15 Mar 2011

Last month I caught up with renowned American golf architect Tom Doak, while he was inspecting his new project in Haikou, on Hainan Island in China. We conducted a 90-minute interview for China Golf Channel, and below is Part I of that discussion.

 

Planet Golf - I want to start with your earliest golf memories. When did you take up golf and how long before you realized it was something you might want to pursue as a career?

Tom Doak - I started playing golf when I was ten years old, first going to the driving range with my Dad and then just a stroke of luck someone built a new course a mile from my house when I was ten. And it was an old farm and the fellow who owned the farm passed away and left it for them to build a golf course for my town. I grew up just outside New York City, where it was hard to belong to a private club because it was very expensive. If they hadn’t built a public course I probably wouldn’t have wound up in this business.

My parents didn’t play a lot, but once or twice a year my Dad would go to a convention with other people he did business with, and they would hold them at golf resorts. So the first five or ten golf courses I saw were the little public course I grew up playing, and Harbour Town, Pinehurst and Pebble Beach, and they were so different from my home course and I was fascinated by why and always interested in the subject from there.

 

PG - At that early age did you recognize the difference between great design and good design, or was it more about the golf experience for you in those early days?

TD - One of the very first courses I saw was Harbour Town, it was only probably four or five years old then and had been very highly received because it was so different from the trend of what was being built. When Mr. Dye was working on it, there was a golf writer named Charles Price who lived down at Hilton Head so he came out with Pete a lot to see what he was doing. And when they finished it Mr. Price did a little booklet, like a yardage book today except without yardages because no one played with yardages back then, but with a diagram and three sentences about the hole. So number 2, short par five there’s a tree in front of the green in the right, so if you can drive it left close to the bunker you have a chance to get home in two. So very simple golf course architecture primer, but that’s what got me interested.

 

PG – And years later you ended up working for Mr. Dye, which must have been pretty surreal?

TD - That wasn’t an accident, I wrote letters for three years - once I decided, right after freshman year in college, that it was what I wanted to do. The thing about getting into the business now, is people don’t understand how less visible a profession it was 30 years ago when I was at school. Most club members didn’t know who designed their golf course; they weren’t marketed by who their designer was. It was really Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and those guys getting into the business and then playing tournaments on those courses and promoting them that way that got people interested in the design. And that even goes back to the old designers. In the 20s Donald Ross, Alister MacKenzie and C.B. Macdonald were fairly well known to people in golf, but by the 60s and 70s they were forgotten and nobody cared. It was only in the 80s when everybody started paying attention to modern designers that the members of all these great old courses started saying, ‘well hey, somebody must have designed this too, you know who was that? Donald Ross, well he must have been pretty good!‘

 

PG - Now you’re in the thick of it, how do you view signature design? Obviously people like Nicklaus, Player and Palmer have given a higher profile to people in your profession, but at the same time you know find yourself competing for jobs against people who are perhaps less passionate and less qualified to design golf courses. Is that a frustration?

TD - It can be a frustrating business, and it’s very competitive.

A lot of clients aren’t that interested in golf, they are developers or resort developers and they’re building golf courses for different reasons. But you know there are different niches in the businesses, I don’t really compete that much with Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Gary Player. Some clients want them, and want their names and want to promote them. And they are more expensive designers too. If somebody like Mike Keiser has a great piece of ground but no real estate associated with it, he doesn’t want to pay Jack Nicklaus’s fee. Even if he thought Jack Nicklaus was a great golf architect it would still be hard to justify spending $2-3 million on a fee for a golf course that should only cost $3 million to build. Some architects only appeal to big developers. Other architects, we don’t have the same appeal to the big developer but we’re in better position to get other kinds of jobs.

 

PG - So what about other genuine golf architects, who find themselves more and more competing with not only the likes of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson for work, but also the Rory McIlory’s, the Paul Casey’s etc. It seems any professional golfer these days can be a course designer, so is it going to be more difficult for the next wave of Tom Doak’s to come through?

TD - Well certainly in the States right now the business is at a very low place, and it’s going to be that way for a while. So the fear isn’t that we are competing with Rory McIlory, it’s that there aren’t many jobs. Rory McIlory isn’t going to get many jobs in that environment; no one is going to want to pay him a lot of money.

Golf and housing in the United States is dead, and it’s going to be dead for ten years at least. So those guys have no work in the States. The younger guys are more able to compete for the few jobs that are left, but it’s still hard to make a living because there just aren’t that many jobs left. In Asia the situation is probably reversed. The pros are very dominant because that’s the only people in the business that the clients recognize who they are. Is that unfair? Is life fair?

You know the other sign to the coin too is that while there are some tour pros who are very involved in golf course design, most of them aren’t and even the ones who are have somebody like me working for them that needs an opportunity. Is it unfair that those young people do good work and don’t get any credit for it? Yeah but by the same token they are making a living at something they love to do and they wouldn’t be doing it if they weren’t comfortable with that.

 

PG - Lets go back to the beginning of your career Tom. You left Pete Dye after a couple of summers and started your own business. Talk about some of those early key projects, those first crucial clients that got you on your way?

TD - I think I was pretty unusual, in that when I left the Dye’s I didn’t have anything lined up to do. I’d worked for Pete for a couple of years and I’d worked for his son Perry for a couple of years. Perry’s business was starting to be all in Asia, Japan mostly but other places too. And those were huge earthmoving projects - blow down the side of a mountain to build a golf course, and not the kind of thing that I visualized myself doing on my own in the future so I didn’t think it was going to be good for my long-term career to do that kind of work. So I quit and I didn’t know what I was going to do.

When I was in college and just out of college, and even when I worked with the Dye’s, I traveled around and saw as many great courses as I could and tried to learn from them. At the same time, purely by accident, you meet a lot of connections and introductions in the golf business. After I quit I took most of that first summer off and went back to some of those places. I went back to northern Michigan. I’d been up to see a MacKenzie course called Crystal Downs, which somebody else had recommended that I see because I was interested in MacKenzie’s work. I loved it but the one time I’d been there it was rainy and cold and the course was in terrible shape, so it was one of the places I really wanted to go back. So I went back and spent a week staying with the golf pro and really spending time on the golf course, and really loved the golf course, thought it was one of the best placed I’d ever been. About six weeks after I was there, another golf pro in Traverse City called the pro at Crystal Downs and said ‘I know someone who wants to build a golf course, they want me to advise them on what architect to get. They can’t afford one of the big name guys and I’m just trying to convince them to not use the same architect who did the course down the street and across the road, to get somebody different in. Have you got any ideas?’ And Fred (The Crystal Downs professional) said ‘yeah, he was just here.’ And that’s how I wound up with my first job. Actually the first five jobs I did on my own, the references were all from people I met while I was in college just traveling around seeing golf courses.

 

PG - And then beyond those first few years, where the jobs were sporadic, you strike it rich with Bandon Dunes and everything changes. How important was that assignment and that piece of land for your career?

TD - Actors do great work for years but if they don’t get a great role nobody thinks they are great actors. It’s the same for architects. You can do good work with bare sites or with reasonable clients, but to do something great you need all of it to come together. And it’s very rare for it really to all come together like that. I’ve been lucky it’s happened a few times for me, and I recognize all the things that need to come together. That really helps, but it’s still a rare thing.

I’d done 12 golf courses before I did Pacific Dunes. It was really the right place in my career. If that opportunity had come along five or six years earlier…I knew a lot about design but did I have the experience to go build what we built, and did I have the team built up behind me to help build what we built? Probably not. So it was the perfect timing for me to have a great client, to have a great piece of land and to have figured out what I did well enough to put it all together. And if it hadn’t happened I might still be an unknown architect. I’d like to think I would have broken through sooner or later. I did have the advantage of having met so many people, and to have built up a bit of a reputation over time. You know everybody in the golf business knew who I was, and some of them thought ‘he’s going to be really good someday’, but when that course happened it was like ‘oh I know that guy he’s really good’. And all of a sudden I would start getting recommended for all the other really good jobs, instead of people saying ‘oh he’ll be good someday but I’m not sure if he’s ready yet.’

 

PG - So going from a position where jobs are hard to come by and you’re competing with other architects, suddenly people are knocking on your door, ringing your phone and you’re getting great pieces of land. The contrast must have been incredible?

TD - It was certainly very different. People told me that (Pacific Dunes) is going to change your life, but I didn’t believe one project would do it. And one project doesn’t do it. If I didn’t have some background before that it probably wouldn’t have helped so much. Certainly if I hadn’t met so many people, it wouldn’t have taken off like it did.

I was in the right place at the right time, and certainly I was in the right place when the business was still booming. If I built Pacific Dunes last year, it wouldn’t have helped nearly as much. That course opened in 2001, and we had an event in September 2001 that almost nobody was able to get to. So business was slow for a little while after that while everyone in America sorted out what was going on, and that’s how I wound up doing two or three projects in Australia and New Zealand. Things were slow in the States and I had some calls about a few projects there, and I could commit to them because we didn’t really have much going on in America.

 

PG - Unlike somebody like Tom Fazio, a number of your best courses are publically accessible. How important has it been for you that anyone can go play Pacific Dunes, Barnbougle Dunes, Cape Kidnappers and now Old Macdonald?

TD - When I was a younger architect I thought doing private clubs had more prestige. Out of the first ten golf courses I built, eight of them were public golf courses, mostly modest public courses. But then I built a course in Philadelphia called Stonewall. It was my first private club. I thought it was really good; it got no recognition at all. I thought it was going to be the course that boosted my career up, but once it didn’t get voted best new golf course of the year no one paid attention anymore because it was private and people couldn’t play it. The magazine’s write about courses that are publically accessible, that readers can go and play, other than that it’s just a bunch of rankings every year, of a bunch of courses people recognize the names but don’t know anything about them.

Pacific Dunes, Cape Kidnappers, Barnbougle they’re all beautiful places, they’re all by the ocean, they’re all publically accessible. Golf Digest, GOLF Magazine, every magazine writes something about Bandon Dunes every year, it’s like being the guy that built Pebble Beach. Jack Neville really only did one golf course. If he were still alive he’d still be getting a ton of work without even trying because everyone would want to hire the guy who did Pebble Beach. But the reason Pebble Beach is as famous as it is, is because it’s a resort golf course and people can go there, and it’s a great fortune for me to have those courses all be public. I love Sand Hills, but Sand Hill is not only a private club but a private club with a short season and a small membership. They play maybe 8,000 rounds of golf a year there. The year after Pacific Dunes opened and they played 40,000 rounds of golf on it. They’d already played more golf on it, and more people had seen it, than had seen Sand Hills in the seven years it had been open. That’s important.

 

PG – Let’s talk about great golf and the virtues of quality design. In a place like this, in China, why do you think developers should focus on building great golf courses?

TD - Let’s go back to Pebble Beach. The routing for Pebble Beach is something that no modern development, unless they really loved golf, would be able to convince themselves to do - to give two miles of coastline to the golf holes and keep the houses back away. They’d want to put the houses right on the clifftops, and they’d put the golf course back inside and maybe the golf would get out on the cliffs for two or three holes, but not seven. Most people would say that the developer was losing money by doing it the way that they did. Pebble Beach was a really remote spot in 1920, at least as remote as Bandon Dunes is today. That golf course put Pebble Beach on the map. If it wasn’t for the golf course being on the ocean front, those ocean front lots would have sold for the same price as every other ocean front lot in California. But Pebble Beach wouldn’t be Pebble Beach.

The history of that project, was that the Del Monte property company owned 10,000 acres of the Monterey Peninsula, so it was worth a tremendous amount to them. But the proof in the pudding and the homes two holes inland from the ocean at Pebble Beach are $20 million homes. It’s hard to see they would be worth anymore if they were right on the clifftop.

Pebble Beach was a residential driven project, but it just happened to be driven by some people who recognized what golf could bring to the table in terms of value.

 

PG - The style of golf course you build is unlike the majority of your peers, and yet it reflects an era that your peers recognize as the Golden Age, the greatest era of all for golf design. Why do you think at times you’re out on a limb so much in terms of your design style?

TD - Every golf course architect builds according to their understanding of golf and what they think golf is about. I was just lucky that when I was 20 or 21 years old, instead of working for a golf course architect and learning how to put holes between development, I went out and saw all these great old courses and loved them and thought, ‘why don’t people build courses like that anymore’.

So I think there are lot of young architects in the States who have traveled around and seen the same courses I have and have the same appreciation for them. But there are a lot of guys in the generation before them, and in lots of cases are who these young guys work for, that don’t think of it that way. They got into the business from landscape architecture, or they got into the business from being a pro golfer. They took a different route and their understanding of golf is different. They look at those great old courses and they speak highly of them because they know everyone would think they’re an idiot if they didn’t, but they really don’t think they are the best courses. They think they are behind the times and outdated, and that modern courses are better. And fundamentally I don’t agree with that.

 

In Part II of the interview Tom discusses his new projects in China, working with Mike Keiser, his favorite Doak holes and the problems with modern design.

Click here for Part II of the Tom Doak interview

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