How Tom Doak (with a surprising assist) turned Memorial Park into a PGA Tour venue/muni double-threat

In the lead-up to the PGA Tour's 2026 Texas Children's Houston Open, architect Tom Doak appeared on Golf Channel's Golf Today to talk about his 2021 redesign of Memorial Park Golf Course, the decades-old muni that hosts the event. Show hosts Rex Hoggard and Eamon Lynch probed Doak about the project, which is something of an outlier in a portfolio of more than 50 golf courses that includes some of the world's highest-rated places to play, from Pacific Dunes at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon to Tara Iti Golf Club in New Zealand, St. Patrick's Links in Ireland and the new Punta Brava Golf & Surf Club in Mexico's Baja California, on a piece of land Doak has called the best he has ever seen for golf.

New Zealand, Ireland and Mexico are a far cry from central Houston, but that is what Doak appreciated about the opportunity to push Memorial Park beyond its original remit as a pleasant but ultimately run-of-the-mill public-facing parkland course.

"I had a chip on my shoulder," Doak said of the contrast between his reputation for building far-flung member- and resort-course destinations with the Memorial Park project. "It's the hardest combination of things to do: to work on a course that is a municipal course and plays 60,000 rounds a year, and can still host the professionals and test them."

Massive increases in PGA Tour driving distance have stretched the advantage pros have over the rest of us by so much that designing golf courses that can stand up to the best in the world often need to be extremely long and/or so demanding as to beat up the rank-and-file, which is not exactly a recipe for happy customers.

Always careful to guide praise for his golf courses towards a large and talented cast of associates, shapers and other advisers, Doak succeeded at Memorial Park by collaborating with someone whom most golf insiders might not have expected: Brooks Koepka, a five-time major champion who has won four other PGA Tour events. The tour usually brings in a player to share some billing with an architect overhauling a high-profile host venue, but Koepka had never been known for his thoughts on course design before being included at Memorial Park.

Doak found an unexpectedly engaged counterpart with direct and useful input that confirmed some of Doak's own ideas of how best to go about tackling things. "He was very vocal about the things that he liked and didn't like," Doak said of Koepka.

One of Koepka's admonitions was that the par 3s needed variety, something Doak and other leading architects have become adept at creating on both new builds and renovations. Doak spoke on Golf Today of the 11th at Shinnecock Hills, where Koepka won the 2018 U.S. Open, a sub-160-yarder with a dastardly green where slight misses are punished severely. At Memorial Park, that hole's counterpart is number 15, whose skinny green sits above a creek and offers precious little room to play safe or bail out. It rounds out a dynamic set of one-shot holes that adds spice at key junctures in the routing.

Another topic on which Koepka and Doak found important common ground was bunkering. On many recent golf courses, bunkers have become flashy showpieces; drone cameras love them, and architects have shown a willingness to build them by the dozen to zhuzh up mundane terrain. Pops of white sand can break up long stretches of green turf. But bunkers are extremely difficult for typical golfers to escape, while they're extremely easy for pros to navigate. By reducing the number of bunkers at Memorial Park from more than 60 pre-rebuild to less than two dozen afterwards, Doak and Koepka put an emphasis on contour, which can mean tricky short-game shots under PGA Tour conditions but manageable situations for everyday players who would otherwise be bogged down by excess bunkers.

Doak noted that by minimizing bunkers, Memorial Park has managed to maintain a brisk pace of play despite a step up in overall difficulty. He cited rounds of less than four and a half hours as a norm for everyday play, attributing it to how few balls are lost other than in a handful of ponds, which are easy to drop next to when necessary.

I had a chance to play Memorial Park in 2021, directly after it had hosted the PGA Tour for the first time. I found it a highly sophisticated test of golf that did not suffer one bit from the minimal bunkering. Doak took Koepka's note about the relative ease of bunkers a step farther, extending a distinct muting of definition across the entire course. A relative lack of easy targets lends a feeling of unease on several tees. Even if the shaping style is different, the psychological warfare Doak engages in at Memorial Park is not unlike that of Pete Dye, whom Doak worked for at the beginning of his own career.

As is often the case at Doak's courses, the greens are the stars, with a well-struck balance between severity and grace. Many approach shots play quite differently one day to the next, which is essential for making a golf course addictive to regulars. There are few American municipal golf courses one would be happier to play - especially as a Houston resident at a green fee of $38 ($140 for out-of-towners).

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It takes a village to build – and celebrate – a great golf course

Memorial Park Golf Course

Houston, Texas

Public/Municipal

4.3125

34

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A par 5 for everyday play, this opener gets golfers out of the gates comfortably with the opportunity to swing two long clubs right off the bat. The broad, relatively shallow green is a perfect introduction to the dominant theme at Memorial Park: contour is king.

Dramatic contours and visual deception from two bunkers make a large putting surface play much smaller. It's a short iron for most pros, but an unexpectedly intimidating one.

The presence of just three par 5s raises the leverage here, as players will be aggressive, trying to make an eagle or an easy birdie. That puts them right where Doak wants them; the right and wrong miss around this green is not easily discernible and changes with different hole locations.

A subtle twist to the right and a full-on bunkerless green give much less definition than pros are used to enjoying as they play. Missing this fairway off the tee means needing to play defensively.

When there are fewer bunkers, those that are used matter much more. The single bunker by the green on this hole looms off the tee not so much as a relevant hazard but as a visual counterpoint to the jagged dry creek the tee shot must carry.

A massive depression of fairway and rough length grass left of this green, which seems to want to kick balls towards oblivion, does much more to intimidate golfers and cause poor execution than any greenside bunker could.

Doak's take on a Redan plays back towards number 2, giving golfers a nice long parkland vista back towards the clubhouse. Front and back hole locations play extremely differently here.

The longest hole on the course will invite long hitters to whale away, but once again, a tricky green makes hitting the fairway seem extra important only after walking off with a par that should have been a birdie. No bunkers, no pushover.

The trio of pot bunkers that originally bit into the left side of this green post-renovation have been reduced to a single pit. An awkwardly-shaped green accentuates the influence of a creek that runs diagonally in front.

The linear tee area is subtly and awkwardly offset to the straightaway fairway, making the tee shot a little tricky. Doak counterposes a deep grass hollow on the left side of the landing area with a bunker on the right. If a player can get a tee shot in the fairway, this becomes a birdie hole.

Long par 3s are severely underrated in part because most players think of their long clubs in terms of power only, not finesse. But the player who can hit a longer iron with confidence and a measure of tenderness can temper the behavior of the ball once it lands on this green, which runs from front to back. That is an elite skill that is not rewarded often enough.

Great architects complicate straightaway holes, and that's exactly what happens here as Doak angles the green just beyond a couple of staggered trees to create a conundrum of an approach shot.

Another choose-your-own-adventure par 4 with no bunkers and a raised green forces players to contemplate what they cannot see - wind, firmness of turf - as they plan their attack. Misery waits right of this green.

Another converted par 5, this fairway is an open invitation to rip a right-to-left tee shot to set up a longish-iron approach into another green that slopes away from the player. Power is nice, but you have to be precise.

A memorable short par 3 at a high-leverage point in the round, this little beauty can be downright beastly when the cup is cut on the skinny front portion of the green surrounded by dropoffs. Even with wedges in their hand, pros have been known to bail 30 feet past the pin and putt back. Those who take it on can make 2 or 8.

Significant water hazards have never been strongly associated with Tom Doak golf courses, but given the in-baked routing of Memorial Park, Doak seized an opportunity to reshape the property's one lake for duty on this hole and the next. A pro who finds the fairway here is faced with something of a hero-shot over a corner of the lake to a peninsula green that tapers towards the back. That could mean the shot of the tournament come Sunday if leaderboard conditions are right.

The way the fairway arcs around the lake relative to the tee-to-green line has caused some pros to lay well back off the tee, while others have tried to swat a drive up by the green. Variety is the spice of golf and this hole has it, including the option of a forward tee position that brings eagles and double-bogeys into play.

A stately, straightaway long par 4 with one of the toughest greens on the course once again demands a tee shot in the fairway, because there's little hope of successfully navigating a huge false front from the rough.