Tom Doak

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Tom Doak is a golf course designer. He is known as a "minimalist" designer (mimimalism being a school of golf design which, put simplisticly, attempts to move as little earth as possible while designing golf courses) and currently has courses ranked in the top 50 in the world according to Golf Magazine's Top 100 Courses in the world list, including Pacific Dunes in Oregon, and Cape Kidnappers in New Zealand. Early on in his career, before his recent acknowledgements, he was know for his sharp criticisms of other golf course designers in the book The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses (now out of print). He was a student of golf course designer Pete Dye, although perhaps his greatest influence comes from Alister MacKenzie (whom Doak wrote a book about), designer of Cypress Pointe, Royal Melbourne, and consultant (to Bobby Jones) at Augusta National. Doak currently resides in Michigan.

Tom Doak as a golf course architect looks at all aspects of golf course design. He feels that every great golf course architect needs to find time to study the great links of Scotland and the British Isles. While attending Cornell University, he caddied every summer at St. Andrews and studied the course and others around him.

While Doak was in design school at Cornell, he studied Landscape Architecture, and took this knowledge and applied it to the golf course. In his studies, he noticed that most of the designers viewed a golf course as all rough and the fairway being the place where the golfer should go. Doak viewed the golf hole as being all fairways and inserting bunkers and rough only to make the hole more interesting.

Tom’s ideas on design have been shaped by traveling and seeing nearly every great course in the world. Tom’s strategy for unique design has been involving little aspects from different courses and golf holes and bringing them into one that makes Tom’s design his own.

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 different views, including the famous golf course architect Robert Trent Jones. Dye gave Tom one bit of advise that has stuck with Tom ever since. Dye taught him how to run a bulldozer and Doak was then able to think in three dimensions and how to use the materials around him.

“Twenty years ago, if you wanted to build a great golf course, you hired a big-name architect and gave him a big budget to work with.

Today's market is more sophisticated. The most noteworthy courses of the past decade have been among the least expensive to build. Thanks to clients who understand the value of beautiful property, we're able to create courses which compare with the best of the past ... and look like they have been here just as long.

Great design is a matter of detail. We pride ourselves on taking the time to get things right.” - Tom Doak, principal designer

“Today it is politically correct for every designer to talk about “working with the land.” However, in their next breath, most other designers go on to dismiss minimalism as impractical, except on the most special sites. They lament that the good pieces of land are all gone, and complain about modern environmental restrictions.” – Tom Doak

There are also many books that Doak has written about Golf Course Design. The books include: