Tom Doak’s highly-respected golf course design work spans the globe, including Pacific Dunes in Oregon, Cape Kidnappers in New Zealand, the Renaissance Club in Scotland, Sebonack in New York, Barnbougle Dunes in Australia, and Ballyneal in Colorado.
Pacific Dunes and Sebonack (the latter done with Jack Nicklaus) are ranked among the top 40 courses in the U.S., according to Golf Digest, and Cape Kidnappers and Barnbougle Dunes are top 20 among those outside America.
But different jobs create different challenges, goals and rewards. Certainly Doak’s work in Colorado illustrates that point, with the private Ballyneal out on the eastern plains near the Nebraska border being a stark contrast to the public CommonGround in urban Aurora.
In the case of CommonGround, which will open to the public on May 23, the objective of Doak and his team at Renaissance Golf Design was to strike a balance in making the course enjoyable for players of all abilities, while still challenging top-tier golfers. And that’s exactly what the owners of the facility, the Colorado Golf Association and Colorado Women’s Golf Association, had in mind.
“Our goal has been to build a course which is playable for everyone, but tricky for a good player to shoot a low score,” Doak wrote in a recent e-mail interview with COgolf.org. “The key to that is to build a good set of greens, where missing on one side of the green will leave a very difficult up-and-down, but missing on the other side is not so bad. If you do that, you give the average player one whole side of the hole to miss on, but you get the low-handicap golfer hedging to the safe side instead of just aiming right at the hole.”
While the par-71 CommonGround course gives players plenty of room off the tee — and several risk-reward options — the green complexes make going low a challenge. Mounding, large undulations, swales, false fronts and the like will test even the best short game.
As CGA executive director Ed Mate has said, what stands out about the course is “how playable it is, how fun it is for every level of player. You don’t lose golf balls; it’s not hit-and-search. That doesn’t happen at all whether you’re a 2 (handicap) or a 32. It’s fun and challenging for both.”
The fact that the golf associations obtained the services of a renowned course architect such as Doak despite not having a huge budget — CommonGround was built for about $4.8 million — speaks to Doak’s interest in working on a broad spectrum of design projects.
“We had recently built several very big-budget private golf courses, and my associates and I felt that we wanted to take on a public project again, to make sure we weren’t seen as being uninterested in that segment of the business,” Doak noted. “Since we have already built a couple of public courses near where I live in Michigan, and did not want to compete with our own clients, the next logical place for us was in Denver, where my associates Jim Urbina and Eric Iverson live, and Don Placek grew up.”
Doak & Co. started work shortly after the old Mira Vista Golf Course closed in early September 2007. While CommonGround bears no resemblance to Mira Vista, Doak made use of some of the existing features, most notably the trees.
“We try to identify every feature of the property which would lend itself to interesting golf, and design around those,” Doak wrote. “The one unusual feature here was that a lot of trees had been planted at Mira Vista (formerly Lowry Golf Course), but they were much too close to the fairways. But we were able to use some of those tree lines by playing on the other sides of them, where the roughs of the old holes used to be.”
Because of the limited budget and the goal of keeping greens fees reasonable ($40-$50), Doak tried to get the most bang for the buck at CommonGround.
“We determined to spend the rest of our money (non-irrigation-related) on golf features, and not on cart paths or landscaping or visuals,” Doak wrote. “We were able to transplant a bunch of the trees that were out there at a very cost-effective rate, which was great.”
Doak said CommonGround looks significantly different than most courses Renaissance Golf has built lately, noting the bunkering is “less flashy, and generally smaller.” But he added that the course of his that bears the most resemblance to CommonGround is the private Renaissance Club next to Muirfield in Scotland. Golf Digest, in its December issue, called the Renaissance a “minimalist, hybrid links/parkland” design.
Despite having many far-flung projects around the world, Doak and his team spent considerable time in Colorado in late 2007 and 2008. Not only were they working on CommonGround, but they were overseeing the $7.6 million restoration project at Cherry Hills Country Club.
“First and foremost, I’ve got two associates who live out there (in Colorado), and they are great champions of any project which will keep them close to home for a while — we all spend too much time on the road,” Doak said. “It’s also a pretty easy trip for me to get to Colorado, as opposed to New Zealand or Mexico or China or some of the other places we’ve been working. Last, but not least, Colorado has a great variety of different settings in which to build courses “¦ the parkland of Cherry Hills is nothing like the sand dunes out at Ballyneal. We haven’t had our chance to work up in the mountains yet, but hopefully, one of these days, we’ll get to do something there, too.”
In the meantime, Doak said he’ll travel to Colorado to take part in grand opening festivities at CommonGround on May 20.
“The most fun part of any job is the first day we get to go out and play the finished course,” he wrote. “Usually, I have that opportunity well before the course is open, but I haven’t been back to Denver since fall, so my first round will be on Opening Day. Hopefully my golf game will be in good enough shape to enjoy it.”
