Golf Vic Vol 60 No 3 2019

feature by Mark Harding In just the last five years, Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf Design has built a World Top-100 course in New Zealand, a Europe Top-20 course in France, two courses back home in Michigan, including the world’s first reversible layout, plus a 12-hole par- three course to sit alongside one of his other World Top-100 courses at Ballyneal in Colorado. In Sydney, he’s completed a significant overhaul of Concord and has rebuilt the famous short hole by the water at the New South Wales Golf Club. Which brings us to Victoria, where he has almost totally redesigned the old Ocean Course at The National to create a new Gunnamatta Course, while beginning the restoration of Yarra Yarra to past glories. It therefore comes as a surprise to hear one of the world’s most acclaimed architects declare: “I’m not a very good multi-tasker.” That’s why Doak says he tries to avoid his projects being at the same stage at the same time – especially at the heavy- construction phase when fairways are still being formed, greens still being moulded and questions are still being asked by anxious committees or boards about every mound, slope and bunker. So when he is in Australia or New Zealand, his projects back home are either still in the planning stage or on standby. “If I had to go home at night and answer 30 emails about what is going on back there, I would shoot myself. Or close to it, anyway,” he laughed. Like the football coach taking it one match at a time, Doak is taking it one course at a time and his win rate is spectacular. His work on Gunnamatta at The National is now completed and the new course could well challenge sister course, the Greg Norman-designed Moonah, as the highest ranked of the four National courses. The next stage of the Renaissance work at Yarra Yarra, under the management of his lieutenant Brian Slawnik, will not commence until later in the year but has already won widespread approval and is certain to arrest the slide in the rankings of the sandbelt course, once top-20 in Australia. Added to his creation with Mike Clayton of Barnbougle Dunes in Tasmania and St Andrews Beach in Victoria 15 years ago, plus his work at Royals Melbourne and Adelaide, at Concord, and New South Wales, it makes Doak the most influential course architect in modern Australian golf. His two most recent projects make a fascinating contrast in that at The National he has made massive changes to the original course design of Thomson Wolveridge and Perritt, while at Yarra he is protecting the original design of Alex Russell by restoring the course to the way it was intended. He is in no doubt which is easier. “A lot of the clubs we consult for in the States, they are very good old courses,” he said. “The brief is to restore them, get them back to where they were and not to totally re-design them. “I’ve always been shy about wanting to re-design a golf course because in a private club you have got hundreds of members who join, presumably, because RENAISSANCE MAN Tom Doak American Tom Doak has had a profound influence on golf course design in Australia and New Zealand. MARK HARDING spoke with him on a recent visit to check progress at his new Gunnamatta Course at The National and his renovation at Yarra Yarra. 24 Golf Victoria