For course architect Tom Doak, the pen was as mighty as the shovel.
Tom Doak sits in the clubhouse at High Pointe Golf Club, where he took on his first solo project in 1987 at age 26. He vividly remembers that any doubts he harboured disappeared after one shovelful of the rich soil. “Right then I just knew, Oh, this is going to be good.”
Such confidence has been associated with Doak ever since. But now, on his home turf of Traverse City in Michigan, reflecting on four decades of excellence in golf architecture, he turns uncharacteristically hesitant. It’s not easy for someone who has only given his all to decide on the best he ever did.
Doak is generally unequivocal, especially in print. In 1994, he released the book The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses, shaking up the golf world with his unsparing “Doak Zero-to-10 Scale” applied to more than 800 courses he’d seen around the world. More than a few ostensibly revered ones received lukewarm 4s and worse.
Doak has proven far more than a flamethrower. His reviews were marked by deep knowledge and sound reasoning. Several astute judgments – like giving the then-scruffy and ignored but charming and breathtaking North Berwick an 8 – advanced the current era of minimalism.
Doak considers golf architecture an art, and as he wrote in The Anatomy of a Golf Course one of his 10 published books on the subject, “Every art needs good criticism if it is to flourish.”
At High Pointe, Doak was reminded of the heathland at Sunningdale. Accordingly, the property’s bold and rugged lines are softened by an elegant classical naturalism, along with a spaciousness that provides “room to play”, in the words of his friend and fellow architect Ben Crenshaw. Doak built and shaped all the greens at High Pointe by himself, the only time he has done so in more than 50 completed and current projects. He began with the 13th hole, creating a rumpled throw rug of perplexing slopes that are exhilarating to try to figure out, which a few architecture aficionados still consider the best green Doak ever built.
Doak doesn’t totally reject the idea. He has pointed out that some of America’s greatest courses, including Pine Valley, Pebble Beach, National Golf Links, Merion and Oakmont, were done by architects on their first tries.
“I was eager to get started and had a lot of ideas, but, really, my philosophy hasn’t changed much since,” says the now-64-year-old who retains a boyish energy. “I try to err on the side of doing too little instead of too much. If you can do a lot to the green, you don’t have to do so much to the rest of the hole besides follow what the land gives you. That 13th green fits into the land so well, it’s a true original.”
That’s about the highest praise Doak can give, though for our purposes, still non-committal.
Doak’s most renowned courses are Pacific Dunes and Ballyneal in the US, while Barnbougle Dunes (with Mike Clayton), Cape Kidnappers and Tara Iti are each ranked 30th or better on Golf Digest’s World 100 Greatest. But Doak also mentions two public courses more geared to the average golfer – CommonGround in Denver, with its sub-$50 green fee, and Memorial Park in Houston, where his green complexes offered enough challenge to host the PGA Tour.
“My goal has always been to do special things,” Doak says. “You work to get all you can out of the land that you’ve got, and the golf ideas keep evolving as you go along. At the end of the day, you should have something that is different and special.”
Sensing a conundrum, he digresses, wondering whether authoring more books than any architect ever should be considered his best work, or if his mentorship of other current architects, including Gil Hanse, would qualify.
In the end, Doak was drawn back to what most set him apart – how his journey began. Because no one in golf history has ever managed their way through a comprehensive, immersive and above all self-designed training regimen aimed at becoming a golf course architect as precociously, persistently, pragmatically and successfully as Tom Doak.
That, he affirms with a nod, is the best he ever did. Doak began playing golf at age 9 at Sterling Farms, a municipal course in Stamford, Connecticut, that was built near his family home and allowed juniors to play after 3pm for a dollar. “Without that I would probably not be in golf at all.”
A couple of years later, Doak’s father, also Tom, began taking his son on his business conferences, introducing him to courses like Harbour Town, Pinehurst No.2, Pebble Beach and Cypress Point. The boy was so captured by the beauty and majesty that he felt a yearning to become a person who created such places. When a family friend gave him a copy of the 1976 classic The World Atlas of Golf, Doak, gifted with exceptional retention skills, read it often enough to know it by heart. After entering MIT as a maths wizard, he told his parents before the end of his freshman year that he wanted to drop out and find a way to have a career designing golf courses. As Doak recalls, “They weren’t shocked.”
With no Plan B, Doak, then 18, began a passionate pursuit. He unleashed a torrent of letters to prominent figures in the game, including Herbert Warren Wind, Deane Beman, Frank Hannigan, Pete Dye and Crenshaw, asking for advice. “I’d tell them about myself and ask, ‘If you were me, what would you be doing?’”
All would eventually respond, but the first was Geoffrey Cornish, the designer, coincidentally, of Sterling Farms, who suggested Doak get into a college landscape architecture program. Cornell University had such a curriculum, one that Robert Trent Jones in the late 1920s had customised for himself on the way to eventually becoming the most prolific course architect ever.
Once in Ithaca, Doak set about another letter-writing campaign, this one focused on greens chairs of clubs with architecturally significant courses, asking for permission to visit and study their designs.
“Sometimes, like at Pine Valley and Augusta, it would take three or four letters to get a response,” Doak says, “but I was relentless. Most of the clubs could tell that I was on a serious mission and wanted to help me out. Mostly, they would tell me I was the first one who had ever written to them.”
After getting the green light, Doak would set off in his misbegotten Mustang II and head to Crystal Downs, Prairie Dunes, Olympic Club, et al. By the time he was 20, he had walked or played virtually all the best private courses in the United States.
Doak’s facility with the written word and typewriter had been nurtured by his mother, Betty, a former editor of academic periodicals. When he was in third grade, Doak couldn’t get started on a school assignment when his mother offered him three cents a word, but only on the condition that she would be allowed to shorten what he’d written to make it better. “She taught me to get to the point,” he says.
Doak would also come to learn that his writing ability was a coping mechanism. While he felt loved and supported by his parents, even considered a “miracle baby” because his mother was 42 when she gave birth, Doak was brought up in a household in which emotions were largely hidden. He was conditioned to show his affection by excelling at school, in the process becoming a driven and often distant perfectionist. As an adult, the pressure of expectations for his projects exacerbated his issues and caused difficulties at work and at home.
About a dozen years ago, at his wife’s suggestion, Doak attended Adult Children of Alcoholics group therapy sessions and gained some life-altering insights. “Both my mother and father grew up with alcoholic parents, and they also drank,” says Doak, whose parents have passed away. “It’s not that I grew up afraid of my parents, it’s that my parents grew up afraid of their parents. Their reserved personalities and discomfort with anything emotional had an effect on me. Some of the things that people have observed in me – like being awkward dealing with people one-on-one, overreacting to disagreements – it was from that,” Doak says with steady eye contact, noticeably different from our first meeting back in 2001. “Yeah,” he responds, “I’m better around people now.”
From adolescence, Doak expressed his inner feelings through writing. “When someone bothered me in some way, I’d write something and give it to them. It freed me up to say what I felt.” In a similar way, he could unburden himself of strongly felt opinions about the game. Confidential Guide and some of his articles had a controversial edge that made Doak unpopular among some peers. “I’m a totally free spirit writing,” Doak says. “Some people still hold a grudge, but that was me being true to myself in a world where every course was either good, better or best.”
It was undeterred letter writing that finally reeled in Doak’s most important mentor – Dye. He’d sent several missives over three years asking the world’s most famous architect for a chance to work on his vaunted crew but had never gotten an answer. Then one day in the northern summer of 1981, Dye called Doak at his parents’ home and asked if he could get to Hilton Head, where he was building Long Cove, posthaste.
“Everyone’s advice to me had been to go to work for Pete Dye, and after a few days watching him, I knew why,” Doak says. “He was out there at 6:30 every morning. Pete didn’t really work off drawings. He told me the only way he could get the results he wanted was to be out there in the dirt. I was there for nine weeks in the summer. People were wondering what an Ivy Leaguer was doing on this hot, sweaty construction site, but Pete took me seriously enough to talk to me about what it took to do the job. From him I learned that if you are going to design golf courses, it really helps to understand how they are built.”
In 1982, Doak won a Cornell scholarship to spend a full academic year studying golf-course architecture in the British Isles. Doak caddied at St Andrews for three months and would visit 172 courses.
After returning to the States, Doak worked for Dye for the next three years, helping build what would be for a time the world’s hardest course, PGA West in La Quinta, California. It was good experience but not the direction an architect with such egalitarian golf sensibilities wanted to continue. Shortly afterwards, Doak struck out on his own, founding Renaissance Golf Design and in 1987 landing High Pointe.
It would mean meeting the challenge of running a business. Says Doak: “People I’ve now known for more than 40 years have said to me, ‘On one hand, the way your personality was, it was hard to know if you could succeed at business on your own, but on the other hand, you knew so much about your business when you were 20 that it was hard to see how you could not be successful.’”
The difference-maker was how it all began.
Photographs by Andrew Jowett
