The Life and Work of Dr. Alister MacKenzie
Dr. Alister MacKenzie is among golf’s most revered architects of the Golden Age, yet parts of his life remain a mystery. Few contemporaneous accounts give more than a partial glimpse of his entire personality.
According to this well-researched biography, he was fond of reminding potential clients and others about his medical training, but his actual experience as a physician was surely nothing more than middling.
He was justifiably proud of his expertise in the art of camouflage, but he had significant trouble gaining acceptance of his ideas during World War I, when it could have helped.
While in America, MacKenzie acted like a classic Scotsman, but he was actually born in England, in Normanton, near Leeds.
Unlike many golf architects, he was by no means an accomplished golfer. MacKenzie knew his way around a putting green, however, and like many other architects, MacKenzie’s designs therefore tended to favor his area of playing expertise.
Doak is well-known to fans of golf architecture, because of his own design work and his previous forays into writing, including The Anatomy of a Golf Course. Scott, a retired Scottish physician, is less well-known, but did much of the research into MacKenzie’s life and times. In addition to this book, we also have Raymund Haddock, MacKenzie’s stepgrandson, to thank for finding the manuscript that became The Spirit of St. Andrews.
This coffee-table sized book includes an extensive collection of old photographs and drawings, full-color pictures of famous holes, and fascinating reproductions of MacKenzie’s correspondence.
One chapter provides short biographies of the many design collaborators with whom MacKenzie worked during his extensive career.
The last extended essay will provoke debate, because it describes MacKenzie’s best holes, at least from the authors’ perspectives.
Review Date: December 15, 2001