One evening last month, while I was playing the Old Course, the cellphone in my golf bag went off. There was plenty of light at 9 p.m., and not another soul was out there, not where I was, a mile or so from downtown St. Andrews. The ancient links is confounding, with greens the size of an Iowa Wal-Mart and disorderly holes and strange toothy animals darting among the gorse bushes. Somewhere between the 7th tee and the green, I got lost. On the other end of the line, as luck would have it, was a former St. Andrews caddie, Tom Doak.
I gave Doak my bearings, and he could see, over the phone, what I had done: taken the wrong line off the 7th tee. He got me back on track. He had me aim over the highest point of a nearby hill, sending me over one hole en route to another. "Seven's a double green — it shares with 11," he said. "You play the white flags on the front nine. Your shot's more uphill than it looks."
Nearly all working course architects pay lip service to the Old Course, the mother of all golf courses. Doak goes further. When interviewing for jobs, many course designers will cite various members of the Dead Architects Society, dropping the names Donald Ross or George Thomas or Alister MacKenzie or even Old Tom Morris of St. Andrews. Doak doesn't drop names.
He's different, all the way around. After graduating from Cornell in 1982, he spent two months caddying and photographing the Old Course. It's his temple, and the dead architects are his high priests. For Doak, MacKenzie is not a buzzword, a quick way to attach oneself to the work of a master. (MacKenzie's greatest hits include Augusta National, Cypress Point and Royal Melbourne.) MacKenzie's list is Doak's grail.
From the mid-1980s through the mid-'90s, Doak, who is 46, was better known as a writer and contributing editor for Golf Magazine than as a course designer. ( Golf and Sports Illustrated are owned by Time Warner.) One Doak book, The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses , has a cult following (page 30) ,and used copies sell on Amazon for more than $500. The book is comically frank. Describing P.B. Dye, Pete's son, Doak writes that he "needs encouragement to make his courses hard like Madonna needs a dating service." He lists the Augusta National holes he "could do without." There are four of them: numbers 1, 9, 15 and 18, although he also has problems with numbers 2, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12 and 13. Doak believes the Augusta czars corrupted the MacKenzie originals. The desecration of Augusta National — Doak was on to that theme long before it became fashionable.
But in the new millennium, Doak's status as an iconoclastic architect of the old school has been shaped principally by his 25 courses and his renovation work. Since 2000 Doak has built a handful of courses that are likely to inspire course architects a century from now. There's Pacific Dunes in Bandon, Ore., too craggy to be called a resort course, although technically that's what it is. There's a public course in Tasmania, Barnbougle Dunes, which he built with the Australian architect Michael Clayton. There's a cliffside public course in New Zealand, Cape Kidnappers. There's a remote and sandy private course, Ballyneal, in Holyoke, Colo. And there's Sebonack, private and uberexpensive, on Long Island (next door to Shinnecock Hills and National Golf Links), which he built with Jack Nicklaus. Talk about an odd couple. A Nicklaus course, typically, is as smooth as a Doak course is rough.
All five are walking courses, bumpy and natural, with stay out! traps and drunk-at-sea greens.
"There really are only two architects today who are doing anything truly original, building traditional courses that will endure," Clayton, a former European tour player, said recently. "There's Crenshaw-Coore," referring to the team of Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore as a single entity, "and there's Doak." Clayton's work with Doak has colored his opinion. "He's doing what MacKenzie did. He's working all over the world, on a variety of terrains. He's making each one count. And if he doesn't like the client or the piece of land or the terms, he's out. He's willing to say no." (Doak usually has three courses in the works at the same time. Nicklaus right now has 50.)
Being a course architect is a lot like being a movie director. You need the right piece of land (or script), the right client (or studio), the right shapers (or actors) and good karma during construction (or during the shoot). As a director's stature grows, he is offered better scripts. For course designers, the same. Doak, once a renegade, is now an A-list architect. He's being offered prime spots.
