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.”