Tom Doak

Tom Doak is a golf course architect. He has 4 courses ranked among the top 100 in the world according to the "Top 100 Courses in the World" list compiled by Golf Magazine. These include Pacific Dunes in Oregon, Ballyneal in Colorado,Barnbougle Dunes in Tasmania and Cape Kidnappers in New Zealand. Doak lives in Michigan.

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 Point, Royal Melbourne, and consultant to Bobby Jones at Augusta National. In 2007, Doak restored Alister MacKenzie's home course, Pasatiempo, a Golf Magazine Top 100 course located in Santa Cruz, California.

He was once known for his sharp criticisms of other golf course designers in the book The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses.

Doak attended Cornell University after a semester at MIT where he studied Design and Landscape Architecture. After graduating Cornell, he won the Dreer Award from the Department of Floraculture and Horticulture. He used the Dreer Award to travel to Great Britain and Ireland, between 1982 and 1983, to study their best golf courses. He caddied at St. Andrews during the summer of 1982.

Doak is a "minimalist" designer. Minimalism is a school of golf design that focuses on concentrating design of a golf hole (or routing) around the natural features of the land. His most successful courses have been built on sand dunes, taking advantage of the sandy soil for drainage also allowing for the reuse of native elements.

Doak credits most of his accomplishments and success to golf course designer Pete Dye. Doak worked with Dye to learn how to construct golf courses during graduate school. Doak was exposed to several different schools of design on multiple continents in a variety of conditions. Jim Urbina taught him how to run a bulldozer allowing for Doak to think in three dimensions and how to use the materials around him.

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