Dye

Genius wears khakis, Gucci loafers and no socks. It creates golf courses and controversy in equal measure, calls Gulf Stream, Fla., home and stops there once or twice a month. It has a Surlyn hide and an artist's touch, a lopsided smile and a heart of golf.

Dye, 64, has made millions making golfers happy and mad, sometimes happily mad. Professional rant. Amateurs rave. Do many of Dye's peers in the American Society of Golf Course Architects. Dye has shaped 66 courses. Along the way he has helped shape the spirit and direction his game.

"I'm a Dye fan even though I do things differently than he does," said Tom Fazio, whose architectural credits include the Vintage Club in Palm Springs, Calif..; Wild Dunes in Isle of Palms, S.C.; Butler National in Oakbrook, Ill; the Champion course at PGA National in West Beach Gardens, Fl., and Ventana Canyon in Tucson. "I believe in difference. We don't need sameness. During the 1950's and 1960's we had a lot of sameness in golf course design.

"Maybe that's what has done, created variety. He has made people think. I think Pete's only negative is a lot of people try to copy him and they can't pull it off, not like he does.

"He's the Arnold Palmer of golf course design," said Steve Smyers, the rising star hired by Indianapolis resident Jack Leer to build Wolf Run Golf Club, an exceptional new course just north of Indianapolis. "I think of al the modern course of the 1960's designed by the better-known architects; most of them have been takeoffs on his designs in one form or another.

Rees Jone's father, Robert Trent Jones, Sr., dominated golf architecture for 20 years after World War II. Dye broke that mold. Rees has built courses like Arcadian Shores in Myrtle Beach, S.C.; Hell's Point in Virginia Beach, Va, and Griffin Gate in Lexington, Ky. Rees feels those courses are his own, done in his own style, but he feels they are a little better because of Dye.

"He broke from tradition with his won ideas 25 years ago. He opened all our eyes," said Jones. " Made us all better because he made us rethink our profession. He made us consider no just shot values but our approach to style and the difficulty of the courses we built."

Twenty-five years ago, Dye was completing his first great course, Crooked Stick Golf Club in Carmel. Crooked Stick was the former Indianapolis resident's first work to be rated among America's top 100 by Golf Digest. Nine others would follow, including five ranked among the world's 50 best by Golf Magazine. PGA Tour professionals noticed. Dye built the radically different Tournament Players Club at Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., for PGA Tour Commissioner Dean Beman. There is water on every hole. Marsh, forest and waste areas encroach every fairway. The greens are small and severe. The earthen mounds provided spectator vantage points. Smaller moguls test players' patience. The course opened in 1980 and introduced the "stadium concept" and "target golf". The pros took dead aim.

The course stays all around my game but never touches it, said Jack Nicklaus. "I've never been very good at stopping a 5-iron the hood of a car."

"Ninety percent cow manure and 10 percent luck," grumbled J.C. Snead.

"Star Wars golf," testified Ben Crenshaw. "This course was built by Darth Vadar."

"Is it against the rules to carry a bulldozer in your bag?" asked Tom Watson. The signature hole was the 17th, a par-3 measuring 132 yards with an island green the size of Hawaii. Dye have the world's best players a hole that looked more difficult than it was, one that required a nervy half shot, a feathery 8-iron or a hard 9. The pros hated it. Pete loved it. He loves to fool all the people all the time. He wants to test not only a player's skill, but his guts, intelligence and will.

Last August, the pros visited another Dye course, Oak Tree Golf Club in Edmond, Okla., for the 70th PGA Championship. The wind didn't blow but players howled.

"Mr. Dye is crazy," said Watson. "He and Alice (Dye's wife) shouldn't be allowed to build any more golf courses."

"I'm just glad I'm not a member." said Fuzzy Zoeller. "I guess somebody has to be."

Perry Dye laughs long and loud. Some would say diabolically. Perry, 37 is Dye's elder son. Perry founded and owns Dye Designs, a Denver architectural firm employing 120.

"Dad knows exactly how to design things into a golf course that make the Tour crazy," said Perry. "Visualize this: Tomorrow morning you get to go to work for the same salary but your job is twice as hard. And you know it. That's what happens when they roll on to one of our courses because we know, by design, how to make it twice as hard for them. We know exactly what they like; we know exactly how far they hit it-Tour stats. It's all published every week; how many miss it to the right, how many miss it to the left, who hits what long, what clubs they don't like."

Dye's Surlyn hide serves him well. But he doesn't just risk criticism and survive it. He revels in it.

"Pete's semi-eccentric to put it conservatively," said Micky Powell, an old friend, former president of the PGA of America and owner of Golf Club of Indiana in Lebanon. "He wants to be somewhat controversial. He likes that. He likes games playing ad getting into a little argument with Tom Kite or Greg Norman or one of the guys."

< Paul Francis Dye Jr. was born in Urbana, Ohio, in 1925. As a boy he was called P.D., a handle that evolved to its phonetic equivalent, Pete. Dye's father was called Pink because of his red hair. Pink was an insurance salesman, ran the post office and was active in politics. He also was an avid 5 handicap golfer who regularly drove 13 miles to play Springfield CC, a nearby Donald Ross-designed course. In 1926, Pink brought golf home. He built a nine-hole course on some hilly land owned by his wife Elizabeth's mother. Urbana CC is active and unchanged to this day.

Pete grew up swinging a golf club and pushing a lawnmower. When the course staff went away to war in 1941, Pete was a 16-year old schoolboy. He served as greenskeeper for the next two years. Pete entered the Army Air Corps in 1944 and served as a paratrooper. After the war, he enrolled at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla. One could play golf there year-round. At Rollins, Pete met Alice O'Neal., the daughter of a prominent Indianapolis attorney and a supremely gifted player. Pete's and Alice's path covered a lot of fairways. In 1950, it led to the alter.

Pete won the 1958 Indiana Amateur. He qualified for several U.S. amateurs and missed the 36-hole cut in the 1957 U.S. Open by a stroke. So did Arnold Palmer. Dye was defeated in the semifinals in the 1958 Trans-Mississippi Amateur by Jack Nicklaus. He made the fifth round of the 1963 British Amateur. Still, Alice's game always shined brighter. Alice had won nine Indiana and three Florida amateur titles. She has won both the U.S. and Canadian senior championships twice. There have been five Western Golf Associations senior titles.

Pete and Alice settled in Indianapolis. Soon enough, Pete was selling a million dollars of life insurance annually and serving as chairman of the greens committee at Country Club of Indianapolis. Twenty-five years before, Pete had cleaned Urbana's CC's dirt from beneath his fingernails. He just never got it out of his blood. Pete experimented at CCI - on occasion disastrously. He and Alice kept a nursery in their yard.

"Pete and I drove to Pinehurst (N.C.) in 1958 to play in the North & South Amateur. That's where he told me he was going to give up his business and go into golf course architecture," recalled Leer, the Indianapolis dentist who recently sold his practice and with Smyers built Wolf Run. "He had me out on the course every evening, holding the stick while he worked the transit and checked out every inch of those Donald Ross greens."

The Dyes answered the call in 1959. Pete took the summer off from his insurance business and built a nine-hole course called El Dorado (now Royal Oak CC and 18 holes) south of town for brothers Bill and Henry Nordsieck. El Dorado was unremarkable except for one thing; its greens were the first built with the USGA mix, a soil formula developed at Purdue University and Texas A & M.

The game was on. Pete drew on inspiration. Alice drew the plans. They built Heather Hills (now Maple Creek) in Indianapolis, Radrick Farms for the University of Michigan, and extensively renovated Monticello (Ind.) CC. Dye quickly learned that his design and the final product too often were not the same on courses built by a contractor.

Dye traveled to the Old World in 1963 to play in the British Amateur. He visited and studied 30 great courses in Scotland, England and Ireland, including St. Andrew's, Muirfield, Prestwick, Carnoustie and Royal Dornoch. The trip was the turning point in Dye's career. He returned inspired, invigorated and determined to not only design courses but build them himself. Dye rounded up 60 "members" who kicked in $6,000 each and bought a Carmel cornfield. It didn't have a slope on it. No matter. Dye gave Mother Nature a facelift. He incorporated the railroad tie bulkheading he had seen at Prestwick, installed the strip bunkers, sand and grass pot bunkers, mounds and moguls and blind shots he had seen elsewhere. He used strategically placed multiple tees to give players of all skill levels an interesting manageable and demanding test. He gave it all definition by using bent grass of a light emerald tint in the fairways and greens, darker bluegrass for collars and brownish fescue for roughs. Crooked Stick had an unmistakable Scottish air. It was the first course in which so many diverse Old World elements were brought together.

Pete brushes it all aside in his self-deprecating manner. "There's nothing new in golf," he said. "I've always copied what other people have done in the past."

Dye completed Crooked Stick in 1964 and the Golf Club in New Albany, Ohio, in 1967. Both achieved immediate acclaim. Harbour Town Golf Links at Hilton Head Island was even more stunning. Completed in 1969, its design was so unique and beguiling that even the pros loved it.

Joe Walser and Ernie Vossler visited those courses. Walser and Vossler had played the PGA Tour and came to know Dye from stops at the Festival 500 Tournament at Speedway GC, where Dye served as starter. Walser and Vossler were partners in a new venture called Unique Golf, later to become Landmark Land Co.

"We visited the projects of all the outstanding architects of the time and felt he was doing something different, unique. We were impressed with his creativity." said Walser. "Robert Trent Jones was the top golf course architect in those days but we didn't want to build another course in that style."

"We gave an unlimited expense account and he exceeded it," said Walser. "But that's all right. I don't know of anybody I've every worked with who has been more dedicated to delivering the very best product he can. He takes tremendous pride in his work and he's the best salesman I've ever know. We may have our minds made up we're going to build a golf course this way and have bigger fairways and maximize our residential values. Pete will come in at us from the back door and wriggle around, talk about this, talk about that to the point where our original concept is turned around and made for a better golf course. It may cut our fairway frontage but in the long run it will probably yield us more profit because we've got a better course."

Among Brian Silva's projects have been the design and construction of Firestone West at Akron, Ohio., and The Captains at Brewster, Mass. The latter was cited by Golf Digest as the best new public course of 1965. Silva is an architectural historian and unabashed Dye fan. "Pete's my idol. I'm like a schoolgirl with a crush around him. He's my all-time super hero," said Silva. "If you didn't know, you'd think he was a window washer around town. He's just a regular guy. But he's brilliant. Has a feel for the ground and a feel for the variety of golf shots that should be required by a good golf course that very few have had."

Dye studied business in school. He took a few agronomy courses at Purdue but nowhere any landscape architecture or engineering. Those were innate aspects of his genius. At Harbour Town, Dye took a parcel of swampland whose elevation varied no more than 4 feet and built eight ponds to drain both land and player. He routed TPC at Sawgrass on a napkin over lunch with Beman. There, he drained another swamp by building a moat around the entire property. Energy crisis? Escalating maintenance costs? Dye built the TPC on 415 acres. Only 60 required regular maintenance. In earlier times that approach has solved water-shortage projects. Old Marsh GC at Palm Beach Gardens may top them all. It is built on a lobe of the Everglades teeming with rare grasses and wildlife. Interstate 95 stretches from Maine to Miami but the environmental concerns at Old Marsh were so numerous and complex, the freeway was routed around it. Dye was permitted, within carefully prescribed limits, within carefully prescribed limits, to build a golf course but he couldn't raise or lower the marsh's water level or bring his course into it. He devised a sump pump system, placed it beneath the fairways and built a lake through which drainage is filtered, then run off through a canal.

"It's been 2 1/2 years, there have been 6 and 7 inch rains and it drains better than any course in South Florida," said Dye. "The environmental people called it 'an environmental triumph' and made it a prototype. All the other designers down there want to kill me because they're making all of them go the that type of drainage."

So who needs engineering? Alister Mackenzie (Augusta National, Cypress Point) was a physician. C.B. MacDonald (Chicago GC, National Golf Links, St. Louis CC) was a businessman. Donald Ross (Pinehurst No. 2, Seminole, Scioto, Oakland Hills, Oak Hill) was a golf pro and greenskeeper. All had a feel for the land and a love of the game.

"Pete would kill me if he heard me say this, but I think he's more artist than architect," said Crooked Stick golf professional Jim Ferriell.

"Maybe the only think in golf course architecture unchanged by Dye's success is his hat size. He's the same today as he was 30 years ago," said Pete's youthful mother, Elizabeth, who holds the fort in Gulf Stream while and Alice are on the road 10 months a years. "Pink's the one. I'm glad he didn't know how successful Pete was going to become because you couldn't have lived with him. Pink loved it, loved everything he did. Pink lost his eyesight before he died (in 1973) but he was there when Pete was building Casa de Campo. When Pete was grading the greens he'd feel around with his foot and say, 'I don't think this is quite right'."

Perry's Dye Designs is a going concern that handles course work on the West Coast and across the ocean. Dye's other son, P.B., operates P.B. Dye Inc. P.B., 33, employs a half-dozen people and works mostly on the East Coast. Pete and Alice operate alone and wherever. Alice still is winning titles and campaigning for women in golf. She has swung USGA support behind her fight for two sets of tees and two handicap and slope ratings on each course for the growing number of women playing the game.

Pete will break ground Monday for a course on Kiawah Island, off Charleston, S.C. That gives him 28 months to reward Walser's and Vossler's supreme confidence in him. The 1991 Ryder Cup is scheduled to be played on whatever Dye produces.

It's a project that stirs Dye at a point in his career when some do not. He has slowed down, Leer estimates he commands a big sign fee and is certain he could get more. Dye would build a course he wanted to build for $5. He wouldn't touch one he didn't for $5 million. Pete always has marched to a different drummer.

"He's an old shoe," said Powell, Dye's professional partner in the annual Pete Dye Cup National Pro-Am at Crooked Stick. "He's obviously worth whatever he wants to be but it doesn't mater to him at all. He as no clue how much money he's got. He's lucky to have $50 in his pocket on a good day.

There are things more important than money. Dye holds his game in reverence. So, too his predecessors. He speaks of "Mr. Ross, Mr. MacDonald, Mr. Jones and Dr. Mackenzie."

Make the "Mr. Dye", too.

"His impact has been major. He did golf courses in the late '60s and '70's that became the style of the '80's," said Fazio. "he's definitely earned his spot." And he's not a new addition, he's been there for a while.

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Last Updated August 13, 1996 by Toshi
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