The Oddities of Pete Dye
In which I venture nervously into Golf Course Architecture
I need to start this by saying I’m hardly an expert on Golf Course Architecture (GCA, for those who are passionate about it). I’ve played a fair amount of golf courses, enough to know that I tend to enjoy some courses by certain architects, while others names send up red flags for me. (And then, in the middle, are tons of talented people who a jerk like me barely knows their name.)
Designers like Bill Coore/Ben Crenshaw, Tom Doak. Gil Hanse, Mike Strantz (RIP) and Kyle Franz, not to mention a few guys you might have heard of like Donald Ross and Old Tom Morris will get me hyped every time. On the downside, Jack Nicklaus has never built a course he didn’t think would be improved with a waterfall or three, and in general Pete Dye’s courses always have seemed to me like an exercise in brutality.
Golf wasn't meant to be a fair game. — Pete Dye
The above quote - or a bastardization of it - is something I’ve heard for awhile. I’ve heard it expressed as “golf wasn’t meant to be a FUN game,” and that’s rung true for me and my limited experiences with Dye courses. And it’s seemed like the exact opposite of what I want from golf.
Until recently, the Pete Dye courses I’ve played are:
Carlton Oaks, San Diego
La Quinta - Dunes, Palm Springs
PGA West Stadium, Palm Springs
Legends (Moorland), Myrtle Beach
That’s it. But of course, as an avid watcher on the PGA Tour, we see TPC Sawgrass at THE PLAYERS, Harbour Town in South Carolina at the RBC (held just last weekend), TPC Louisiana for the Zurich Classic (held this week) and other sites like Kiawah Island (the 2021 PGA) and Whistling Straits (the 2021 Ryder Cup, prior major tournaments) are landmark courses ranked inside the top-10 of most lists.
In short, Pete Dye is a menace. And I’ve always thought of his courses as brutal tests of both distance AND target golf. For those who don’t play, that means he is asking you to hit the ball reasonably far (or else land in water or a hazard of some sort) but to also have enough control on WHERE the ball is going when you try to bash it that you don’t land in a bunker or yet another hazard.
It’s hard. His sandtraps with their railroad ties gave me nightmares after playing Carlton Oaks over 20 years ago (I think I may have had USPS forward my mail there, as I wasn’t going anywhere), and due to some friends insisting we play PGA West from the back tees, I was a broken man finishing up the Stadium Course. (I also spent some time in the sand trap you see above.)
I pair that with the stern tests of Sawgrass and Kiawah, and it’s easy to think that Dye is a one size fits all kind of a designer.
But that’s not really fair. I don’t really remember much about Legends (Moorland) except that it was one of three courses there, and I liked all of them. (Honestly, I thought Tom Doak designed all three of them.)
And Harbour Town is NOTHING like a Sawgrass or Kiawah. In fact, it’s sort of the opposite - it’s tight, but distance is not the major question Dye asks golfers to solve for, it’s making sure you hit to the right spots and have control over your irons and wedges. Get out of position and you could literally have no real way to get the ball anywhere close on the green. Just ask Shane Lowry, one of the best short game players in the world, who bladed an approach straight into the water and a double-bogey to knock himself out of contention last weekend.
But, I’ve never played Harbour Town, so I can’t really talk too much to say it except I love its logo and it is one of the tour stops I’d love to be able to play one day.
But I have played another Pete Dye course I didn’t name above - because I only recently played it, LOVED it, and then much later found out it’s a Dye course. It’s the Royal Hawaiian Golf Club on Oahu, and it’s sort of nothing like anything above. I mean, it’s HARD. And it’s tight - I lost three or four golf balls, and considered it a victory. Originally designed as a private course (and also, apparently, recently touched up by Saudi apologist Greg Norman), it’s one of the best examples I can think of where a golf architect builds a course into the land he finds, instead of blowing everything up and forcing a course into the landscape. Because you couldn’t do it any other way here - it’s in the middle of what I’d call a jungle.
The thing about Royal Hawaiian is - unlike almost every other course I’ve ever played - is at no point during your round can you think, “Oh…right. I have played a lot of holes like this.” The course weaves in and out of a true jungle. It’s not walkable whatsoever (the drive in a cart between the first green and second tee is like five or six minutes), and it can be a bit damp (given that the clouds seem to be just out of reach at times. Appropriate for the surroundings, the course is a little scruffy and wild in places, and that’s fine. Everyone I saw - including the guy I played with - had a grin on his face, because it’s just so weird.
At one point, I noticed some railroad ties - a Pete Dye signature - acting as protection to keep a cart path free from the jungle above, and sent a joke text to a friend saying, “Pete Dye wanted in on this course,” not realizing he’d designed the whole darn thing. That’s how little this felt like a Pete Dye design. (Also? What a great joke! How hilarious are golf nerds, am I right?)
And to me, that’s the hallmark of a great golf course designer - I don’t want to walk around a course and think, “Oh, of course this looks like this, [insert designer name] is behind it.” Golf courses are fun when they belong in their environment, and sure - bunkers of sand and water hazards may not always exist and need to be built, but there’s a whole square peg/round hole thing that happens far too often in some golf course design.
Royal Hawaiian Golf Club is a prime example that Pete Dye (and his son Perry, who designed it with him - no note whether wife Alice, who often had a major say in some course designs, did work here) was a creative master who wanted his courses to be hard - but he looked for different ways to build those challenges. I will be playing a bunch of his courses in Wisconsin this fall that are going to kick the ever living crap out of me - and I can’t wait.
