To answer BCrosby's earlier questions (that he wished someone would ask Pete Dye), here are comments Pete told me during one of the interviews I did with he and Alice as I was researching and writing the history of Crooked Stick Golf Club. (
www.crookedstickbook.com)
BCrosby asked...
At the time of your first tour of the great Scottish courses, what was it about US courses that you thought was unsatisfactory?"Answers" from Pete/Alice:
From the book:
PETE: “When we first got in the design business, we went up to Chicago to study the courses, because those were the best we knew of. I had played a lot of tournaments there and people considered them the real greats. But to my eye they all looked the same – all of them green, green, green – carefully manicured…tree-lined – and every single green had the same back-to-front slope. I remember thinking: ‘This is not what I want to build.’”
Not in the book:
ALICE: ...we went to Chicago and everything was…
PETE: …tree lined…
ALICE: …bowling alleys in trees…
In the interviews, Pete also talked to me about Robert Trent Jones and how he (Pete) envisioned doing things a bit differently than Jones...
Not in the book:
PETE: "Mr. Jones was a great friend of Alice and a friend of mine. He was a wonderful person. He had come in the business just before the war and after the war. And he did a great thing. He was really smart. There was starting to be a need for golf courses around the country. So he developed a plan and his plan was worked out where certain type of bulldozers could build a tee and green…stuff like that...he did a lot of great golf courses. And he built them all over... But he didn’t change that plan from Paducah, Kentucky to…anyplace. It was the same plan.
So…when I got into this thing, I wasn’t against Mr. Jones, but I figured you had to relate back to the way they were built by hand…beforehand. So, at that time…I didn’t know how to fill a bucket with sand. I never knew how to put dirt in a sand box. So we bought a bulldozer. I bought an end loader. And it finally dawned on me that a lot of these things would not do what I wanted to do. I couldn’t get them to work. So, I improvised out here at Crooked Stick all the time…with John Geupel’s (founding member and Caterpillar equipment dealer) equipment and what little I’d bought to find out how I could build things…
BCrosby asked...
Put differently, what was it about the Scottish courses that you thought most important to import into courses in the US?"Answers" from Pete/Alice:
In the book:
PETE: “The rumpled fairways, the semi-blind shots – I saw things I’d never seen in the United States,” recalls Pete. “That’s where those ideas started for me.”
Not in the book:
PETE: Over there, all those rolls and contours they have over there…they’re not manmade. It’s just the recession of the sea.
ALICE: I think one thing we noticed in Scotland, too and felt was an openness.
PETE: ...I came back from Scotland and those courses we saw... this (Crooked Stick) is the first golf course that we tried to put fairway grass and then have fescue in the rough and get a real contrast, cause the different grass is what really frames the golf course (over there). And this is the first golf course in the Midwest that had bent, (or Merion blue) fairways and really totally fescue (in the rough).
NOTE: You can read a couple of chapters from my book, including the one about the Dye's trip to Scotland at
http://www.crookedstickbook.com/bookexcerpt.html