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It was a tradition. When Tom Doak completed a course, he and his father, Tom Sr., played it together. On July 1, 2001, Young Tom unveiled Pacific Dunes on a raw, secluded sliver of Oregon coast. For the rising designer, this was a game-changer. The craggy masterpiece vaulted to No. 3 on Golf Magazine's Top 100 Courses You Can Play and made Doak an instant brand name. His father never saw it. He was 83, ailing and too frail to travel. He died before Pacific Dunes elevated his son's name — which was his name, too — and brought comparisons to Ross, Mackenzie and Tillinghast.
The final course that father and son christened together? That would be Beechtree Golf Club in Aberdeen, Md., 30 miles north of Baltimore, where they'd teed it up three years earlier.
"That was the last time we played together," recalls Doak, 48. "My dad died knowing I'd had increased success, but he barely lived long enough to see the reviews of Pacific Dunes. The closest he came to seeing that success was Beechtree, which was maybe the best course we'd done up to that point. It propelled us forward. My dad and I played with my Uncle Lowell, who also passed away. It was the last round we all played together and probably the last time my dad played golf. After Pacific Dunes, Beechtree faded into the background. But I have a spot in my heart for it."
When it opened in 1998, Beechtree Golf Club's marriage of parkland and links styles charmed critics and public golfers alike. ("Truly sensational," raved The Washington Times.) Doak was 37 then, and it was his creation that drew national acclaim. His firm, Renaissance Design, has since gone on to place four courses in Golf Magazine's Top 100 in the World, including Ballyneal in Colorado and Cape Kidnappers in New Zealand. Meanwhile, Beechtree carried on as a respected, profitable (if not lucrative) public course.
But on December 7, 2008, it closed, only the second time a Top 100 You Can Play track has folded since this magazine began its rankings in 1996. Like its predecessor, the East course at Blue Heron Pines in New Jersey (shuttered in 2006), Beechtree will become a residential development. That's right — while 6 percent of American homeowners can't pay their mortgages, the course will give way to more homes. Bulldozers will soon shred 300 acres of intricate greens, bluegrass rough and proud hardwoods to make room for 735 houses and townhouses. They're being built in anticipation of 8,200 new jobs coming to a nearby military installation. It's just business, says a spokesman for property owner James F. Knott Realty. The land has more value as real estate. So Beechtree will become a housing project.
"This is how a great course dies," a Doak fan wrote on golfclubatlas.com, an online community where course-design junkies debate and dissect golf architecture in acute detail. "To the sloshing and ka-CHING-ing of the cash register."
"When I heard Beechtree was closing, I thought, 'Are you kidding? An architect at the top of his game has a course closing?' " says Chip Gaskins, a corporate developer for a wireless startup in the D.C. area. Gaskins, 38, was so saddened that he recruited a group of fellow golfclubatlas.com regulars to pay Beechtree their final respects. On a warm Saturday in October, 14 of them tossed their clubs in their trunks and journeyed to play the course before it was plowed under. "We had to come," Gaskins continues. "I loved Pacific Dunes and Ballyneal, and I had to play this one before it was gone. Doak was still cutting his teeth as a designer, but he paid great attention to the greens. They're subtle but bold." He pauses. "I know I sound like a wine snob: 'It had a chocolatey-licoricey bouquet....' But what makes Doak great are the subtle things." Case in point: The par-5 eighth, which had a blind tee shot. The clubhouse's steeple lit the way, peeking over a hill and providing the line, a tip of the cap to the blind shots at St. Andrews, where Doak caddied for a summer.
At dusk, the group clicked beer glasses on the clubhouse veranda and watched the sun drop. Mike Malone, 58, compared Beechtree to a puzzle. "Some courses throw bunkers or mounds at you to make you worry about your shot," he says. "Beechtree makes you think about your shot. Take the 4th hole, a 200-yard par-3 with no bunkers. You stand on the tee and think, 'This is easy.' Then you notice how the green slopes west-to-east, not back-to-front, and how you have the option of flying the pin or running it up. You have a decision. That's golf for me, a 14-handicap. I might not execute the shot, but before I swing, in my mind, I'm Tiger Woods. I'm thinking about strategy, the shot, the shape."
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