Tom Doak refuses to totally apply the concept of fairness to the game of golf, as life, golf should present unexpected situations, adding emotions and letting players do their best to respond to bad luck or to a trap made by the designer. This way of thinking is so far away from the common thoughts about design, either the penal philosophy, where the line of play is obvious or the strategic way of design, where unfair features are not part of the game.

One of the main goals of Doak’s design is making courses playable for all kind of golfer; he focused his attention especially on future members and golfers that will mostly play the course.
This is not common in the modern days where courses are designed to fit the game of the pros for eventual championship events that most of the time will never take place. Average golfer is then considered just in the forward tees placement, but this is often not enough to challenge all kinds of players in the same way. He sometimes fails in doing it, sometimes his hazards punish too much bad players, like for example when he uses steep banks for his greens; but maybe this is his way to tell people to improve their game and to teach them which skills develop more.

Tom Doak is a fan of the “Camouflage Concept”, one of the main design characteristic that makes his master Alister MacKenzie one of the greatest. Camouflage is a military technique that Mackenzie learned when he served as a doctor during the Boer War in South Africa, is it a way to make the enemy confusing taking advantage from natural cover and the men’s construction completely fit in the landscape to make the feel they are natural, he realised that greens in golf design have analogies with the objectives of a military campaign, the architect try to protect the hole with features that confuse the golfers in the same way who is attacked his own land.[8]

For this reason one of his favourite hazard is short grass, he thinks that in front of the view of short mown grass a golfer would feel safe, but it could be the most unfair hazard, if the slopes are used to change direction of the ball and let it roll in a hazard, he thinks that few players would recognise the trap and so the goal of defending the hole is achieved.
The way he uses mown grass vary a lot depending on the occasion.
He also often uses in his design sand faced bunker, another example of camouflage, they intimidate golfers and change the perception of depth.

Use of short grass as an hazard

The use of mown grass as an hazard is not a novelty in Golf Design, it is one of the main feature of many historical course, such as Pinehurst No.2 and Royal Dornoch, both of them famous for their mowed banks of the green; or the Murfield Golf Club, where contours of the fairway may collect balls toward deep pot bunkers or the mounded open approaches of most of the Scottish Links, where the decision of which kind of shot to play always put some struggle on golfers of all levels.