If you are interested in golf, don’t miss this Golf Digest 60th Anniversary article (slideshow here) on the most important American golf courses of the past 130 years.

Organized by decade, the list only includes a few Texas courses, including Houston’s venerable Champions Golf Club.

Given the dire financial condition of many courses these days in the face of a soft golf market, Golf Digest chose one old course in Florida as a lesson in real estate development that is frequently forgotten:

Whitfield Country Club, a residential development in Sarasota, Fla., was built in the mid-1920s by Donald Ross, the country’s premier course architect. To sell memberships and home sites, Whitfield’s developers hired the great amateur player Bobby Jones as spokesman. And yet Whitfield failed within a year, a victim of Florida’s real-estate bust that struck well in advance of the stock-market crash. Whitfield proved that even a marquee designer and a celebrity endorser don’t guarantee success, a lesson with resonance even now.  .   .   .