Also, while I've in the past been very interested in the 'Dye-Design-Tree' and his influence on our generation of architects like Tom D and Bill Coore (and I've seen how fondly and respectfully Tom writes about Mr. Dye), I have come to believe that he didn't teach Tom so much about DESIGNING a course (said with a posh English accent) as he did about BUILDIN' 'EM (said while chomping a cigar). Similarly, I have come to believe that folks like Mr. Dye and Tom D are not CREATIVE in the same way I am, i.e. that what makes their courses work is not INTUITION and IMAGINATION but CALCULATIONS and INFORMATION.
Yep, that's pretty much spot on.
Mr. Dye did not need much help from any of us in designing golf holes. He needed help building them, so he taught us how to help with that. Most anything we absorbed about design was on our own time. Luckily, I had been doing all of that on a parallel track, with my travels, and in hindsight I think it was a great benefit that I was able to learn both parts over the same years, so that one does not dominate the other in my thought process.
Mr. Dye is the best seat-of-the-pants engineer I have ever met, with perhaps one exception [a real civil engineer]. When I saw him in November at Kiawah Island, he was going on and on about sump pumps, and how they made places like Kiawah and the TPC at Sawgrass and other projects possible to build. That was always what dominated his conversations, not what to design but how to build it. The design part he could do in his sleep, and mostly, it was not all that complex ... that's why his designs are so familiar.
I would not go so far to say that his creativity was all about calculation and information. The key to his success is that he was never afraid to tinker around and follow his intuition, and he was convinced that tinkering around would make the finished product better. Which it certainly does. Pete has a great imagination -- way more than I do -- but I never had the sense he had the finished golf hole all visualized in his head. He just knew what direction he was going and how it needed to work. I've tried to do the same.