Golf Architects/Designers: Tom Doak

World-renowned architect Tom Doak of Renaissance Golf Design is one of America’s most successful golf architects, he currently has 4 courses ranked among the top 100 in the world according to Golf Magazine’s “Top 100 Courses in the World” list, including Pacific Dunes (Oregon,USA), Ballyneal (Colorado, USA), Barnbougle Dunes (Tasmania, Australia) and Cape Kidnappers (Napier, New Zealand). Tom Doak attended Cornell University where he studied Design and Landscape Architecture. After graduating Cornell, he won the Dreer Award from the Department of Floraculture and Horticulture. He used the Dreer Award to travel to Great Britain and Ireland and spent a year as a caddie at St. Andrews and studying traditional links courses throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Although perhaps his greatest influence comes from Alister MacKenzie (whom Doak wrote a book about), designer of Cypress Point, Royal Melbourne, and consultant to Bobby Jones at Augusta National. Tom Doak credits most of his accomplishments and success to Pete Dye. Doak worked with Dye to learn how to construct golf courses during graduate school. Doak was exposed to several different schools of design on multiple continents in a variety of conditions. Dye taught him how to run a bulldozer allowing for Doak to think in three dimensions and how to use the materials around him.

Early on in his career, before his recent acknowledgments, he was known for his sharp criticisms of other golf course designers in the book “The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses”.  Doak has become known as a “minimalist” designer. Minimalism being a school of golf design which, put simplistically, philosophy focuses on concentrating design of a golf hole (or routing) around the natural features of the land. His most successful courses have been built on sand dunes, taking advantage of the sandy soil for drainage also allowing for the reuse of native elements.

As head of Renaissance Golf Design, Doak designs in the field and oversees construction of a small number of courses. He and his team are also responsible for a growing number of restoration projects. In 2007, Doak restored Alister MacKenzie’s home course, Pasatiempo, a Golf Magazine Top 100 course located in California, USA.