Architect Brian Curley is very clear about the roots of the style of design that has created what many term a second Golden Age of golf architecture: “Today’s courses can be traced back to Pete.”
He continues: “Even though his work looks nothing like the great courses being built nowadays, the underlying principles are his.”
The late Pete Dye will go down as the greatest mentor of architectural talent in the game’s history. “Si monumentum requiris, circumspicere” reads the epitaph to Sir Christopher Wren in London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, his greatest achievement. “If you seek his monument, look around you”. The same words could apply to any top architect. But for Dye, you could find them just as easily at Sand Hills or Barnbougle as you could at Kiawah Island or TPC Sawgrass.
The list of Dye alumni is long. Starting with his brother Roy, his two sons, Perry and PB, Roy’s children Cynthia and Andy, other active architects to have worked for the family include Bill Coore, Tom Doak, Rod Whitman, Bobby Weed, Tim Liddy, Brian Curley, Jason McCoy, Greg Letsche, Chris Lutzke and Jim Urbina, alongside former industry names such as Lee Schmidt and John Harbottle.
The ‘Dyeciples’, generally, never worked for Pete directly, but were on the payroll of individual projects (and thus must have lived somewhat from job to job at times). Tom Doak, one of the most successful of them, adapted Pete’s business model to include staff associates; the most prominent of them is the first, Gil Hanse, but names like Brian Schneider, Eric Iverson, Bruce Hepner and Don Placek – to say nothing of the many younger shapers who have since graduated to lead their own projects – have made major contributions to a lot of very fine courses. Even Jack Nicklaus has a claim to being a Dyeciple – Jack’s first exposure to the process of golf design was serving as a consultant to Dye on the build of Harbour Town in South Carolina in the late 1960s.
I never met Pete properly, but came into his orbit very briefly at an American Society of Golf Course Architects annual meeting in Denver in 2011. My abiding memory of that trip was at the Jim Engh-designed Fossil Trace course. Several golf architects were milling around their golf carts before the game, which was a shotgun start. Fossil Trace, very hilly with some quite lengthy transitions between holes. Nevertheless, above the hubbub, a voice could be heard, exclaiming, “I want to walk”. It was the then 85-year-old Pete Dye. I played that day with his son Perry; eventually we reached the sixteenth hole, a par three on which a nearest-the-pin contest was being played. There was a marker sheet about three feet from the hole. Perry strolled over to see whose name was on it and fell about laughing. Written on the sheet were the words ‘Pete Dye’.
I tell this anecdote to illustrate that I found Pete quite intimidating. I cannot be the only one: I can only imagine how a young Rod Whitman, on his first Pete job in Austin in the early eighties, felt at finding his boss asleep by the roadside outside the airport, from which he was supposed to have been collected (to see this story in full, read the interview with Whitman in the April 2023 issue of GCA, or search for ‘Rod Whitman’ on our website).
Yet for those who worked closely with him, Pete was clearly not as scary as all that. He inspired respect, for sure (the number of his former associates who still refer to ‘Mr Dye’ demonstrates that clearly), but not fear. “He worked harder than anybody else, and he expected his associates to be just as dedicated,” says Tim Liddy, who worked closely with Dye for thirty years, right to the end of the great man’s career. “He absolutely loved his work – it was infectious – and he had a genuinely strong desire to build things that made his clients happy.”
Curley, who met Dye on site at PGA West, on his first day working for developer Landmark Land, and built several courses with him, says: “Pete was always very good at explaining his ideas. Whatever he wanted to do, he would explain why, rather than just saying ‘Do it’. If you give a reason why, people understand it the next time.”
“I think the success of those that trained under Pete is due to his mode of mentorship, which positioned anybody that went through it for success,” says Bobby Weed, who had a 40-year working relationship with Dye.
Spanish architect Marco Martin, who, along with his partner Blake Stirling, primarily worked for Perry Dye, but encountered Pete extensively, agrees. “The first thing when you joined the design team was to study carefully the Pete Dye courses and a simple notebook of general guidelines of design,” he says. “Great memories come to me, like driving Pete and Alice and spending time with them at Palm Springs or in their house in Phoenix, or the best when I received a personal message from Pete saying, “Marco, you were great with my brother Roy, I’ll never forget that.”
Chris Lutzke says that Pete’s preference for untrained assistance was critical. “He didn’t care about past experience. As a matter of fact, he preferred that you didn’t have any,” he says. “That way, he could mould you into what he wanted because you didn’t know anything else. He was always trying to come up with something new, something fresh, that would give the golf industry something to talk about. We learned how to use materials found on site – a vein of sand, or boulders, or even a concrete retaining wall – and incorporate it into the golf course to create the lines and shadows that he was always looking for.
“He always made us feel like we were a part of the process, because we were. No idea was a bad idea… ever. We would make mistakes, trial and error. But he always had our back no matter what. If Pete Dye liked you and you were out there for 70 or 80 hours a week working your ass off, you couldn’t do anything wrong because you were trying. That was the secret to working for him. Of course, Alice had to like you as much or you were dead in the water, so that was important too.”
“When working with Pete, you were not given detailed plans to direct the concepts or construction of a golf course,” says Bill Coore. “The design and construction processes were more fluid: you were expected to become a part of the process. Sometimes Pete would have a definitive concept or vision for a hole; other times his directions were vague, allowing for individual interpretations. Within Pete’s system, you were given the freedom to work, to think, to experiment, to succeed and to fail. Most of all, you were given the opportunity to learn and be prepared. The results seem to suggest that his method worked.”
Dye, famously, was not a lover of plans, and that has fed down to a lot of his followers. The degree to which a course needs to be planned depends on the nature of the project and the site – if you are building a totally core course on pure sand dunes that are no more than gently undulating, all you may need to build the course is a routing. Literally everything else can be decided on site. If you are building on clay, through what will become a substantial housing development, more detailed plans are almost certainly essential. And in most jurisdictions, some degree of detailed planning is likely to be required to get permission to build the course in the first place.
Dyeciples tend therefore to favour on-site creativity, even if they draw quite detailed plans up front. “I call plans ‘Eighty per centers’, but the magic happens in the field,” says Brian Curley. “Pete knew how to get things built,” says Liddy. “He understood the importance of on-site decisions – a design is always changing on site. That exposed all us young aspiring architects to the multitude of decisions, and hierarchy of decisions, in the construction process.”
Curley says that it is Dye’s attitude to construction, and also to strategy, that is his greatest legacy to the industry. “His courses may not look like the great ones being built nowadays, but the philosophy is the same,” he says. “Everyone whoever worked with Pete always talks about angles. The majority of courses I worked on with Pete were treeless to start with. I never worked on a bowling alley course with Pete. There is a big difference between bowling alley golf and angle golf. Pete’s philosophy came from his UK experience in his early days. When he came back from the UK, he had a whole different approach to what a golf course looked like. The setups of courses by people who trained with Pete have a lot to do with that kind of philosophy. Pete opened up a window of fresh air that a golf course could look different. Pete’s courses looked rugged – his older courses have a very rugged look to them. There was less reliance on a formula with Pete. You don’t build to a plan; you build to a concept and a theory.”
“Scotland opened his eyes to the variety that could exist in golf design,” says Liddy. “He saw golf holes that had evolved over hundreds of years, and it showed him that anything was possible.”
Bobby Weed says that Dye taught him how to run a golf design business. “There aren’t any important aspects of the business that a Dyeciple doesn’t understand. You acquired detailed knowledge and hands-on experience of construction and all that it entails – which prepare you to communicate with credibility to both builders and owners, along with equipment operators. You learned how to incorporate design and creativity into a construction framework, and to interface with and establish relationships with clients. Pete (and Alice) handled all of the above in full view of the guys they were mentoring. I can’t imagine there could be any better on the job training than that. I also think that Pete and Alice’s fierce independence probably established the reality of what it meant to be in business for yourself. Any other avenue into design work – working in an office, working for a construction company – would likely leave one of those aspects unfulfilled.”
The use of young associates as shapers, finishers and such like on golf courses meant that there are a lot of people who worked on Dye projects. Not all of them became successful golf architects. Like Doak, Coore & Crenshaw, and Hanse today, Pete and Alice mentored many young people hoping to get into the business. “Pete had a whole generation of aspiring architects that grew up with his ideal of golf design, and that generation was mostly more interested in a cool career than making a lot of money,” says Tim Liddy. “Many of the guys who worked for him did not become successful. Only a small percentage, with the proper educational background evolved into top golf architects.”
This article first appeared in the October 2024 issue of Golf Course Architecture. For a printed subscription or free digital edition, please visit our subscriptions page.