About Tom Doak
Tom Doak is President of Renaissance Golf Design Inc,
based in Traverse City, Michigan, USA, has built Golf Courses all over the
United States and now New Zealand.
His minimalist design philosophy - characterized by the utilization of natural
topographical features and restraint in earthmoving - was formed during
his year abroad, when he visited 172 different courses and spent two months
as a caddie at the Old Course in St. Andrews.
CAPE KIDNAPPERS
by Tom Doak
Our goal in designing golf courses is to create interesting
holes you wouldn't find anywhere else. That wasn't hard to do at Cape Kidnappers,
because the site is not like anywhere else in golf. If it were any bigger
or any more dramatic, it would probably be cordoned off as a national park.
It's an overwhelming experience to stand up on the cliffs, 140 meters above
sea level, and look out across the waves far below in Hawke's Bay.
Cape Kidnappers is not true links terrain, with the wrinkles of sand dunes;
instead the land tilts toward the sea as a series of ridges jutting out
toward the edge of the cliffs. Yet, the play is seaside golf at its finest.
The surface is firm and fast, the conditions can be windy, and the player
who can control his trajectory will be master of the course. You'll hit
shots over the tops of the tea trees, and play along the edges of deep ravines.
If you stray on your approaches, you'll actually hope to get caught up in
bunkers hanging off the green's edge, some of them deeper than you've ever
seen before. At the twelfth and fifteenth you'll play right out to land's
end, to greens as Bernard Darwin once described the 17th at North Berwick
in Scotland:
"Then comes the crucial shot, the approach on to [a] green that slopes right
away from us to the sea -- without the ghost of a charitable back wall.
It is so frightening that we are strongly tempted to approach it on the
instalment system, and it is really wonderful how many instalments may be
necessary, as with limbs palsied with terror, we push and poke the ball
over that treacherous and slippery surface."
Three times, you'll have to make the perilous leap from the end of one ridge
to the end of the next. And at the sixth and fifteenth holes it's possible
to pull your approach off the very end of the earth, though it will take
nearly ten seconds of hang time for your ball to reach the ocean below.
For myself and my associates, it was a great adventure to track up the hill
every day and build a golf course in such a remarkable setting. We hope
you enjoy your time here as much as we have. New Zealand is a long way from
home, but Cape Kidnappers is never far from our hearts.
