"What I saw in TPC is a golf course that no one would ever confuse with an old British links course (even a "perfected" or "modified" one); a golf course that was specifically designed to challenge the greatest players in the world; and a golf course that could not have and would not have been built anywhere else in the world but America -- but one that still manifested the traditional and solid golf architectural principles of the past as found in the British courses, albeit in a startling new and inventive way."
PeterP:
Yes sir, I think that's very true and also why, when one looks very carefully at WHAT-ALL Pete Dye (and probably Alice too) did with golf architecture probably needs its VERY OWN and VERY SPECIAL place in the entire history and evolution of golf course architecture.
The truly fascinating thing to me about Pete Dye is how he combined both really really valid basic architectural principles as the relate to things like playability/strategies and shot values and such with a pretty blatant artifcal look in some aspects of his architecture.
Pete didn't do that fascinating combination by accident, in my opinion---he did it very much by design and I believe I've known why for many years. The other interesting thing about that, and perhaps great thing, is I don't believe he borrowed the combination of it from anyone---it all pretty much came straight out of his own head and his own imagination, and it might've been the ultimate borrowing of some aspects of the old to come up with a combination of something truly new and unique!
I think in many ways Pete Dye (and Alice), despite his fame, might've always been a bit overlooked in the pantheon of architectural greatness and his name will probably continue to suffer that fate. It's not that he's not famous, just that he probably ought to be more famous.
I'm just fascinated by people in this art form and business who found what made them great somewhere in the reaches of their imagination or even just in the timing of things in their lives. I'm fascinated that they never got what they did from someone else at all----it really was uniquely their own. If you think about it, to pull that off as Pete Dye did, probably takes some luck and a whole lot of guts. The thing that may keep his over-all greatness down somewhat is that vestige of the look artificiality or the blatantly man-made (which I think he has always loved) about his style as well as the fact that Pete has never hid the fact that he really likes the idea of "hard" or "difficult". That probably came from the fact that both he and Alice were really good players but maybe more from the fact that both of them have a pretty cool sense of humor about all this!