Links Magazine: Tom Doak #5 All Time

[Greg Krueger]

In the latest edition of Links Magazine they name the 25 best architects of all time. Interesting list with Tom Doak #5 all time. Congrats TD!
Here it is:

1) Harry Colt
2) Alister MacKenzie
2) Donald Ross
4) A.W. Tillinghast
5) Tom Doak
6) Pete Dye
7) Bill Coore / Ben Crenshaw
Charles Blair Macdonald
9) Old Tom Morris
10) Tom Fazio
11) Seth Raynor
12) C.H. Alison
13) Tom Simpson
14) Robert Trent Jones Sr.
15) Stanley Thompson
16) William Flynn
17) Jack Nicklaus
18) James Braid
19) Willie Park Jr.
20) Herbert Fowler
21) Greg Norman ?
21) George Thomas
23) David Kidd
24) Perry Maxwell
25) Robert Trent Jones Jr.

Pretty cool list....Greg Norman T21??? What does everyone think?

[Ronald Montesano]

I think they needed to sell more magazines to GCA contributors.

I think that an attempt to quantify or rate architects is preposterous.

[PCCraig]

Colt as #1?

[Will Lozier]

With all due respect to Tom, that seems absurd simply due to longevity.  I think he is the finest GCA alive but, there are so many who are not with some astounding bodies of work over very long careers - OTM!  In time, he may end up as THE best.  But now, to place him there seems premature.

Cheers

[Matthew Mollica]

I'd have thought George Thomas might have finished ahead of Greg Norman.

[Brian Colbert]

1,476: Arthur Hills

[Scott Warren]

Will,

I disagree. I believe time with only be even kinder to Renaissance Golf Design's courses.

Ballyneal, St Andrews Beach and Renaissance Club particularly have not yet come to be recognised as being as good as they are, and they'll continue to grow in stature with good management.

Ren Club and StAB especially are in really tough neighbourhoods and with time, when they are less new, will be given a more fair comparison to the older more established courses around East Lothian and greater Melbourne.

And Barnbougle Dunes is the only course in Australia that bears comparison with Royal Melbourne West as best in the land, which given RMW's place in the conversation of great courses of the world is saying a heap.

The fact Tom and his team have worked as far afield as Long Island, Myrtle Beach, Oregon, Scotland, France, New Zealand, Tasmania and China also adds a lot, IMO. The back end elements of building golf courses and working with outside crews are surely more complicated working in foreign environments with different rules, customs, even units of measure etc.

At the top end, there is no way I can support Colt over MacKenzie, much as I really enjoy Colt's courses.

And Tom Simpson would surely be higher if his French courses were instead built in the United States. As an exercise, what are Alison, Fazio and Pete Dye's seven best courses and what are Simpson's? Now look where each candidate's courses are located.

EDIT - On my first look over the list I missed how egregiously low Perry Maxwell is. That's fucking insulting.

[Jeff_Brauer]

I took a stab at reordering this over morning coffee, but cannot really come to grips with it.  I would only go so far as to put them in groups of five, and my top five (in no order) were:

Alister MacKenzie
Perry Maxwell
George Thomas
Charles Blair Macdonald
A.W. Tillinghast

That list is biased towards the question of whose courses I would go out of my way most to play, but that makes it biased towards private clubs I have little access to, and to the ODG as well.  It also seems to favor those with fewer but better courses over those with big production, long careers, and consistency. (Tillie is the biggest exception in the five, IMHO)  Of course, that is my golf playing preference - to play good new (to me) courses over just playing at the club every day just to play golf.

Short version, its just another list to generate discussion, and even then, I bet it generates less discussion here than most course lists.

My only other comment (to Melvyn M on Facebook as well) was that Old Tom may not deserve to be on this list, as how many of anything are there where the first was the best?  On the other hand, he deserves a special historical category all by himself, and his legacy is both TOC and that everyone built on what he did early on.

[Brad Isaacs]

I just find it amazing Norman is on the list?...
maxwell....really ..... Next list please

[Matt Kardash]

I never understood how people rate one architect better than another since golf architecture is one of the few disciplines where not all architects start with the same initial conditions. I'm not taking anything away from Tom Doak but in his young career he has arguably already worked on more world-class sites than any architect ever. Granted, he makes the best of these sites, but who is to say another architect would not given the chance? How do you compare an architect working in the 80s on dead-flat land in a desert with a post-2000 architect who gets a site like Ballyneal or Cabot Cliffs? Just sayin'.

[Nigel Islam]

I just find it amazing Norman is on the list?...
maxwell....really ..... Next list please

Brad,
Are you saying Maxwell should not be on the list or that Norman should not be ahead of him?

[Garland Bayley]

1,476: Arthur Hills

1,477: Greg Norman

[Sam Morrow]

Lists like this seem incredibly difficult to do so I take them with a grain of salt. If anything it gets people talking.

[Paul Gray]

The mention of Greg Norman, aside from the quality of the body of his work, got me thinking about how accurately we could really attribute work to an individual.

How much of the work credited to big names in the game is really their own work? How much did TD do which goes under the name of Peter Dye and how much, by extension, is the next big thing currently doing in the name of someone else?

[Peter Pallotta]

If living architects move up in the years to come that'll be okay, but if it's the dead ones who do I'm cancelling my subscription!!...

[Will Lozier]

Will,

I disagree.

I believe time with only be even kinder to Renaissance Golf Design's courses.

Agree completely.

Ballyneal, St Andrews Beach and Renaissance Club particularly have not yet come to be recognised as being as good as they are, and they'll continue to grow in stature with good management.

Have played none of these...they all look phenomenal.

Ren Club and StAB especially are in really tough neighbourhoods and with time, when they are less new, will be given a more fair comparison to the older more established courses around East Lothian and greater Melbourne.  

RC looks to me the more attractive course to Muirfield.

And Barnbougle Dunes is the only course in Australia that bears comparison with Royal Melbourne West as best in the land, which given RMW's place in the conversation of great courses of the world is saying a heap.

Can't argue.

The fact Tom and his team have worked as far afield as Long Island, Myrtle Beach, Oregon, Scotland, France, New Zealand, Tasmania and China also adds a lot, IMO. The back end elements of building golf courses and working with outside crews are surely more complicated working in foreign environments with different rules, customs, even units of measure etc.

Agree but don't see where this factors into the discussion...Dr. AM had to travel overseas and to S. America by boat, and deal with all of the above.  I think the biggest factor is earth moving capabilities from the earliest designers with very little to modern architects who can do just about anything.  Now, I would say that the few moderns designers - TD, C&C, and a few others - would have flourished with horse-drawn plows just the same!  I believe that and I think it is why I admire their work so much.  

At the top end, there is no way I can support Colt over MacKenzie, much as I really enjoy Colt's courses.

Agree.

And Tom Simpson would surely be higher if his French courses were instead built in the United States. As an exercise, what are Alison, Fazio and Pete Dye's seven best courses and what are Simpson's? Now look where each candidate's courses are located.

I still kick myself for not playing in France during my year overseas, especially having made it to Kennemer!  Every Simpson I've caught glimpses of looks amazing and really of a distinct style and look.

EDIT - On my first look over the list I missed how egregiously low Perry Maxwell is. That's fucking insulting.

[jeffwarne]

I never understood how people rate one architect better than another since golf architecture is one of the few disciplines where not all architects start with the same initial conditions. I'm not taking anything away from Tom Doak but in his young career he has arguably already worked on more world-class sites than any architect ever. Granted, he makes the best of these sites, but who is to say another architect would not given the chance? How do you compare an architect working in the 80s on dead-flat land in a desert with a post-2000 architect who gets a site like Ballyneal or Cabot Cliffs? Just sayin'.

Is that like saying, other basketball players could make heroic winning shots if given the chance?
Players, and architects earn opportunities/great sites/plays designed to get them open , by what they produced in the past
(although some of the more mediocre were born into them, denying other potentially great architects opportunities. hence the mediocre results)

[Garland Bayley]

Matt,

How do you think you get world class sites? Do you think clients offer world class sites to every Tom, Dick, and Harry architect?
Well, maybe that should say every Dick and Harry architect.

[Jud_T]

What, no Robert Bruce Harris? Colt at #1 is the most interesting thing here (calling Frank Pont).  I'm not sure Tom would rank himself above Bill Coore if he were to entertain such a list.

[Craig Van Egmond]

Any list that has Jack Nicklaus, Greg Norman and David Kidd higher than Perry Maxwell is just messed up.

Alister Mackenzie said of Maxwell, “Mr. Maxwell speaks of my ability to make a good fairway or develop a worthy green, but I wish to tell you that in laying out a golf course and to give it everything that the science and art of golf demand, Mr. Maxwell is not second to anyone I know.”

[Tim_Cronin]

Haven't seen the story so have no idea how the ranking was made. But, wouldn't one way be to take a top 100 course ranking (take your pick) and assign points to each placing. So No. 1 Pine Valley is worth 100, and so on. Add it up per architect. Couldn't be any worse.

No big deal anyway. It's only opinion, but it is cool to see Tom get recognition as the top YLG. (That's Young Living Guy.)

[Matt Kardash]

Matt,

How do you think you get world class sites? Do you think clients offer world class sites to every Tom, Dick, and Harry architect?
Well, maybe that should say every Dick and Harry architect.

Compare the world class sites of architect #5 (Doak) and #6 (Dye) on that list. I bet you Doak already has worked on a half dozen better sites than Dye ever got. Are you telling me that Dye was not good enough to earn great sites? Of course not. It was a different time. Fortunately we are now in a time where developers are seeking great pieces of land. Architects from the 50s through the 90s weren't blessed with the same quality of sites some of the leading names have been getting post 2000.
By no means is this a knock on the great architects of today. I am just saying you have to be honest when you compare courses and architects from different eras of design.
Would you say Doak and Coore are better because the designed Streamsong in Florida, while Dye designed TPC? Don't you see how ridiculous it would even be to compare?

[Tom_Doak]

Compare the world class sites of architect #5 (Doak) and #6 (Dye) on that list. I bet you Doak already has worked on a half dozen better sites than Dye ever got.

Matt:

Except for Teeth of the Dog, I wouldn't argue with you at all about that.  But, I did consciously try from the start of my career to stress the importance of working on great property, so it's not entirely an accident that I wound up with more great sites than other architects [including my mentor Mr. Dye] who never professed to care.

I'm not sure what this ranking is supposed to really be about.  I've always said it doesn't make sense to try and rank architects, only our courses, because hardly anyone understands the difference between what we started with and what we did with it.  I haven't seen the article that accompanies this, if there even is one, but I doubt they are pretending to have done that.

It's possible that they just made the list to be controversial and try to sell magazines ... putting me at #5 would help accomplish the former, anyway.    

It's more likely that they just gave out points for every course the different designers had in the two LINKS 100 lists, in which case I would have fared pretty well, since some of my courses are ranked higher by them than by any of the other magazines.  That would also explain why Perry Maxwell and George Thomas are listed well below their sterling and well-deserved reputations, as each has only two courses on the top-100 lists.

I'm flattered and amazed by the #5 position.  When you stop to think about it, no modern designer will ever be able to touch the top three or four, due to the breadth and depth of their lifetimes of work ... there is no chance any of us will ever build as many courses as they did, while keeping the quality so high.  [C.B. Macdonald, with only twelve courses to his credit, is much more assailable, as this ranking shows.]  So the best we can ever hope for is to finish #5.  I may not be there, but I've got a few more courses to build yet.

[Matt Kardash]

Tom,

I agree with you 100% It makes sense to rank courses since it is only the final product that counts. Trying to rank architects makes no sense.

[Matthew Mollica]

Wonder where they think Robert Hunter sits...