Tom P: Pacific Dunes may not favor a fade as much as some of our other courses, because I was very conscious that Jim Urbina hits a power fade and I was trying to balance that out in the design of some of the holes. For example, on #8 the dogleg right, where we did not have much natural stuff to work with, my idea for the hole was to see if we could design the hole to reward a draw off the tee and the second shot, instead of a fade. The first hole I could think of that did that was the third at Woking in England, so that's what I ran with.
The second difference between our work and Coore & Crenshaw's is, as some people have alluded to, the green complexes. Sand Hills and some holes at Friars Head are exceptions, but generally Bill likes to build his greens with a foot or three of sand fill for the green pad, and then do the tie-ins off that. He also sometimes locates his greens by filling at the base of a hill or the end of a little valley (Bandon Trails #4, 13 and 15, Friars Head #16, Old Sandwich #13 are some examples) ... I like these green sites and I always say to myself, why don't I ever think of something like that?
I don't think of it because we rarely ever bring fill to the green site unless the drainage is really a big problem. Pete Dye was a big proponent of locating his greens at grade on a slight natural high spot so the drainage automatically worked around it, and I took that to heart; at High Pointe we didn't have any means of moving earth other than me on a bulldozer, so every green started from ground level. You get a wider variety of greens in this way, I think, and it's one of the major differences between my work and most others'. But it's possible that Bill's greens are more visible from the fairway than mine, because I'm starting on a high point and cutting down, and he's starting in a low and filling slightly up.