I don't know how much or little this will add to this thread, but here is the Preface to my book PETE DYE GOLF COURSES---50 YEARS OF VISIONARY DESIGN, which had the good fortune to win the International Network of Golf Book of the Year Award in 2008:
PREFACE:
URBANA COUNTRY CLUB
Paul Francis “Pink” Dye
With nine holes added by P.B. Dye
It is remarkable how life so often turns on a whim, a chance encounter, a moment of happenstance. If it was not for a timely automobile breakdown some 90 years ago, there would probably be no such thing as a Pete Dye golf course.
“My dad had never played golf before,” explains Pete Dye. “Several years before I was born, his automobile broke down on the old Federal Highway Number 40 when he was returning from Washington D.C. back to our hometown of Urbana, Ohio. The breakdown occurred in Farmington, Pennsylvania, near a historic hotel called the Summit Inn Resort. He stayed overnight while repairs were made, hit some golf balls, and played nine holes for the first time. He was hooked!”
“Pink” Dye quickly decided a course was needed in Urbana, and procured 60-odd acres from his in-laws for construction. “My mother’s side was the Johnson family,” continues Pete. “They had about a thousand acres, and they gave dad some hilly, difficult acreage that couldn’t be cultivated as farmland.” Thus began a tradition of Dye architects making do with exceedingly difficult terrain.
“My dad got a small group of investors together, sought out the great architect Donald Ross who was working nearby in Ohio at the time for some advice, and started to work building his own course. It was six holes to begin with, and then three more were added the next year. I came into the world a few years after that, and as a boy, began working on that golf course, cutting greens, watering and helping with routine maintenance from as far back as I can remember.”
The course itself is partially wooded, surrounded by cornfield. It features some long range views amidst its moderate elevation changes, with a couple of farm ponds and a few adjacent farmhouses. There are some uphill blind shots, small greens canted from back to front, and no shortage of side-hill or uneven lies. Ohio has long been a golf-rich state, with superior venues like Scioto, Camargo, Firestone, Inverness, Muirfield Village and the Pete Dye-designed Golf Club, to name but half-a-dozen. Among these bigger names, the rural qualities of the Urbana Country Club, particularly after its 1993 expansion, qualify it as one of the state’s hidden gems.
“When my 94 year-old grandmother told me to finish the golf course that grandfather started, that was built all those years prior on her family’s land, all I could say was, “yes ma’am, I’m ready,” recalls P.B. Dye, who undertook the task some 70 years after the original course was built. Working from a course routing produced by his late uncle Roy, Pete’s brother, P.B. made certain to emulate the pushed-up greens that his grandfather had originally built, though little other dirt was moved in construction. “I could live anywhere I’d like,” continues P.B. “But I choose to make my summer home in a log cabin next to the second tee of this golf course. That’s how much it means to me.”
Andy Doss, like his first cousin P.B., is the grandson of course creator Pink Dye. He is also Pete’s nephew, and a former president of the Urbana Country Club. “Our expansion budget was tight, so we knocked down the necessary trees, opted for single-line irrigation, required minimal drainage because there was so little earth moved, and tried to make the addition fit in seamlessly with the original course,” states Doss, who runs the in-town insurance firm that was begun by his great-grandfather in 1893. He relays an anecdote that paints a clear picture of the rural sensibility of the golf course and the small town of 11,000, located midway between Dayton and Columbus in central Ohio. “When the additional nine holes were built, P.B. wanted to construct dirt greens like our grandfather did, instead of modern sand greens. We got the dirt from a local potato farmer, and when the bent grass starting to come up, so did a few potato sprouts!”
”It’s a pleasant Midwestern golf course, no frills,” offers Perry Dye. “But the fact that my grandfather insisted on building a golf course in a town that at the time only had 6,000 residents, with maybe six golfers, is really something. And now here we are, nearly a century later, with his descendants building courses all over the world.”
The original and indigenous Dye design, Urbana Country Club, is woven into the fabric of the community, and has been a simple and straightforward place to enjoy the game since shortly after Pink Dye turned his first shovelful of earth back in 1922. “It’s where the story really begins,” says Pete Dye, ostensibly referring to his 50-year career as a course designer, but at the same time, to the celebration of his remarkable career that follows.