This past November, golf course architect Pete Dye was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame. Far and away the most controversial designer of the modern era, Dye was the fifth architect to join the HOF alongside C.B. MacDonald, Donald Ross, Alister Mackenzie and Robert Trent Jones Sr. In many ways, Dye”s career in the golf course design business is more similar to the greats of the past such as Ross and Mackenzie in that he came to the profession through acquired knowledge and a profound of love of the game.
Born in 1925 in Urbana, Ohio, Pete Dye took up the game at a young age. He was a regular at the nine-hole municipal course in Urbana that his dad built. As a teenager he worked at the golf course. In time he became an accomplished amateur golfer. Dye served in the military during the latter stages of World War II and upon his discharge in 1948, he met a Rollins College student, Alice O”Neal. Alice was the captain of her college team. Pete and Alice married in 1950 and they moved to her hometown of Indianapolis. He was an insurance salesman.
It is safe to say that the Dyes were a top-notch golfing family and Alice was the better player even through Pete was no slouch. Pete won the Indiana State Amateur and qualified and played in the 1957 United States Open. Throughout the years, Alice won 11 Indianapolis City Amateur titles, nine Indiana State Amateurs, played on the 1970 Curtis Cup team against Great Britain and Ireland, and won the U.S. Women”s Senior Amateur in 1979 and 1979.
In the mid-1950s, Dye began a gradual career change, and with Alice as an active partner, he took on a handful of golf course design jobs in the central Indiana area. One of the nine-hole courses Dye built was the El Dorado Country Club in Greenwood, Indiana. In 1963, some University of Michigan regents happened to play El Dorado, were impressed with the course design and recommended that Dye build the planned University of Michigan Golf Course. Dye parlayed that success and got a great private course job as the architect of a new Indianapolis club that would be called Crooked Stick. A top-100 golf course, Crooked Stick was the host of the PGA Championship in 1991 that was won by a virtually unknown long-ball knocker named John Daly.
During that time, Dye made a visit to Scotland and came away with some radically different thoughts about golf course architecture. Visiting Prestwick along Scotland”s western shore forced him rethink his design process. Prestwick is a quirky vintage links layout that hosted the first 12 British Open championships. The course features stonewalls, blind shots and railroad ties, design features that Dye started to incorporate into his future work.
As Dye”s reputation continued to grow, he received some cherry assignments, most notably The Golf Club of Columbus. Dye solicited advice from Columbus native Jack Nicklaus and then partnered up with him for a project in South Carolina called Harbour Town Golf Links. At a time when the leading architect of the day, Robert Trent Jones Sr., was designing courses with big greens, big fairways and big bunkers, Dye and Nicklaus took a walk back into time at Harbour Town, creating a course with small greens, distinctive attack angles and creative doglegs. Harbour Town was a roaring success and has served as PGA Tour site since opening in 1969.
Since then, Dye has had his hand in hundreds of golf course projects. His most diabolical and controversial course was the TPC Course at Sawgrass that he built for PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman. It has served as the host course of the Players Championship, the so-called fifth major, since 1982 and is best known for its island green on the 17th hole.
Another classic Dye project has been Whistling Straits in Wisconsin, the site of Vijay Singh”s PGA Championship win in 2004 and a future PGA venue in 2010 and 2015 as well as host of the 2020 Ryder Cup Matches. Whistling Straits also has a rugged links course on the premises, The Irish Course, as well as two other Dye courses some five miles down the road at the Blackwolf Run complex. Blackwolf Run was the site of Se Ri Pak”s U.S. Women”s Open triumph.
Other Dye courses include former Ryder Cup site Kiawah Island, Oak Tree in Oklahoma where Jeff Sluman won the PGA, the TPC of Louisiana, a regular tour site, and all three courses at the Paiute Golf Club outside of Las Vegas. In California, Dye has been very active in the Palm Springs area. He designed the Stadium Course at PGA West, the first home of the Skins Game, as well as the Dunes and Mountain courses at LaQuinta. In Northern California, Dye designed the Carmel Valley Ranch course in the Monterey area. During his time in California, Dye worked closely with current Langtry Farms Director of Golf Johnny Pott.
To this very day, the 83-year-old Dye is still active in the world of golf course architecture. He has recently revisited Whistling Straits to build new back tees for next year”s PGA Championship. His wife Alice is still active in the design business as are his son”s Perry and P.B. Dye. Two of his prot?g?s, Tom Doak and Bill Core, have built outstanding reputations in the field. Doak is responsible for Bandon”s Pacific Dunes Course while Coore and his partner Ben Crenshaw designed the Bandon Trails Course.
In 1995 Dye was the recipient of the Donald Ross Award given for excellence in the profession by the American Society of Golf Course Architects. In 2003 he received the Old Tom Morris Award, the highest honor given by the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America. And now Pete Dye is a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame. True, some of his courses are contrived, and true, we can point the finger at Dye as the inventor of Stadium Golf, but when you look at his body of work for the past 50 years, he is very deserving of his place among the greats of the game.
