I think Pete Dye (who is one of my favourites btw) was basically building original after original course up until PGA West. To me, you can pinpoint this as being the moment where he started to repeat himself. By no means do I think he did not good original work after this point (PDGC, Kiawah, Blackwolf Run River, Whistling Straits are obviously all great).
You can convince yourself that PGA West is not like Sawgrass, but on the back-nine alone at PGA West there are 3 holes that are basically identical to Sawgrass. The holes even have the same numbers. I will let you figure out which those are.
On another note, I really think PGA West is due for a renovation. The bunkers and mowing lines can really use some work.
Matt:
We exchanged notes on the circumstances behind this design three years ago, on the first page of this thread.
I would guess that I'm as big a fan of Mr. Dye as a person and as an artist as anyone else who posts here. And I agree with you, that there are a lot of things at the Stadium course that are repeats from the TPC at Sawgrass, and even from several of his prior courses.
The reason for that was that both clients asked him to do the same thing -- to design his idea of a perfect golf course, on land that was very different, but in both cases had no ground features to give any direction to the design.
Mr. Dye's vision of the perfect golf course was pretty well honed by then, after 25 years of building golf courses. When he sat down with me in Savannah to explain everything he wanted me to draw in January of 1984, I recognized most of the ideas right away, because they were almost exactly what he had explained to Mark Mulvoy from Sports Illustrated in an interview from 1971 about his courses at John's Island, FL. I understood that this would make the course very similar to Sawgrass, and did my best [with Pete's permission] to throw in some other ideas to try and give the course a different feel, but in particular Pete's ideas on an "ideal finish" were very well developed.
That was when I realized that I didn't want to have such a strong vision of what an ideal course would be, because it could wind up being counterproductive.
I don't think you would feel that the courses were so similar, had they not built the island green 17th. It was not part of the original plan, but the client asked Pete to reconsider. I think if it had been any other client, Pete would have threatened to walk away from the project over that -- after all, he was the one who taught me that I should do that. But he did not do that with Joe Walser and Ernie Vossler, for whom he had already built 8-10 golf courses. He had a lot of respect for them.
Incidentally, IIRC, Pete's design fee for PGA West was $200,000, which translates to $500,000 today. Pete didn't design courses for the money.