A few weeks ago there was an opening of a Doak course in Scotland, the Renaissance Club, built on heaving land smack-dab between Muirfield and North Berwick, along a celebrated golfing coastline. Doak spent the afternoon in a white tent with an open bar. Jay Haas, in Scotland for the Senior British Open, drove over to have a look. The former Ryder Cupper introduced himself to Doak. Many others did the same. "The course visits have become way more time-consuming," Doak said later. "There are more people who want to talk to me." That's not a protest. Every artist likes attention. At the Sebonack opening, the Nicklaus team was flabbergasted by Doak's firm grip on the microphone.
Doak has not read How to Win Friends and Influence People, and he'll never become a tie-wearing member of the golf establishment, in the tradition of Haas, Tom Fazio or Jim Nantz. Doak's company, with eight employees, gets $1 million for some of its courses, but Doak still thinks of himself as a kid willing to sneak on to play the best courses in the world. (When he does now, it's to take pictures.)
I met Doak in 1992, when he was building his first private course, Stonewall, on rolling farmland in semirural Elverson, Pa. (about 50 miles northwest of Philadelphia). During construction he lived near the course with his first wife, Dianna Johnson, and their young son, Michael, in a drab town house with rental furniture. The client wanted the long entrance road to be invisible from the course and vice versa, so Doak built a berm, a protective hill, along the road, sometimes operating the bulldozer himself. It was perfect. But the client, in Doak's mind, spoiled the whole thing by adding a split-rail fence along the top of the berm. Doak was livid. They were killing his art.
Around that time I took him to play my home course, the Philadelphia Cricket Club, which has an A.W. Tillinghast course that we (the members) are very proud of. Doak, who shoots in the 80s and hits the ball well, drove it solidly on the par-4 2nd, then hit a big push-block for his second shot onto the roof of an old barn that sits beside the green. When he wrote up the course for his Confidential Guide, he cited the course's cramped front nine. He wrote, "I casually pushed my approach shot onto the roof of the men's locker room." Herbert Warren Wind used to say you may sooner insult a man's wife than his golf club. Reading Doak's words for the first time, my ears got hot.
Some years later — in the parking lot at Southern Hills — I was talking to Ben Crenshaw about golf in Philadelphia. He said, "You still at the Cricket Club? I love that course. I love that number 2 hole, the way that old barn comes into play." Crenshaw has that gift, to make you feel good.
But it's not really fair to compare Crenshaw and Doak this way, as Crenshaw is one of the most charming people you could ever hope to meet, and Doak seems to relate better to land than human beings; he'll tell you it's easier to get a piece of earth to do what you want it to than a person, although not much. The two men are simply built differently. But Crenshaw and Doak each admire the other's talent and work. ("I don't consider Crenshaw a player-architect," Doak told me. "I consider him an architect." That's about the highest praise he gives.) Years ago Crenshaw used to worry that Doak's career would stall because he was such a poor salesman. Among other things, course design is a p.r. game, an aspect that is not a Doak strength.
Johnson was married to Doak from 1990 to '98, a period during which they were living, she said, "from golf course to golf course." Doak's father, Tom Michael, now 16, in a small two-door Ford and slept in a room over a pub where he ate supper nightly and where the urinal was one of those large metal troughs. It's hard to picture Tom Fazio in there.
Despite the good work being done by Crenshaw-Coore and Doak and a few others, this is not the Golden Age of Architecture, Part II. (The Dead Architects dominated the real Golden Age.) Since the height of the Palmer golf boom, courses have often been built for the wrong reasons, and Doak, in an unwitting way, has contributed to the problem. Doak, admirably honest, knows it too.
The problem stems from the high-profile lists that rank courses, particularly the Golf Digest list of the 100 greatest U.S. courses and the Golf Magazine list of the 100 best in the world, a list that, from 1983 to '95, was Doak's brainchild.
"The client will say, 'Build me a course that gets on the list,'" Doak said last month while we walked his Scottish course. "Or, 'Build me a course that can get me a major tournament.'" The developers, usually rich men in a rush, want instant cachet. They aren't typically worried about slow play, lost balls, high greens fees, cart golf, scorecards crowded with X's. "They want long, hard courses. I've never had a client say, 'Build me a short, wide, playable course.'" A famous example of short, wide and playable is Augusta National — or it used to be. A famous example of a course that is still like that is the Old Course.
So that's where Tom Doak will sometimes start, trying to educate the potential client about St. Andrews and what he learned there as a caddie, which is that practically anybody can play the Old Course. If that doesn't work, he has one more move at his disposal. He can always say no.
