Loop Golf At Forest Dunes A Reversible Treat

ROSCOMMON, MICHIGAN | Now 58 years old, Tom Doak was a high school student when he first became interested in reversible golf courses. “I was reading a book by the English architect Tom Simpson, and it had a section on what was sometimes called loop golf,” Doak says. “He had produced a few reversibles in his career, small courses of only three or six holes on private estates, and the book had diagrams of those types of layouts. I thought they looked so cool.”

Doak also found himself enthralled as a young man by the Old Course in St. Andrews, which was played in a reverse, clockwise direction on a weekly basis for several decades in the late 1800s and early 1900s. That “left-handed” version of the Old had golfers starting on the first tee and playing to the 17th green, and they continued in that direction until the final hole, which commenced on the second tee and finished on the 18th green. “In fact, a lot of early links courses were constructed like that, largely because it gave them a way to let the divoted areas heal,” he says.
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