55 until you got your break. That didn’t sound too encouraging, but I didn’t give up my dream.” Curley went to the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) at San Luis Obispo, one of the very top colleges for architecture in the US, and not long after he graduated in 1982, he got his big break. “In 1984, I had just got married, and my fatherin-law was a commercial real estate developer,” says Curley. “He told me to go see these guys in La Quinta called Landmark Land who were buying up all the land round there. I went to see them and told them I’d do anything. The real estate boom had just started, and Palm Springs was the epicentre of that. They hired me and my first day on the job we started PGA West, and I met Pete Dye and Lee Schmidt. Lee was on the construction team. Pete latched on to me because I could draw. He couldn’t draw his own breath – that’s why he spent so much time on site waving his arms around.” Dye, of course, as well as being in his own right one of the most significant figures in golf architecture, has gone down to history as perhaps the greatest mentor of talent in the industry’s history. The list of Dye alumni includes names such as Bill Coore, Tom Doak, Tim Liddy, Bobby Weed, Jim Urbina, Rod Whitman and many others. Dye was a big personality, and everyone who worked for him seems to have a favourite ‘Pete story’. “That whole Pete Dye family tree of designers dominate the industry now,” says Curley. “If you were in Trent Jones’s office and were low on the totem pole, you’d probably have been drawing plans all the time. Because Pete didn’t draw, it wasn’t like that with him. Pete was a great talker, and I spent so much time around him that I can impersonate him pretty The architect with local workers during the construction of the Forest Dunes course at FLC Quang Binh in Vietnam Photo: Brian Curley “ Landmark Land hired me and my first day on the job we started PGA West, and I met Pete Dye and Lee Schmidt”
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