The PGA Tour’s flagship event, The PLAYERS Championship always generates plenty of buzz.
It’s always one of the best fields of the season and played on a course that generates as much controversy as Miguel Angel Jimenez vs. Keegan Bradley, maybe more. No, definitely more.
TPC Sawgrass has been both praised and reviled and love it or hate it Pete Dye’s creation changed the way golf courses and golf course architects were perceived.
Dye’s Sawgrass was dug out from swampland and he brought target golf to a new level while at the same time building an extremely fan-friendly layout.
He was sure to put some trouble on each hole whether it was water, bunkers, doglegs, pot bunkers, waste areas or just the extreme undulations in the greens, Sawgrass rarely gives a player a breather.
This is a course even the very casual golf fan recognizes, or at least they remember one hole, the par three seventeenth. 
The island green seventeenth is both the most hated and loved hole in golf. It’s hated by the players and loved by the fans. Each year the largest crowds are gathered around the seventeenth to watch the pros struggle with the most famous hole in America.
Players and course critics alike may blame Pete Dye for his treacherous, unforgiving test of nerves but the real blame, or credit should go to Pete’s wife, Alice Dye for the actual design of the seventeenth.
Alice Dye was an Indiana State Amateur Champion, twice, and played on the 1970 Curtis Cup and after she married Pete just happened to be around when he left his job of selling insurance to start designing golf courses.
Alice has been an integral part of Pete’s career and it was Alice that solved a huge problem for Pete when he was nearly finished with Sawgrass but realized he had no land left for his seventeenth hole.
Dye had dug out all the sand between the sixteenth and eighteenth holes as that was the best sand anywhere on the parcel and they used it all over the course. What was left was a deep hole and few options for a transition hole to eighteen.
It was then that Alice told Pete, “Put the green exactly where it was to be and fill the cavity with water.”It was a simple solution for a complex problem from a real problem solver. While it may have been an obviously simple solution to Alice it has evolved into a big problem for every pro that tees it up there…especially on Sunday.
It will be fun this week watching the action at seventeen and as those shots splash their way to a watery finish the name muttered on the lips of the players will be Dye, but remember, its Alice Dye not Pete.
Click here for a Q & A with Alice Dye in Links Magazine.
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