Photo: Bandon Dunes Golf Resort 67 On the banks of the Trinity River, some 80 miles north of Houston, Texas, a meeting took place in 1976 that would set the direction for the career of one of Canada’s foremost golf architects. Rod Whitman, then a student at nearby Houston State University in Huntsville, was looking for work. Just 30 minutes away was the newly built Waterwood National course, the focal point for a new community development. The young Whitman enquired about joining the greenkeeping team; the extra income would help see him through college. Waterwood’s superintendent at the time? Bill Coore. Coore had got his start from Pete Dye a few years earlier, on the construction team for Oak Hollow in North Carolina. He’d then gone from job to job, for both Pete and his brother Roy. But at Waterwood, one of Roy’s designs, Coore had stayed on as superintendent. That first meeting would lead to a positive working relationship at Waterwood. Not only was Coore sharing his new-found expertise in turf maintenance, but the course required some reconstruction work too. This gave Whitman his first experience of shaping. By the spring of 1981, and with several years of work at Waterwood under his belt, Whitman would – on Coore’s recommendation – make the short trip west to become an intern designer and run the construction crew for Pete Dye’s new course at Austin Country Club in Texas. “Pete was always on the road,” recalls Whitman. “One time, I went to pick him up from the airport in Austin. It was late at night and Pete was nowhere to be found. A janitor told me that the last plane in or out was just leaving.” So, Whitman headed back to his digs, where the caretaker told him Pete had just called, from the airport. “I said I had just left the airport and Pete wasn’t there!” says Whitman. “Back I went, and I found Pete on the sidewalk, sleeping. Turns out that he had woken up on the plane just as it was leaving. He told the stewardess that he was supposed to have gotten off in Austin, so they taxied everyone back to the terminal to drop him off. He was a bit grumpy and tired when I was finally able to collect him. In fact, he told me that the next time I came to pick him up and he wasn’t there, I was to come onto the damn plane and get him!” Dye famously mentored many of today’s leading architects – including Coore, Tom Doak, Bobby Weed, Tim Liddy and Brian Curley – each of whom absorbed some of his philosophies in their own work. “The most important thing I learned from Pete was how to contour greens and their surrounds,” says Whitman. “Golf course design works from the green back to the tee. Watching him try to set up angles of shots was hugely influential. He wanted players to have to shape their shots.
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