Comparing How Hanse/Wagner & Tom Doak Design For The Pros at PGA Frisco and Memorial Park

The finishing hole at Memorial Park is a brute of a finishing par 4, measuring slightly over 500 yards and playing to a tricky green working on an angle from the short-left side up the right. There’s an abrupt collection area up short and up the right side, three bunkers left, and some rough as well—all waiting for errand shots to come in on the final swing of the day. It feels like the perfect conclusion to a golf course meant to host an annual TOUR stop (which it has since 2020), with a difficult par awaiting those looking to close out the tournament every March. Most importantly, though, Memorial Park is home to the public 51 weeks a year, where residents of Houston can play for $38 on a weekend. In having some combination of sand, short grass, and rough that the golfer has to play from waiting around the finishing green, there’s an anticipation that lurks on what the daily player has to conquer next, and that’s more than enough variety to be an interesting golf course for daily play.

By no means is it the most complex hole in tournament golf, nor does it really provide the type of risk-reward excitement a finishing par 5 does, but it feels like the perfect synopsis of the golf course you just finished: a solid, stern test of golf, with obvious attention to the details and enough architectural variety to captivate every level of play, all while merging the necessary requirements to host both the PGA TOUR yearly and the municipal clientele that sees Memorial Park host nearly 60,000 rounds a year (!).

One of just three fairway bunkers on the golf course comes at the par 5, 14th.

Notably, Memorial Park’s restraint when it comes to hazards is a refreshing take on golf architecture geared to the professional game. Architects like Robert Trent Jones Sr. and Tom Fazio have either built or renovated golf courses specifically to make them more difficult and “suitable” for the professional game, but generally, water or bunkers are the crux of such mandate. The result is generally a slog of a golf course for the public with trouble looming everywhere, and with penalty continuing to loom, it becomes a tiresome endevour. Granted, they generally do produce stern tests for the professionals, but a monotonous viewing experience and truthfully, boring events to watch. Tighter landing areas, historically crowded by trees, were par for the course back then too, and as the foliage began to grow, the events became defined by pitching out and a simple execution test with little room for recovery. Trees are not inherently a bad thing, and when used properly, they produce some truly amazing shots under tournament golf pressure (Rory McIlroy had numerous examples at the 2025 Masters, Tiger Woods highlight reel is littered with shots around or over trees, and famously, Sergio Garcia at Medinah in 1999) but, like bunkers, they became the default lazy way to tighten golf courses up and make them difficult.

Memorial Park is not that. Visually, there’s enough room to play and hit the golf ball around. If you start misisng fairways, you might find yourself having to negotiate with one or two trees, and even on the 4th hole, playing to the inside right corner might mean having to go up and over one, but they’re never intrusive. With that said, it is still an execution test. There may be space between the base of the trees on either side of the fairway, but they’re not overly wide fairways the golf world has become accustomed to, especially if you’ve played other Tom Doak, Bill Coore & Ben Crenshaw, or Gil Hanse & Jim Wagner designs. Notably, there are only 19 bunkers on the entire golf course—three of which are fairway bunkers—and other than the 16th and 17th, no water off the tee or into the green on the two and three-shot holes (the 9th and 15th are both par 3’s with water in play short).

The long par 4, 4th at Memorial Park doesn’t need bunkers to challenge golfers, with Doak’s green sloping hard away from the line of play. 

Without the usual sand or water hazards as the backbone of difficulty, Memorial Park had to get creative on how to both be a suitable TOUR venue, whilst being interesting enough for locals to want to come play here—and continue to play here. Doak, alongside then-PGA TOUR (now LIV) player Brooks Koepka, advocated for less bunkers given touring professionals are rarely worried about them (and on the contrary, the public are overwhelmingly penalized by them), more contour in the fairways, and angled greens to define the layout.

As a result, contour is the overall motif of Memorial Park, with the fairways gracefully rippling from the tee to the green, alongside the conservative use of a tree, a bunker here and there, and the occasional water hazard as well. The result is a simple question off the tee: “can you hit the fairway, or not?” followed by a complexity of an uneven lie to a green complex full of character. Conceptually, the idea of a far more linear test off the tee is much different than the usual cerebral, choose-your-own-path nature seen in some of Doak’s other notable layouts, where it provides a mental test as much as a physical one. Memorial Park is a different type of layout to add to Doak’s repetroire—a switch in genre, per se—where the main goal is to be a suitable venue for the best in the world. In doing so, there’s an obvious restraint throughout the property, and a different style aesthetically than the sandy sites Doak gets to work on. It is captivating in its own way, especially when in contrast to Doak’s other works.

The gentle ripples in the fairway might not be as severe of a penalty as other hazards, but they add just enough complexity to keep things interesting on each hole.

The uniqueness of Memorial Park in Tom Doak’s impressive list of golf courses is something to inspect and look at, for it is the only golf course thus far built with the professional game specifically in mind (Renaissance Club hosts the TOUR every year, but it wasn’t built with the specific goal of hosting). The “linear” challenge of Memorial Park is far different than the usual Doak golf course, but also not quite as penal as much of the post-World War Two courses that tried to achieve the same thing, and not as visually difficult as a Pete Dye golf course. There’s no RTJ-pinching of the fairways between two bunkers requiring someone to thread the needle into a twenty yard-wide fairway, nor is there bunkers only to disrupt the visual that frequent Pete Dye golf courses. From a Touring Professional perspective, the simplicity of the question asked off the tee is what makes Harbour Town a favourite, or Shaughnessy in Vancouver when it used to host the PGA TOUR. The black-and-white reality of hitting the fairway or not allows TOUR players to justify what they have to do to win an event and, largely, removes any “rub of the green” from the equation—for better and worse.

That said, the green complexes are largely the main defence and interest of the golf course. Often, they’re slightly elevated and perched above their surrounds, with short grass ushering balls further away from the middle of the green. They frequently sit at an angle off the line of play, coming across the slope like Pete Dye did at TPC Sawgrass, or Donald Ross famously did at Pinehurst No. 2. The contours themselves are often complicated with pimples, rises, knobs, or ridges in the middle of the surfaces, and the perimeter of the surfaces are slightly elevated as well, meaning chipping and pitching from below the surface is a challenges, with the edges sloping into the green and thus away from you. Down the stretch, this motif begins to pick up steam, particularly with the 13th and 15th being even gnarlier than the rest.

The heinous par 3, 15th

Some 250 miles or so to the north and up the I-35, the home of the PGA of America is a rather intrepid facility. PGA Frisco is home to a Beau Welling design (Fields Ranch West), Gil Hanse & Jim Wagner (Fields Ranch East), a par 3 course under the lights co-designed between the two firms, a large-scale practice area, an OMNI hotel and resort, a shopping centre that hosts PGA of America partners like Vineyard Vines and more, numerous restaurants for the community and resort guests to enjoy, and a housing development portion on the outskirts of the facility. PGA Frisco is about the antithesis of Memorial Park in nearly every facet: for one, it’s a large-scale private development catering to wealthy individuals with high room rates and guest fees, and two, the compound itself is sprawling. Not that Memorial Park isn’t—the facility itself is an impressive display of building golf into the centrepiece of a community, and the actual park itself is a massive part of Houston culture—but Frisco is very in line with the “everything is bigger in Texas” mantra.

This certainly transfers over to Gil Hanse & Jim Wagner’s Fields Ranch East, which, like Tom Doak at Memorial Park, also had the same requirements: to be able to host the world’s best, whilst accommodating the daily play its intended to receive. Fields Ranch East is a big ballpark, maxing out 300-ish yards longer than even Memorial Park’s 7,412 length and creeping up at just shy of 8,000 yards (it comes up just 137 yards short). It is a flamboyant design, dancing up and down the hills of North Texas and as a result, produces its fair share of dramatic vistas and views. The golf course benefits from this as well, with a handful of dramatic downhill tee shots and demanding holes working up the hillside (this is especially true on the front nine, which plays closer to Beau Wellings Fields Ranch West that’s hillier than Hanse & Wagner’s course).

The opening approach to the par 5, 1st, with the daunting par 4, 2nd up the hillside in the background.

In a recent trip to Texas, Memorial Park and PGA Frisco were both on the docket. There were no intentions to pit these two layouts against each other; I wanted to see both given they’re relatively new and Memorial Park, in particular, was an intruiging golf course to watch on TV (especially when it wasn’t overseeded during its time in the fall on the TOUR). Upon finishing the trip at Memorial Park, it was a fascinating think-piece on how both Tom Doak and Gil Hanse/Jim Wagner approached something they historically have not steered into. Rather, they’ve both become typecasted (whether right or wrong) into building golf on sandy sites in remote areas of the world, where places like Pacific Dunes (Doak), CapRock Ranch (Hanse/Wagner), Tari Iti (Doak), Ohoopee Match (Hanse/Wagner), and more are not exactly located near population centres, and they’ve never had ambitions of hosting events. Architects like Robert Trent Jones Sr., Rees Jones, Tom Fazio, and recently, Steve Wenzloff as the in-house architect for the PGA TOUR, have largely been responsible for building or renovating golf courses for tournaments, but those names are either deceased (RTJ Sr.) or in the twilight of their career.

In fairness to Doak and Hanse, it’s not like this is entirely unusual for them to be building golf for events. Doak himself built The Rawls Course for Texas Tech, meaning it had to at least hold up and challenge the collegiate level. Hanse & Wagner renovated TPC Boston specifically for the PGA TOUR when it hosted an annual playoff event in the fall, and famously, they designed the Rio 2016 Olympic Golf Course in Brazil. Interestingly, both Castle Stuart (Hanse/Wagner) and Renaissance Club (Doak) have hosted the Scottish Open, with the former taking up the yearly duties on the PGA TOUR, though neither were built specifically for the tournament. Elsewhere, Hanse has been involved in a handful of restorations of golf courses that have either hosted events or will in the future, including Winged Foot (West), Merion (East), Oakland Hills (South), Colonial, Oakmont, and more.

The par 5, 3rd at PGA Frisco (Fields Ranch East)

Even though the objective of both projects were aligned, there are differences between the two that makes it difficult to compare. For one, Memorial Park has toaccommodate nearly 60,000 rounds a year and host the PGA TOUR as a yearly stop, whereas PGA Frisco hosts a PGA of America event every two years, with the PGA Championship—one of the four majors in men’s golf—scheduled for 2027 and 2034. PGA Frisco, with its green fee north of $300 and mandatory walking with a caddie, begins to narrow its clientele a bit more than Memorial Park, which, as a muni, has the civic duty to be a facility suitable as an entrypoint into the world of golf. You would hope Frisco, given its home of the PGA of America, would be able to serve that purpose as well, but it achieves it on the putting course, the practice area, and the short course (and, beyond that, the Fields Ranch West course is a better entrypoint than the Fields Ranch East course).

The difference in the two layouts is quickly realized on the opening stretch of Fields Ranch East: by the middle of the third fairway (above), Memorial Park’s total bunker count of 19 is already made up, and by the end of the round, there are 88 bunkers in total (nearly 5 times more than Memorial Park). There’s more water in play as well, with marshy hazards occupying space on nearly half the holes and the prospect of a lost ball looming around the corner on roughly every second hole. Memorial Park, in general, is much more playable, and depending on the users taste, you could argue visually nondescript or even vanilla. 7 of the holes at Memorial Park are without a bunker, and Frisco is far more visually striking for that, especially when factoring in that Memorial Park is generally flat, while PGA Frisco has roughly 100 feet of elevation change between the 2nd green (top) and 17th green (bottom).

The dramatic uphill drivable par 4, 16th at PGA Frisco (Fields Ranch East)

PGA Frisco is a much more difficult test, but one would expect that given its expected to host the PGA of America’s flagship event and a major, whereas Memorial Park is a standard PGA TOUR stop. In both instances though, the architects had to step outside their comfort zone and try to tackle a different category. Their own notable golf courses like a Les Bordes or a Childress Hall need not worry about the Rory McIlroy’s and Scottie Scheffler’s of the world. They should have the ability to challenge the scratch or better player—and they do—but how they hold up in a four-day stroke play event with the 150-something best golfers in the world is not a concern. Even more interesting, Hanse started working for Tom Doak shortly after graduating from Cornell in 1989, and in their own work, there are some conceptual similarities (as expected), yet, Memorial Park and PGA Frisco are two vastly different architectural experiences.

Relating both these golf courses to their architect’s overall body of work, Frisco feels closer to what you would expect from a Hanse than Memorial Park does to Doak’s catalogue. Frisco still has some semblance of width and angles, and there are the occasional bunker that falls in line with the big blown-out style we associate the two architects with. Frisco is a larger, broad-shouldered golf course in general, and there’s a bit more thought off the tee than Memorial Park has, with angles to various pins requiring a bit more thought, whereas Memorial Park is a bit more “straightforward.” Frisco’s greens are flatter, bigger, and more accommodating than Memorial Park, though in both instances, they are more severe than a normal TOUR venue, but less severe than the normal Doak/Hanse/Wagner.

At both golf courses, drama is a consideration, especially coming down the stretch. Architects like Rees Jones and Tom Fazio were far less concerned about making players feel uncomfortable and scared than they were about making them commit to their preferred shot or line, usually meaning some sort of water hazard came close to the end, and the landing areas of the finishing holes began to tighten (think Oak Hill’s 15th during the Fazio era, with its big pond to the right removed when Andrew Green came in). From a viewing perspective, the sight of seeing someone ~lose the golf tournament is good, albeit heartbreaking TV, but perhaps seeing someone win it with a courageous line or shot is better? Frisco and Memorial Park both think so.

The tiny, crowned green at the 15th at Memorial Park is immediately followed by the risk-reward par 5, 16th with its green on the other side of the water hazard, ripe for someone to push it and go for it in two. At PGA Frisco, the third-last hole on is a drivable par 4 (on the 2027 PGA Championship routing, with the nines reversed), and in each instance, missing the green can complicate the chances of a birdie or even a par. Both golf courses end on a demanding par 4, with Frisco’s centreline bunker and hazard intercepting the fairway causing stress coming home.

Even though they both tackle the goal slightly differently, the focus on drama, choice, and contour in and around the greens are what defines both layouts. Sure, Frisco is a far more harder, dramatic, visually interesting golf course, but Memorial Park is a charming, low-key, decidedly fascinating golf course. In each instance, Doak and Hanse/Wagner had to step outside their comfort zone, providing a unique outlook on how the two design firms think players should be challenged. In Hanse/Wagner’s case, the focus is on the freedom to choose and almost baiting players into messing up with its risk-reward options of abundance and dramatic hazards awaiting the misses, where Memorial Park is a more visually straightforward golf course, but perhaps has a bit more sneakiness in how it challenges players in and around the greens. At Fields Ranch East, you know what’s going to beat you up: bunkers seemingly wait at every turn and a lost ball looms especially in the famous north Texas winds, where Memorial Park is more about the surrounding areas around the green complexes—being very intentional on contour.

Perhaps more interesting, a focus on drama coming down the stretch was a focus for both, with a long par 4 (18 Memorial Park, 18 PGA Frisco), short or drivable par 4 (17 at Memorial Park, 16 at PGA Frisco), and a short, touchy par 3 (15 at Memorial Park, 17 at PGA Frisco) making up the closing stretches of both golf courses. How they choose to do so might be different in presentation and visually, but conceptually, they finish nearly the same. Even better, they’re both open to the public and anyone reading this can see both and compare. Memorial Park’s subdued, almost narrowed view of the professional game off the tee is a cynical outlook on what professional golf has become, defined by data golf and analytics instead of artistry and creativity. Thankfully, the green complexes more than make up enough interest to provide a thoughtful golf experience, and are an inspiring set to play and hit shots into, around, and on. In that regard, PGA Frisco feels more hopeful, but also more eager to expose the mistakes from the best players off the tee. Nonetheless, both sets of green complexes are poised to try their best to hold up under the stress of the best in the world chipping and pitching around their surfaces, and time will tell if Frisco can provide a captivating viewing experience like Memorial Park has (only somewhat mitigated by an overseed). For now, they’re golf courses built by two of the best architects currently practising, ripe for the public to discuss and debate the differences between two facilities trying to achieve the same goal.