by Jeff Skinner
Pete Dye has changed the way golf courses are built and at 88 he hasn’t stopped yet. While the pros are treated to Dye’s most famous creation, the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass, take a look at Jeff Silverman’s profile of the Prince of Dirt in Golf World. Dye is a character and still loves what he is doing.
Why, I’ve just asked him, is he still at it? Why, when most his age are content to put up their feet, is he still caking his with dirt and dust? (Just check out his shoes.) Why is he still flying off for days at a time to oversee renovations in Georgia and South Carolina and Virginia and Indiana, not to mention his own backyard, in the past year? Why is he wrestling with ideas for a new 18 through challenging gunk and forest north of Jacksonville (and, as 2014 progressed, a potential fifth course for patron Herb Kohler — “Every time I spend a dollar, he has a heart attack” — near Whistling Straits in Wisconsin)? What’s left to prove?
Alice, Pete and “Sixty”
The silence is eerie.
Then: “I don’t know,” he returns with a shake of the head. “I’ve got to be crazy.”
As in: still crazy after all these years about what he does. “I just like to build,” he says. “It’s a big puzzle.”
That Dye is one of the most extraordinary architects in the game’s history, one of only four in the World Golf Hall of Fame, on par with Macdonald, MacKenzie, Ross or any other name pulled from the pantheon, isn’t news. Nor is his knack for drilling deep into the dark recesses of the golf mind to whip up the most visually intimidating, nail-biting, knee-knocking tests of the game anywhere. Who else shoulders such colorful appellations — from Dye-abolical to the Marquis de Sod? Who else has mentored so many burgeoning designers under his expansive wing — think, for starters, Bill Coore, Bobby Weed, Tom Doak and Jim Urbina — that there is even a pun for that: the Dye-ciples, who have evolved into an important hands-on force spawned by Pete’s preference for slow-cooking courses one at a time. “Pete never talks about designing a golf course,” says Doak. “He talks about building them.” Adds Urbina: “He’s the instruction manual.”
Click here for Silverman’s Golf World article.
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