75TH ANNIVERSARY
mentor – Pete Dye. He’d sent several missives over three years asking the world’s most famous architect for a chance to work on his vaunted crew but had never got an answer. Then one day in the summer of 1981, Dye called Doak at his parents’ home and asked if he could get to Hilton Head, where he was building Long Cove, posthaste. “Everyone’s advice to me had been to go to work for Pete Dye, and after a few days watching him, I knew why,” Doak says. “He was out there at 6.30 every morning. Pete didn’t really work off drawings. He told me the only way he could get the results he wanted was to be out there in the dirt. I was there for nine weeks in the summer. People were wondering what an Ivy Leaguer was doing on this hot, sweaty construction site, but Pete took me seriously enough to talk to me about what it took to do the job. From him I learned that if you are going to design golf courses, it really helps to understand how they are built.” In 1982, Doak won a Cornell schol- arship to spend a full academic year studying golf course architecture in the British Isles. Doak caddied at St Andrews for three months and would visit 172 courses. After returning to the States, Doak worked for Dye for the next three years, helping build what would be for a time the world’s hardest course, PGA West in La Quinta, California. It was good expe- rience but not the direction an architect with such egalitarian golf sensibilities wanted to continue. Shortly after, Doak struck out on his own, founding Renais- sance Golf Design and in 1987 landing High Pointe. It would mean meeting the challenge of running a business. Says Doak: “Peo- ple I’ve now known for more than 40 years have said to me, ‘On one hand, the way your personality was, it was hard to know if you could succeed at business on your own, but on the other hand, you knew so much about your business when you were 20 that it was hard to see how you could not be successful.’” The difference maker was how it all began.
asking for permission to visit and study their designs. “Sometimes, like at Pine Valley and Augusta, it would take three or four letters to get a response,” Doak says, “but I was relentless. Most of the clubs could tell that I was on a serious mission and wanted to help me out. Mostly, they would tell me I was the first one who had ever writ- ten to them.” After getting the green light, Doak would set off in his misbegot- ten Mustang II and head to Crystal Downs, Prairie Dunes, Olympic Club, et al. By the time he was 20, he had walked or played virtually all the best private courses in the country. Doak’s facility with the written word and typewriter had been nur- tured by his mother, Betty, a former editor of academic periodicals. When he was in third grade, Doak couldn’t get started on a school assign- ment when his mother offered him three cents a word, but only on the condition that she would be allowed to shorten what he’d written to make it better. “She taught me to get to the point,” he says. Doak would also come to learn that his writing ability was a coping mechanism. While he felt loved and supported by his parents, even considered a “miracle baby” because his mother was 42 when she gave birth, Doak was brought up in a household in which emotions were largely hidden. He was conditioned to show his affection by excelling at school, in the process becoming a driven and often distant perfectionist. As an adult, the pressure of expectations for his proj- ects exacerbated his issues and caused difficulties at work and at home. About a dozen years ago, at his wife’s suggestion, Doak attended Adult Chil- dren of Alcoholics group therapy ses- sions and gained some life-altering insights. “Both my mother and father grew up with alcoholic parents, and they also drank,” says Doak, whose parents have passed away. “It’s not that I grew up afraid of my parents. It’s that my parents grew up afraid of their par- ents. Their reserved personalities and discomfort with anything emotional had an effect on me. Some of the things
that people have observed in me – like being awkward dealing with people one on one, overreacting to disagreements – it was from that,” Doak says with steady eye contact, noticeably different from our first meeting back in 2001. “Yeah,” he responds, “I’m better around people now.” From adolescence, Doak expressed his inner feelings through writing. “When someone bothered me in some way, I’d write something and give it to them. It freed me up to say what I felt.” In a similar way, he could unburden himself of strongly felt opinions about the game. Confidential Guide and some of his articles had a controversial edge that made Doak unpopular among some peers. “I’m a totally free spirit writing,” Doak says. “Some people still hold a grudge, but that was me being true to myself in a world where every course was either good, better or best.” It was undeterred letter writing that finally reeled in Doak’s most important By the time he was 20, [Doak] had walked or played virtually all the best private courses in the country.
22 GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2025
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