Tom Doak Interview Snippets on Sports, Leisure

So I’ve been up in Lake Placid writing, trying not to break my hip skiing, and listening to Phish. The seclusion of Whiteface Mountain is a great retreat to write.

I have been reviewing alot of old notes and found some wonderful snippets from my Tom Doak interview that hadn’t been printed yet. There’ll be more as I finish the chapter about Tom for my book, but until then, here’s some to tide you over:

TOM DOAK: I have always wanted to be the best at what I do. My sports idols growing up were the guys who were great and weren’t afraid to show it – Larry Bird, Bill Walton, Reggie Jackson, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods. Humility is a great trait and I wish I had more of it, but false humility is a sign of weakness.

Some sports are individual, (including golf), but others require team effort – Bird and Walton were great go-to guys but they were also great passers who made all their teammates better. Golf course architecture is one of those team sports. You wouldn’t get far trying to go one-on-five, no matter how good you are. Routing a hole in th eright place is like feeding the construction guys for a lay-up, instead of them having to make a three-pointer with a guy intheir face.

You have to awork with other people to get your ideas in the ground; you have to be a great leader, not a one-man band. I saw this within the first couple of weeks I worked for Pete Dye and I have not forgotten. That’s been the hardest part for me. I was never the best people person starting out because I’m introverted by nature; but if you think about it, you don’t get good at reading maps and solving puzzles if you are too busy being the big man on campus.

It was hard to relate to clients and to find the right people to help build our courses; I didn’t fit into the common mode of relying on contractors to build stuff for me, so I was a rebel. Once we started Pacific Dunes, all that resistance went away, and it’s freed us up.

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What do I do to unwind? Play golf….play games with our kids, any game is fine as long as it isn’t on the TV screen. I do the Sunday crossword and lots of different puzzles, but not religiously; because of my travel schedule, some times I don’t even remember it IS Sunday. I like to travel….I like reading but 99% of my reading is non-fiction – biographies, history, politics, and especially in foreign places to see what they think of America. I’m a Yankee fan going back to the 1964 World Series (I was 3) and to my high school years when we went to alot of big gamesin 1976-1978, but I just love baseball in general, and know more about it than most people should.

I was actually at the game where Bucky Dent homered. I was a freshman at M.I.T. and wondered before the final Sunday how they were going to sell tickets in case of a tie — so I called the ticket office and they said they were putting tickets on sale that morning just in case. SO we walked to Fenway, bought tickets for the playoff game, sat in the bleachers for the Sunday game and listened to the Yankees lose on radio, and walked home with our playoff tickets.

They playoff game will always remain a great memory to me — the tension was so thick from the first pitch right to the last that you could cut it with a knife, like no other sporting event I have seen before or since. I wore my Yankees cap to the game and was razzed but not beat up because the fans were all confident their team would win. It was only after the last out that someone ripped off my cap and tried to burn it!

I went to alot of great games as a sports fan in NYC. Saw OJ break the rushing record at Shea in the freezing cold, saw Reggie hit three homers in Game Six, Saw every shot of the last two days of Nicklaus beating Aoki at Baltusrol. I do miss that about Traverse City, but I wouldn’t have time to get to many games anyway, so I keep the TV off on weekends and spend time with the kids instead.