Golf course architect Tom Doak could rightly be dubbed the Bill Gates of bentgrass. Not just because his humble mom-and-pop design shop has become a bit of a global behemoth but also because, with or without pocket protectors, Doak and Gates can easily be lumped together under that cruelest and most reductive of monosyllables: nerd.

There’s nothing wrong with nerdiness—if its defining characteristics include monomania, stern iconoclasm, and a distinct lack of regard for sartorial preoccupations.

“He remembers every hole he’s ever played, good or bad,” says the Chicago greeting-card magnate Mike Keiser, who enlisted Doak to design his Pacific Dunes course in Bandon, Oregon. Opened in 2001, it was named the country’s best resort golf course by Golfweek magazine in 2006—placing just ahead of Pebble Beach. “It is clear from Tom’s work that he has got it; he’s the architectural giant of his time.”

But the 46-year-old Doak doesn’t much care what you think of him or how he looks, especially since those qualities seem to attract other power nerds, like AOL co-founder Steve Case, who just announced that Doak would craft a course for Cacique, a luxury resort being created on $23 million worth of coastline in Costa Rica.

Several other Doak-designed courses are currently moving forward at full speed, including the Rock Creek Club in Missoula, Montana; the Renaissance Club on the historic Archerfield estate in Dirleton, Scotland; as well as an $11 million course called Wicked Pony, in Bend, Oregon. On Mexico’s golf-crazy Baja Peninsula, construction has begun on Bahia de los Sueños, and up near Denver, Doak’s complete redesign of Mira Vista, a once-modest layout on a former Air Force base, is under way.

These days, a price quote for a Doak original design falls near the top end of the field, a reported million dollars or so to buy his vaunted eye and faultless track record for delivering results on schedule and on budget—despite the fact that many people love Doak’s courses, plenty of others don’t particularly fancy him.

“He used to be called Terrible Tom for his outspokenness,” says Keiser, who claims to get along beautifully with Doak, “But he worked on that and now suffers fools well. Not that I’m a fool.”

After graduating from Cornell University with a degree in landscape architecture, Doak spent a summer caddying at St. Andrews, in Scotland, then played and studied every venerable course from the Royal Aberdeen to Carnoustie. Once he was stateside again, Doak apprenticed himself to designer Pete Dye, whose deviously tough courses, from Palm Beach to Palm Springs, are the bane of the everyday golfer’s existence.

Tom Doak’s obsession with classic courses has never flagged. He doesn’t just quote British design legend Alister MacKenzie on his company’s website; he co-wrote a biography of the man. He is also author of the no-holds-barred Confidential Guide to Golf Courses, which is now out of print and, at last look, was listed on eBay for $1,000. Within its pages, Doak offered his notoriously frank assessment of more than 800 layouts on six continents, earning him praise from the game’s conservative backbenchers and scorn from those vilified by his pointed judgments.

“I’ve been called a lot more names than most golf course architects,” Doak says, “but so, too, were my heroes in the business, MacKenzie and Dye. It’s good to be controversial, but I’m pretty sick of being described with that word. I’m not as much of a jerk as I’m portrayed as being.”

Indeed, if Greg Norman is the Louis Armstrong of golf—a goodwill ambassador with an outsize personality and smiles for miles—Doak is more like Jerry Lewis’ Nutty Professor, bespectacled scholar by day, who exhibits a mixture of audacity and understated charm by night. And while a grandiose Robert Trent Jones Jr. compares himself to Mozart, saying his “courses are like symphonies with crescendos, lulls, and different rhythms,” Doak favors the plainspokenness of the knowing rustic, sounding more like Will Rogers with a hint of Don Rickles.

“Most golf course architects, you see pictures of them in the promotional stuff with a rolled-up set of plans in their hand,” Doak says of some of his celebrity colleagues. “Nobody’s got a picture of me doing that! Even though we draw up a fairly detailed plan for the client, once we get out there in the field, we’re trying to find ways to improve the place, not looking for photo ops where we can appear industrious and spackled with mud.”

In addition to all the new work Doak is doing, he’s in demand for the sensitive task of tweaking existing courses, especially those designed by masters such as MacKenzie, A.W. Tillinghast, and Donald Ross. Club members everywhere seem hell-bent on making their classic layouts longer and more competitive. Doak is currently in the midst of redoing all the greens at MacKenzie’s famed Valley Club in Montecito, California, which was built in 1929, and there are whispers that he will be consulting at Cypress Point, an even more exalted MacKenzie course on the Monterey Peninsula.

When consulting on such hallowed turf, Doak focuses on the topography and design that were there before rather than leaving his own footprint. If a course is that good, he says, the odds of making it better rather than worse are generally not high. “I’m usually more reluctant to make changes than the members, who see the pros hitting 350-yard drives on TV and think their course has to be longer,” Doak says. “They can’t hit it that far, so I don’t know what they’re worrying about!”

When it comes to creating a new course, Doak is far from hands-off, but he’s as respectful of the land as he is of his forebears. Many of his peers are tricking out their layouts with trendy bells and whistles such as waterfalls, fun-house greens, and gratuitous earthmoving—a model that goes against laissez-faire, old-world design but does make money. Letting the land dictate the design is for old fogies—or diehard traditionalists like Doak.

“He is a master at using the natural terrain, local vegetation, and historical surroundings of an area to shape a unique and special golf experience,” says Donn Davis, C.E.O. of Revolution Places, which is developing Cacique.

“The bulldozer is our third and last option,” Doak says. “Natural areas not only add local character to a golf course, they don’t have to be irrigated or seeded or maintained for the life of the course.

“Today it is politically correct for every designer to talk about working with the land,” Doak adds, with characteristic frankness. “However, in their next breath, most other designers go on to dismiss minimalism as impractical, except on the most special sites. They lament that the good pieces of land are all gone.”

Obtaining good raw material hasn’t been a big problem for Doak. His Pacific Dunes layout sits on a stretch of pristine coastline, and the same is true of Cape Kidnappers golf course in New Zealand, which was ranked 27th best in the world by Golf Magazine in 2005 and is considered an antipodean Pebble Beach. But he has also worked miracles on extremely hilly and rocky sites, such as Stone Eagle in Palm Desert, California, where a good deal of earthmoving and the odd bundle of dynamite were required to turn barren desert into verdant fields. Similarly, on a pancake-flat cotton field in Lubbock, Texas, he went against the Doakian grain and moved a million cubic yards of soil to fashion the acclaimed Rawls Course for Texas Tech University.

Unfortunately, Doak doesn’t get much time to play the game nowadays, and his handicap has gained a second digit. His business shows no signs of slowing, and Doak downplays the much-discussed notion that the industry is in a slump. “Developing a golf course is a lot like putting up an office building. It all depends on demand in your local market,” he says. “There’s still a lot of development because there are still people who believe they can do the best course in town.”