You don’t hang with Tom Doak looking for party-time chit-chat about the loveliness of a certain Donald Ross tabletop green you played on a golfing holiday. Doak doesn’t do chit-chat, or cocktails parties for that matter. And while he understands the concept of vacation, it’s not his thing. A vacation for him is looking at golf courses he has not seen before. He has seen thousands.

Doak is a golf-course architect who doesn’t romanticize his profession. All good course architects are, at some level artists, just as all good hair stylists and magazine designers are. But if you really pay attention to his words — in his books, at his course openings, in the video we present here — what you realize is that he’s a builder, a soup-to-nuts builder, seeing a big picture but getting there one obsessive detail at a time.

The tools of his trade are topo maps, bulldozers, shovels, golf carts suitable for a safari, grass seed in its many varieties and an understanding of hydrology. As a golf-course architect, Doak says often and in this new GOLF Originals presentation, he claims he is overrated and that the people he works with — his “band” — are underrated. “They almost don’t need me,” he says. This Tom Doak is not an ordinary guy.

So, who is Tom Doak? Get to know him in the second installment of our new monthly series, GOLF Originals with Michael Bamberger.
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