Golf course designer going strong
By CRAIG DOLCH
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
PORT ST. LUCIE — Like many avid golfers, Pete and Alice Dye took a trip to Scotland to visit the home of their sport.
Little did anyone know how much that six-week journey in 1963 would transform American golf for the next half-century. The Dyes played some golf on that trip, but mostly they soaked in the surroundings and came back to the U.S. determined to build that style of golf course.
"That trip was the fundamental basis of everything we've done," Pete Dye, whose wife has assisted on most of his designs, said Tuesday. "We saw so many golf courses - at least two a day. I had never seen anything like it. It turned my career around 100 percent."
That visit not only shaped his vision, but also has had a profound impact on a generation of golf-course architects who realized there were more creative ways to build golf courses than simply move dirt and make them play longer.
Dye, who lives in Delray Beach, built shorter courses, while legends, such as Robert Trent Jones, lengthened them. Dye preferred sharp, abrupt features like swales and mounds and hollows rather than long, graceful lines. He built small, difficult greens with lots of contour instead of massive greens. He moved as little dirt as possible. He bought into the Donald Ross theory that holes should have tee shots that go from left to right and green angles that move from right to left - or vice versa.
Dye's latest work was unveiled Tuesday when his aptly named Dye Course was re-opened at the PGA Golf Club. This wasn't a traditional golf course renovation as much as it was a historical restoration. The PGA of America, which runs the three-course club, wasn't looking to turn the Dye Course into a typical resort-style layout. Neither was Dye. He's very proud of the links-style course not found near water.
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