Tom Doak good to his word at Dornick Hills in Ardmore

Widened fairways but sloping, testing greensites characterize the restoration at Dornick Hills.

Doak did it for Dornick Hills

by ken macleod

When you are a world famous and in-demand golf architect, there are certain benefits to volunteering for a project.

Not having to sit through committee meetings is one of them.

“Because I made that comment about doing it for free, nobody could say boo to me about what we were doing,” Tom Doak said at the grand reopening party June 2 for Dornick Hills Country Club in Ardmore. “They let me do what I wanted to do without having to go through a bunch of committee BS.”

And what Doak wanted to do was recreate 18 greens envisioning what Perry Maxwell would have done more than a century ago on the rolling course that launched his fabled career. Then he wanted to remove hundreds of trees to widen fairways, improve turf grass and bring back playing angles and sightlines, knowing his sloping greens and testy surrounds will be all the challenge required.

Doak played a morning round with Jerome “Bruzzy” Westheimer and Joe Ward, two members who were major financial backers of the project. Ward was the one who called Doak after seeing a comment in Golfclubatlast.com where Doak mentioned he would volunteer his services if the opportunity ever came up to improve Dornick Hills.

Well it did and he was a man of his word. And now Dornick Hills has 18 incredible greens with the Maxwell rolls and Doak touches.

“They let me do what I thought we should do and I’m happy with the way they came out,” Doak said. “One of the reasons I don’t do a lot of consulting work anymore is because clubs really try to micromanage what you’re doing, and I don’t want to spend 10 days talking about something, I want to do something. This free thing really opens the door to that.”

Of course not comp was the tremendous work provided by the course builders, including Dundee Golf led by Blake Conant, whose company works closely with Doak, shaping most of his projects.

Speeds on the new greens, seeded last fall with 007 bent grass, were a bit conservative, according to Doak.

“I think they can be a little faster and they’ll be fine,” Doak said. “I know they are new and Brent (superintendent Brent Waite) wants to be conservative and doesn’t want golfers to think they are too severe, but I hit

Tom Doak

a lot of chips and putts out there from various angles and they’ll be fine.

“I think what they have done looks great. No one looked for a ball all day. But it’s not easy. It’s not easy to get the ball close the hole and it’s not easy when you miss a green to make par.”

Dornick Hills throughout its history has always had a rugged feel to it and this version is no exception. Waite was actually hoping his new fairway mower, another victim of supply chain issues, would show up soon, allowing him to get fairway heights tighter as the summer kicks in. A silent auction at the party raised over $100,000 that will go to maintenance.

The course will get a good test from some of the state’s best players when the Oklahoma Golf Association State Stroke Play Championship is held there June 20-22.

The timing for this restoration was perfect for Doak and Dornick Hills. Many projects were on hold due to the pandemic and the golf boom had not really begun when they started. Now Doak has one more restoration project on his plate, at Crooked Stick, designed by his mentor Pete Dye. Then new courses are suddenly stacking up. Doak said he could be signing contracts to build as many as 10 new courses in the coming years, eight of those in the United States, and not including two he is already working on at Sand Valley Resort in Wisconsin. Doak said the new projects are mostly golf-first projects, meaning they are not real-estate driven, and many were fueled by the numbers of wealthy families moving from California and New York to Texas and Florida during the pandemic and finding the golf options lacking. Notes: One touching moment at the party was when Dora Horn, the granddaughter of Perry Maxwell, presented Doak with a book of Alfred Lord Tennyson poetry from Maxwell’s personal library. Horn said she was thrilled with the work done by all. The final resting place of Perry Maxwell and other family members is in a grove above the 17th tee. Dora and her family paid a visit there in addition to touring the course.

No longer a pond by the par-3 17th green.