Fore! Alum Is One of the World’s Leading Golf Course Designers

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After studying landscape architecture on the Hill, Tom Doak ’82 went on to create some of the sport’s most admired locales

By Melissa Newcomb

They include New Zealand’s Tara Iti, Oregon’s Pacific Dunes, Australia’s Barnbougle Dunes, and Ireland’s St. Patrick’s Links.

“When you have a good piece of land, there’s a lot of ideas already out there if you can just find them,” Doak observes. “You may be able to shape land any way you want, but you can’t plant an old elm tree or build a view of the ocean.”

Doak currently has 10 courses ranked among the world’s top 100, according to Golf magazine’s 2025–26 listing.

Many of Doak’s most celebrated projects have been built on sandy terrain, where natural dunes and contours create interesting challenges for golfers, while well-draining soil facilitates construction and maintenance.

His work has attracted widespread attention from major publications, including Sports Illustrated and the New York Times.

As Golf Digest says of Pacific Dunes, which sits 100 feet above the ocean on the Oregon coast: “Holes seem to emerge from the landscape rather than being superimposed onto it, with rolling greens and rumpled fairways framed by rugged sand dunes and marvelously grotesque bunkers.”

When you have a good piece of land, there’s a lot of ideas already out there if you can just find them. You may be able to shape land any way you want, but you can’t plant an old elm tree or build a view of the ocean.

For Doak, designing a course begins long before construction, with an extensive planning process that can take up to a full year. From the initial conversation with a client to opening day, it typically takes four to five years to complete a project.

“The puzzle of figuring out where the golf holes go on a good piece of land is one of my favorite parts about what I do; that’s half the success of the course right there,” says Doak, who's based in northern Michigan.

“You have to be able to read a topographic map well—but a map also doesn’t show you the background, the views off-site, and where there are nice trees.”

Holes seem to emerge from the landscape rather than being superimposed onto it, with rolling greens and rumpled fairways framed by rugged sand dunes and marvelously grotesque bunkers.

Golf Digest, on Pacific Dunes

And Doak isn’t shy about sharing his opinions about other courses. In the late 1980s, he self-published the first incarnation of The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses, a collection of his (often brutally honest) reviews of some 700 he’d visited around the world.

Initially intended for friends seeking recommendations, the guide included blunt criticism of courses Doak considered subpar. He printed just 40 books—but once word started to spread, unauthorized copies began circulating and attracting attention.

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“It was very controversial,” Doak recalls. “If you read about a new course in a magazine, the words used to categorize it are ‘good,’ ‘better,’ or ‘best.’ Nobody ever says anything’s ‘not that great’ or ‘overrated.’ Other golfers do make assessments like that—they just never put them in print.”

In the late 1980s, Doak self-published the first incarnation of The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses, a collection of his (often brutally honest) reviews of some 700 he’d visited around the world.

The guide has since expanded to five volumes covering more than 2,500 courses, all rated on the “Doak Scale,” a 0–10 system that has become a familiar reference among golfers.

As he opined of Nevada’s Wolf Creek, which he dubbed a 2: “I can’t rate it a zero because I do think someone should have built a course on this spectacular terrain—they just shouldn’t have built this course!”

Doak’s interest in the field began in childhood, when he accompanied his father to business meetings held at some of the country’s most popular golf resorts.

Intrigued by how different they were from the public course a mile from his home in Stamford, CT, he eventually decided to pursue course design, transferring from MIT after his freshman year to study landscape architecture in CALS.

The puzzle of figuring out where the golf holes go on a good piece of land is one of my favorite parts about what I do; that’s half the success of the course right there.

An award from the college later funded a year of independent study abroad, giving him the opportunity to travel throughout Great Britain and Ireland, visiting 172 properties and learning about design and maintenance from greenskeepers.

(He recently co-founded a scholarship, named in his honor, that will allow early career golf course architects to have similar experiences built around their own interests.)

Upon returning to the U.S., Doak worked for another practitioner before launching his own design firm.

His first project, High Pointe in Northern Michigan, opened when he was just 28—and more than three decades later, Doak had the opportunity to revamp it, creating a new course that incorporates portions of the original layout.

“For most people, playing in a beautiful setting is worth a lot,” Doak says. “All the best golf courses—they’re challenging, but they're also beautiful.”

Top: Te Arai Links in New Zealand. (All images provided.)

Published November 9, 2026

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