I think I’ve come full-circle. When I first started golfing, every course I played was unique. Then, eventually, one track bled into another. And now, I’ve learned to take notice, appreciate and file-away the idiosyncrasies of each place I visit.

I once penned an entire post on why golf is unique compared to the other sports – and one of the biggest reasons is no two courses are exactly alike. Think about that for a second. Football fields (both American and European) conform to exact specifications; baseball diamonds and hockey rinks do too. But not golf – every single course is unique to itself.

Of course, I knew this all along. But it sure is fun remembering it all over again! So don’t just play golf…experience it. Travel, discover and enjoy – even if it’s just to the course in the next county over.