Golf architect's guide still an ace

On amazon.com, the book is going for $435. One seller on eBay is asking $845 for a copy. Judging by those prices, a person would think it was a Charles Dickens tome in the original binding or a first-printing J.D. Salinger novel. It is neither. It is a golf book published in 1996.

"Confidential Guide to Golf Courses" by Tom Doak is a cult classic. And probably the No. 1 reason is that the content is even rarer than the book itself: blunt golf candor.

"It's no holds barred, really. It's exactly what I thought," said Doak, who, after he wrote the book, has become an internationally acclaimed course architect with a major imprint on Long Island. He will be here Saturday for the official opening of his redesigned North Shore Country Club layout in Glen Head. He also is co-designer of Sebonack Golf Club in Southampton and has working arrangements with Garden City Golf Club and others.

Good thing he is busy. The architect of the highly regarded Pacific Dunes in Oregon cannot get by on sales of the book in which he boldly critiques golf courses, regardless of its popularity and price.

"I just get the standard writer's royalty, which isn't that much," he said. Nor is he planning on a re-release. "If I did it now, even though I'd still try to be completely honest, there are too many relatively new courses by people who I compete with in one way or another. So I don't think it would be taken as completely honest, no matter what I'd say."

Here is more truth: Doak never intended his book to have an audience beyond his friends. He was fresh out of Cornell in the 1980s, traveling the world to learn golf architecture. "I saw all these courses on my own dime and I had a lot of people help me. They let me stay at their houses or told me where to go or what not to bother with," he said on the phone the other day. "Once I did travel a lot, I found it amazing how much of the golf world went on second- and third-hand opinions."

Still in his 20s, Doak wrote his own observations and perspectives. He printed 40 copies and distributed them to the friends who had helped him. People found it so compelling -- for instance, he gave Augusta National a "9" rating rather than a perfect 10 -- the book took on a life of its own. He ultimately agreed to publish a limited edition: 12,000 copies.

Doak wrote of Florida courses: "I'll take Seminole, you can have the other 999." Of Bay Hill, he wrote, "The two finishing holes are impossible, the other 16, just forgettable." He also wrote that Jack Nicklaus "was almost single-handedly responsible for the inflation of golf course construction budgets during the 1980s."

He had no idea, of course, he would co-design Sebonack with Nicklaus in the 2000s. Nor could he envision his book fetching $845.

"Confidential Guide" does have many nice things to say, too. It praised Southampton's National Golf Links of America at a time when that wasn't fashionable. "By the '70s and early '80s, people thought it was an anachronism; too easy or too short or that it had too many blind holes. But there are five or six holes that are totally different than anything I had ever seen. I said it had to be in the top 20 for sure," he said.

Like that old course, his book will not decrease in value any time soon. "I wish," Doak said, "I had some more of them."