[Tom_Doak]

I was at Crooked Stick yesterday with some old friends for Alice Dye's memorial service.  In the morning I went out with one of the members and made a tour of the course, and after thinking about it some more on my way home, I have to say I don't think Crooked Stick ever got its due as a groundbreaking design.


I'm not a huge fan of the course as it is today.  I saw it first in 1981 when it was still more or less intact, and I was there in 1986 when Mr. Dye started rebuilding the greens and introducing some elements that look more like his then-contemporary work at PGA West, and my goodness it's much different today, because Pete never stopped tinkering with it.  But it's mostly a matter of priorities [or, a matter of taste] whether you think it's better now or the way it used to be, and I don't want to argue with Nick R. over more than one course at a time.


What I wanted to point out is that regardless of how you like its style, Crooked Stick, started in 1964 and completed in 1967, was perhaps the first golf course created via large-scale earthmoving.  It was a cornfield to start, and all of the abrupt elevation changes you see there today were created by machine.  When I was there with Pete in 1986, he took me over to the right side of the 12th fairway, and showed me how he had dug a small volcano to bank up the outside of the dogleg. 


In an era where Mr. Jones and his peers were still just building green complexes and fairway bunkers and ponds, Pete Dye came along and made ten-foot cuts and fills to give life to his fairways and to contain views across the property to just what he wanted you to see.  And he was doing that 50+ years ago, on a course basically funded with his own money and that of his friends, pretty much before anybody else had even thought of doing it.**


But if Pete hadn't shown me a little bit of that, in person, I would never have guessed how much work was done there, and even then it took me thirty years to realize just how revolutionary it must have been at the time. 


Pete was not willing to settle for the land he had, if he could figure out a way to make it better.  That's not my style, but one of the reasons I sought to find a different style was that I did not think I could ever compete with Mr. Dye at conjuring golf holes from nothing.  I'm not sure anyone else did, either.




**  I suppose someone is going to respond to this by saying "Lido", but that's not the same at all.  Anybody could dredge material to build up a flat site, and copy templates.  Crooked Stick may or may not have been a better course than Lido was, but it was certainly much more creative.

[Mark Fedeli]

Tom, could you put up here the "Muir of Golf" photo you posted on Instagram? That original routing looked sensational.

[Peter Pallotta]

Tom -
in your view, from where did that breakthrough of Mr Dye's come? What could've been the genesis of that kind of gca creativity? What was the impetus, or the precedent?
I mean: he grew up with  (natural) lay of the land courses, and then in his 20s spent much time with Mr Ross and the lay of the land Pinehurst courses, and then he played many of America's classic lay of the land courses as a top amateur, and then later he travelled to GB&I to study the original & greatest lay of the land courses there.
And then one day he jumped on a machine and starting making 10 foot cuts & fills!
??

[Tom_Doak]

Tom, could you put up here the "Muir of Golf" photo you posted on Instagram? That original routing looked sensational.

Mark:


I don't have the ability to post photos here, as I don't have my photos on a sharing site online.  Anyone interested can look at it on Instagram @doakgolf . . . apologies for the poor quality photo and reflections, it was hanging in a not-well-lit hallway and yesterday was not the day to ask to take it down to photograph it.


It's interesting to note that the routing posted is very different to today's.  That was one of the reasons for my revelation, in that I noticed how different some of the holes were and it was probably because the earthmoving features we see today were built for the final routing, and not the previous version.  If you look carefully you'll see that the back nine [which was built first] was a lot closer to the "Muir of Golf" plan, with today's 12th through 16th holes and the 18th all part of that plan, albeit in a different sequence.


The front nine was built two years later, after the resolution of some financing hold-ups, and interestingly, the difference is that they created a couple of prime housing cul-de-sacs jutting into the course from east and west, which was probably to help fund the completion.  I never heard Pete mention that; I will have to go back to Chris Wirthwein's excellent club history to see if there is more detail on whether anyone else influenced that change.

[Tom_Doak]

Tom -
in your view, from where did that breakthrough of Mr Dye's come? What could've been the genesis of that kind of gca creativity? What was the impetus, or the precedent?
I mean: he grew up with  (natural) lay of the land courses, and then in his 20s spent much time with Mr Ross and the lay of the land Pinehurst courses, and then he played many of America's classic lay of the land courses as a top amateur, and then later he travelled to GB&I to study the original & greatest lay of the land courses there.
And then one day he jump on a machine and starting making 10 foot cuts & fills!
??

Peter:


Mr. and Mrs. Dye made their first big trip to Scotland in 1963.  Crooked Stick started in 1964.


The plan referenced by Mark Fedeli that was on the wall at Crooked Stick has the name of the course as "Muir of Golf," which is a tribute to the little course at Muir of Ord, Scotland, that Pete and Alice played on their way to Dornoch.  I don't know if he really liked that course or was just tickled by the name of it, but I remember vividly that when I returned from my year overseas and was showing them a bunch of my pictures, Pete said, "I bet you didn't get to Muir of Ord," and dammit, I had not.  It was the only time I ever heard him mention it.

[Mark Fedeli]

Tom, if you don't mind, reposting it here from your instagram account. Happy to delete if you'd like me to:

[Tom_Doak]

Mark:


That's great.  Someday someone will have to teach me how you did that, though I'm not likely to listen 


(I used to think Pete Dye was a dinosaur when it came to technology.  Now I try to be more like him.)

[Nick Ribeiro]

Tom,


You wont get an argument from me on Crooked Stick, or any Dye design for that matter. I'm a fan. The first Dye course I ever played was Teeth of The Dog back before I stopped flying.


I am not sure why you thought you'd catch an argument from me on another GREAT challenging course with such narrow fairways? In fact, quite possibly thinner fairways than Bethpage Black? A golf course even longer than Bethpage Black as well? With championship rough?


If you were trying to get these drones to start talking about the amazing width, options off the tee, and all the half par holes, I am sorry I ruined the fun. Some here are in so deep, they may still bite though! 


I'll be interested to hear why everyone else likes Crooked Stick on here....

[Bill Charles]

Tom,


You wont get an argument from me on Crooked Stick, or any Dye design for that matter. I'm a fan. The first Dye course I ever played was Teeth of The Dog back before I stopped flying.


I am not sure why you thought you'd catch an argument from me on another GREAT challenging course with such narrow fairways? In fact, quite possibly thinner fairways than Bethpage Black? A golf course even longer than Bethpage Black as well? With championship rough?


If you were trying to get these drones to start talking about the amazing width, options off the tee, and all the half par holes, I am sorry I ruined the fun. Some here are in so deep, they may still bite though! 


I'll be interested to hear why everyone else likes Crooked Stick on here....

I don’t like crooked stick. It can’t be great for the reasons you list. Like Bethpage the fairways are to narrow. Just because someone else likes it doesn’t mean it’s a great or even good course. Crooked stick is not a great course. How you like them apples?

[Kalen Braley]

Tom,

Great OP with some interesting insights.

I do have one follow-up question, how would you compare the Rawls, which you basically built from a flat canvas, to Crooked Stick? 

Thanks!

[Tom_Doak]

Tom,

Great OP with some interesting insights.

I do have one follow-up question, how would you compare the Rawls, which you basically built from a flat canvas, to Crooked Stick? 

Kalen:


Crooked Stick has 50 years of maturity now, The Rawls just 15 - and I haven't seen it in 10+ years, so I can't tell you how well it has matured. 


Crooked Stick was about that age when I first saw it in 1981, and I never would have suspected how much work had been done to build it, as the native grasses and shrubs and trees had matured to the point that the out-of-play areas looked natural.


I don't think The Rawls Course could ever really pull that off, because it's landscaped differently than most of that part of Texas, and because Lubbock is so flat that the contours are hard to believe, even if you could find those same sorts of contours twenty miles outside of town.  In short, we tried to make The Rawls a believable landscape, but nobody would have been happy if it looked like the two large city blocks it is built in   


I think the amount of earth moved at Crooked Stick was maybe half as much as The Rawls, but the difference is all that we had to put a lot of fill on the edge of the property at The Rawls Course to hide neighboring buildings.  There is none of that at Crooked Stick, but I'd guess the amount they moved to create their lakes and create topography is similar to what was done on the interior of The Rawls Course.

[Kalen Braley]

Tom,

Thanks for that.  True to your word that's the the only flat land (that i'm aware of) you've dabbled with, although Common Ground and the new one in Houston may be close.

In general thou, before knowing what i know now, I would have never guessed that Pete was your mentor.  Based on the select few of his courses I've played, and far more I've seen on TV...vs the larger selection of yours I've played I have a difficult time finding any similarities to be honest.

What would you say you've incorporated from his design philosophy into yours, even if you've put your own flavor/twist on it?

[Tom_Doak]

In general thou, before knowing what i know now, I would have never guessed that Pete was your mentor.  Based on the select few of his courses I've played, and far more I've seen on TV...vs the larger selection of yours I've played I have a difficult time finding any similarities to be honest.

What would you say you've incorporated from his design philosophy into yours, even if you've put your own flavor/twist on it?

Kalen:


I learned most of what I know about building golf courses from Pete Dye:  how it's done, how much help you need, how much work it is, why plans are no substitute for being there, etc.


I also learned a ton about design philosophy from him, mostly while working on the plans for the Stadium course at PGA West, which gave me a month or so to question him about why he wanted to do this or that. 


Pete was always looking for things that would make good players uncomfortable, especially if they were things that wouldn't bother the average golfer so much [because everything you do on the ground makes the course more difficult for the average golfer, in a compound-interest sort of way].  He had noticed that for the pros, length was not much of a challenge anymore, so he was trying to include more short par-4's that presented them with awkward options.  He was also big on very long par-4's that were not a difficult five for the amateur [presumably with a stroke in hand], but tough for the pros.  All of those things were the same things I had picked up from seeing MacKenzie courses, and from spending my year in the UK, and I have continued to try and work them into my own courses.


The only thing I didn't like about Pete's style was having so much water in play - because artificial water hazards mostly look alike, and it's hard to make them look natural - so I've tried to stay away from that.  And I put more contour into my greens than Pete does, because I'm a fan of MacKenzie courses, and I haven't had to worry about what will happen if they play a tournament on my courses and get the greens "stupid fast".  [Crooked Stick's greens were quite heavily contoured originally, but Pete had to change them in 1986 so they would work for tournament play.]


So, in short, I've tried to make sure my courses don't LOOK like Pete Dye's courses, but there are still a lot of similarities in the philosophy behind them.  That will probably be even more apparent when you see our new project at Memorial Park, where I am operating under many of the same constraints that Pete had to work with for a lot of his famous courses.

[herrstein]

I played in a USGA Mid-Am Qualifier in 1991 at Crooked Stick. As I came off the 13th green and headed for the 14th tee, I saw a guy on a bulldozer behind the back tee. I walked over to see what was going on. It was Pete Dye, whom I knew fairly well from The Honors Course construction and subsequent meetings and play. He saw me coming and said, "Hey, Digger," which is what he called me. I asked what he was doing, and he said, "I finally figured out how to make Greg Norman hit a 4-iron to a par 4."
Which was true, Norman did have to hit longer irons in that year. But an unknown named John Daly was flying the corner Pete had lengthened, and I believe Daly hit 9-irons in. I specifically remember watching him birdie that hole at least once, maybe more?
I later played Crooked Stick with Pete Dye and Steve Smyers, then played Smyers' Wolf Run with the two. It was a blast to hear them needle each other.

[Kalen Braley]

Tom,

So at the point in your career did you think about Naturalism in how you might build your own courses one day or sort of evolve into that later?

From my view, Pete's courses for the most part seem more deliberate or imposed on the land as opposed to a Pac Dunes or Ballyneal or others you've done that don't seem to fight the terrain.  Beechtree is the one course I've played where it was closer to that, but still fun to play and also early on in your career.

I guess this is a bit of a tangent, but I still have internal debate over how important a course presents to you...as long as its fun, engaging, with lots of interesting shots and variety.  Its probably why I'm one of the few on GCA who really like playing Engh's courses and using the measure of "would you want to play it again right away", I can certainly say yes to his as well all of yours that I've played.   

[Lou_Duran]

"The Stick" has two major flaws: the topography is not exciting and it is a residential course.  I would happily play most of my golf there for the rest of my life.

There are some 34k courses in the world; around 16k in the U.S.  I think that most reasonable, experienced golfers would rate CS in the top 100-300 (GD has it near the bottom of the Top 100 in the U.S.).  If this doesn't qualify as being great, then perhaps our scale may require some calibration.

[Nick Ribeiro]

"The Stick" has two major flaws: the topography is not exciting and it is a residential course.  I would happily play most of my golf there for the rest of my life.

There are some 34k courses in the world; around 16k in the U.S.  I think that most reasonable, experienced golfers would rate CS in the top 100-300 (GD has it near the bottom of the Top 100 in the U.S.).  If this doesn't qualify as being great, then perhaps our scale may require some calibration.

Lou,


You are venturing into very dangerous territory. I like it. And I agree!

[Tom_Doak]

Tom,

So at the point in your career did you think about Naturalism in how you might build your own courses one day or sort of evolve into that later?

From my view, Pete's courses for the most part seem more deliberate or imposed on the land as opposed to a Pac Dunes or Ballyneal or others you've done that don't seem to fight the terrain.  Beechtree is the one course I've played where it was closer to that, but still fun to play and also early on in your career.

I guess this is a bit of a tangent, but I still have internal debate over how important a course presents to you...as long as its fun, engaging, with lots of interesting shots and variety.  Its probably why I'm one of the few on GCA who really like playing Engh's courses and using the measure of "would you want to play it again right away", I can certainly say yes to his as well all of yours that I've played.   

Kalen:


I realized when I worked for Mr. Dye that he was sort of handicapped by his own success, and the idea that he didn't need a good piece of land to produce a great course . . . so he rarely got them.  [He was passed over for Sand Hills by his former client Mr. Youngscap, partly for that reason.]  Teeth of the Dog was an exception, as is The Golf Club, and it's no accident those are some of his very best courses; so I decided I should try and become the guy for clients who did have a good piece of land.


I was really lucky that my very first project was a really nice piece of ground, and that's how minimalism / naturalism was born:  the idea of erring on the side of doing too little, instead of too much, as I had seen on so many older courses.  You don't have that luxury in a cornfield.

[Bill Charles]

"The Stick" has two major flaws: the topography is not exciting and it is a residential course.  I would happily play most of my golf there for the rest of my life.

There are some 34k courses in the world; around 16k in the U.S.  I think that most reasonable, experienced golfers would rate CS in the top 100-300 (GD has it near the bottom of the Top 100 in the U.S.).  If this doesn't qualify as being great, then perhaps our scale may require some calibration.

Classifying Crooked Stick as great perhaps mean you need a little more than calibration. It’s a terrible tough slog from start to finish. It never gets easier. It never gets more playable. It is not fun. It can not be considered anywhere close to great.

[Joe Perches]

When I was there with Pete in 1986, he took me over to the right side of the 12th fairway, and showed me how he had dug a small volcano to bank up the outside of the dogleg. 

I'm not sure what you mean by 'dug a small volcano'.
How does one do that?  I've never seen the course and this is one of the few pictures I can find of it.

[Tom_Doak]

When I was there with Pete in 1986, he took me over to the right side of the 12th fairway, and showed me how he had dug a small volcano to bank up the outside of the dogleg. 

I'm not sure what you mean by 'dug a small volcano'.
How does one do that?  I've never seen the course and this is one of the few pictures I can find of it.

You can see the rim of the "volcano" just on the right side of your picture.


Basically, Mr. Dye started thirty yards right of the 12th fairway [between holes 12 and 11], dug a hole, and pushed up the excavated material out toward the edges of the fairways to bank them up. 


From the tee, all you see is the horizon of the ridge/bank, and then maybe something on the other side, so it reads visually as a hill, and you don't notice there is actually a deep hole in the middle where you thought the hill was.


However, I'm told that some members drive it into the volcano because it opens up the best angle to the green, and they have to keep the grass short there so players can find their ball after it's disappeared over the horizon.

[John Emerson]

I’ve only seen Crooked Stick once during th Sr PGA a few years back and I remember many unique and intriguing features.  I really liked 18 and the par 3 12th or 13th??? 1 was a really good hole also.  Most of the guys hit irons off the tee. I also liked the use of the railroad ties.  Off topic here...Not to discredit PD or the course but lthe neighborhood in which it sits has some of the coolest home details I’ve seen.  The more I type the more I’m remembering :/

[Ted Sturges]

Thanks Tom for your comments...great stuff.


I am a member at CS and agree with some of the "non-Tom" comments that are posted here, and I disagree with others.


For the comment above that the fairways are narrow like Bethpage, that's inaccurate.  The fairways at Crooked Stick, and the playing corridors in general, and generous and encourage one to hit driver nearly everywhere.


Disagree that the topography is unexciting.  To Tom's initial post, Pete created something pretty cool out of an Indiana cornfield.  Most would have no idea that the property was dead flat at the start.  The back nine is especially interesting topography wise.


Agree that the course is handicapped by the housing (to Tom's comment, that helped Mr. Dye get the project completed), and that it is a "tough slog" all the way around.  The course is very penal (16-17-18 provides a finish where a good round can end with three X's)...too penal for my taste (I was a 6 when I joined and I'm now a 10, headed higher I fear, due to how hard this place is).


I like Tom's comment that CS perhaps didn't get the acclaim it deserved as something special built on a poor piece of land.  50 years later, Crooked Stick is a pretty cool place.


TS

[Nick Ribeiro]

Thanks Tom for your comments...great stuff.


I am a member at CS and agree with some of the "non-Tom" comments that are posted here, and I disagree with others.


For the comment above that the fairways are narrow like Bethpage, that's inaccurate.  The fairways at Crooked Stick, and the playing corridors in general, and generous and encourage one to hit driver nearly everywhere.


Disagree that the topography is unexciting.  To Tom's initial post, Pete created something pretty cool out of an Indiana cornfield.  Most would have no idea that the property was dead flat at the start.  The back nine is especially interesting topography wise.


Agree that the course is handicapped by the housing (to Tom's comment, that helped Mr. Dye get the project completed), and that it is a "tough slog" all the way around.  The course is very penal (16-17-18 provides a finish where a good round can end with three X's)...too penal for my taste (I was a 6 when I joined and I'm now a 10, headed higher I fear, due to how hard this place is).


I like Tom's comment that CS perhaps didn't get the acclaim it deserved as something special built on a poor piece of land.  50 years later, Crooked Stick is a pretty cool place.


TS

Ted,


Regarding the fairways are narrow like Bethpage is inaccurate, have they considerably widened or tightened the fairways since google earth last updated? It appears they are very similar widths according to google? Or do you consider the widths both offer to be generous?

[Ross Harmon]

Funny to hear people knock Crooked Stick as a "residential" course. There's maybe a dozen or so houses (one being Pete's) you can see from the course and they are all set far out of play. You never cross a street once in 18 holes. Tough crowd here...

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