Tom Doak - The Anatomy of a Golf Course: The Art of Golf Architecture

Lou Gehrig said he considered himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth, but I wasnt around then. To be where I am today, making a good living at doing something I lovebuilding golf coursesIve had to be more than lucky. Ive had a lot of help.

Everything started with my dad, who let me start tagging along on his business conference/golf trips when I was ten or eleven years old. If those trips didnt turn me into a scratch golfer, they did introduce me to courses like Harbour Town, Pebble Beach, and Pinehurst No. 2, which were quite a change from the municipal course in Connecticut where I learned the game. In the process, I became fascinated with the differences between golf courses.

Next, I have to thank my faculty in the Landscape Architecture program at Cornell University, who didnt flinch when I told them I wanted to be a golf course architect; and especially a Cornell alumnus named William Frederick Dreer, who left an endowed scholarship for our department enabling me to spend a year studying the great golf courses of the British Isles, including a spell as a caddie on the Old Course at St. Andrews, and visits to 172 different golf courses all told. Ezra Cornell declared he would found an institution where any man can pursue any study, and Im living proof they still take that motto seriously on the shores of Cayuga Lake.

My travels didnt stop there, however, thanks to the staff and members of many private clubs in the United States and abroad who opened their arms to a college student requesting permission to study their golf courses. There are literally hundreds of people to whom I am indebted in this regard, including a few who took me into their homes, and who I still count among my closest friendsBill Shean, Fred Muller, Andre Buckles, Johnny Stevens, Woody Millen, Walter Woods, and Richie Benaud, to name just a handful.

Those travels left me with a love of good golf courses, and a fair grasp of the principles of sound design; yet I never would have been able to make the leap from student to architect without the guidance of Pete and Alice Dye and their sons, Perry and P. B. After I had bugged them by constantly writing letters for a couple of years, they let me come to work for them, in the most menial capacity, on the construction of Long Cove Club in the summer of 1981. For four years afterward I followed along from Plum Creek to PGA West to Riverdale Dunes and Piping Rock, gradually becoming more involved in the construction of their courses, and occasionally getting to contribute my two cents worth to the final design. Of all the things I learned from Pete, the most important was just how much work was involved in getting a great golf course from the dream to the ground. That is one lesson I hope will come across clearly in this book.

While associated with the Dyes, I was also lucky enough to work with many talented people who are too often overlooked in their contributions to the success of golf courses shapers like Scott Pool and Jim Urbina (who taught me how to run a bulldozer), construction managers like David Postlethwait and Lee Schmidt (both of whom are now golf architects in their own right), and Neal Iverson, who taught me the value of a well-designed irrigation system. When I took on my first solo project at High Pointe in Michigan, I was fortunate to be able to rely on my construction superintendent and grass guru Tom Mead. Tom made the concept of fescue fairways and greens in northern Michigan a reality and taught me most of what I know about the use and limitations of turfgrasses.

I must also thank all the well-known members of the golf community who offered their advice and encouragement. Fellow architects Ben Crenshaw, Geoffrey Cornish, Rees Jones, Tom Fazio, Tom Weiskopf, and Ron Whitten, the most qualified nonarchitect in the world, openly shared their ideas with me. The peerless golf course photographer Brian Morgan helped me enormously during my year overseas, and George Peper at GOLF Magazine allowed me to start writing about golf architecture while I waited for my real career to take off. Just by taking me seriously, all of these people made me that much more determined to succeed at my craft and repay their faith in me.

Ultimately, however, no golf architect can be successful without patrons who will commission him to work with their land. I must thank Larry and Danny Young at The Legends, David Smith at Wilderness Valley, and John Gorman at Harbour View for giving me outstanding opportunities to show what I can do. Doug Grove, Dave Richards, and Brian Morgan provided the references which led to those jobs. Most of all I must thank Don Hayden, the developer of High Pointe, who entrusted a 26-year-old rookie architect with a good budget and a beautiful piece of land, and then gave me the freedom to put years of theories into practice without having to defend my choices. I only wish the current management was as sympathetic to preserving those ideals.

As for this book itself, I must first thank Peter Burford, for his conviction in publishing a serious golf book without the mass-market appeal of the endless coffee-table golf course picture books. All of the golf-hole diagrams are the handiwork of my talented design associate Gil Hanse, whose patience for detail serves him well as a designer as well as an illustrator.

Several friends were kind enough to read through the manuscript and make suggestions: Gil Hanse, Tom Mead, David Earl, Ben Crenshaw, and especially my wife, Dianna Johnson. Dianna not only helped me refine my ideas throughout the year the book was in the works, but also delivered our first son, Michael, in the meantime.

Finally, none of this would have been possible without the encouragement of my mom, Betty Burch Doak. She grew up on a farm in Missouri, which is where I think my love of the land came from. She was the one who taught me to write, since she had been an editor for the agricultural extension services at the University of Delaware and at Cornell University before she was a mom. Later, when I wanted to pursue golf architecture as a career, she obtained copies through interlibrary loan of the wonderful books on the subject written by Alister Mackenzie, George Thomas, and Robert Hunter, and made two copies of eachone for me, and one for herself to read. Of course, she would have been proud of anything Id decided to do, but I am sure that it was one passage from Mackenzies book that convinced her I was pursuing a noble profession: One of the reasons why I, a medical man, decided to give up medicine and take to golf architecture was my firm conviction of the extraordinary influence on health of pleasurable excitement, especially when combined with fresh air and exercise.

I wish she had lived to see this book completed, because it probably would have benefitted from her editorial eye, but I will be satisfied if it inspires one more person to appreciate the beauties of golf courses the way my mom did.

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AUTHORS CHOICE

GOLF COURSES WORTH STUDY

Augusta National GC, Augusta, Georgia. (Mackenzie/Bobby Jones, Maxwell, Trent Jones)

Ballybunion GC - Old Course, Co. Kerry, IRELAND. (Sutton, Simpson)

The Camargo Club, Cincinnati, Ohio. (Raynor)

Charlotte CC, Charlotte, North Carolina. (Ross, Trent Jones)

Commonwealth GC, South Oakleigh, Melbourne, AUSTRALIA. (Bennett, Lane/Morpeth/Morcom)

Crooked Stick GC, Carmel, Indiana. (Dye)

Crystal Downs CC, Frankfort, Michigan. (Mackenzie/Maxwell)

Detroit GC - North Course, Detroit, Michigan. (Ross)

Forsgate CC - East Course, Jamesburg, New Jersey. (Banks)

Garden City GC, Garden City, New York. (Emmet, Travis)

Harbour Town Golf Links, Hilton Head, South Carolina. (Dye/Nicklaus)

High Pointe GC, Williamsburg, Michigan. (Doak/Mead)