I was in Florida on Saturday night for the Donald Ross Award dinner to honor Alice Dye. Many thanks to Ian Andrew for passing on my request to attend to the ASGCA board, and to them for letting me in the door.
Mrs. Dye is still sharp as a tack, and her brief remarks were very warmly received by a large contingent, which included Jack and Barbara Nicklaus, and Herb and Natalie Kohler who flew in for the evening.
Mrs. Dye receives great credit for her efforts to make the game more playable for women golfers, and for educating all of the rest of us on how to do likewise -- it's not exaggerating to say that she did it almost single-handedly. But I don't think she gets nearly the credit she should for the role she played on Pete's courses. That first summer I worked for them on the construction crew at Long Cove, there was a palpable sense among the crew that, as one co-worker put it, "Nothing is really finished until Miss Allie likes it."
One of the hardest things to do in golf course design -- especially for those of us who work out in the dirt and make it up as we go along -- is to maintain a sense of the course as a whole. Is it too easy, or too hard, or as it should be? When we are working in the dirt, we're not out playing and seeing other courses very much, and it's very easy to lose perspective. What's more, when our friends come to visit, they're generally enthusiastic, and urging us to make it even stronger or wilder, which is usually the last thing architects need, especially if they are good players themselves. Mr. Dye liked to toe the fine line between difficult and "too difficult," and Mrs. Dye was the one person he relied on to tell him if he was going too far, or alternatively, not far enough.
There would be a lot more great golf architects today if only they had someone like Alice to keep them in line. Sadly for us, she is one of a kind.