56 BRIAN CURLEY well. He wasn’t bashful, he talked a lot. The people who came out of his family tree are loose and talk a lot. Other big firms are run in the style of the boss. Pete was never the boss, in fact, given that I was representing Landmark, if anything Lee and I were his boss. But being with him was just like going to school. If you want to be successful in this business, you have to be good at what you do obviously, but you have to be able to get on with people and sell. Pete was the best salesman, and that ability is a massive help. “Courses by the people who learned with Pete don’t always look like Dye courses, but there’s a lot of commonality in terms of angles and how they are set up. I believe it would be a lot easier to take a manufactured Pete Dye course and redo it in a naturalistic style than it would be to take a Jones course and do the same. “Landmark built the PGA West Stadium course, and they bought the Ryder Cup for a tiny sum of money. Then the US lost the Ryder Cup for the first time in forever and it became competitive and a huge thing. The cup was going to be in Palm Springs in September when it’s incredibly hot, and the PGA came to them and said, ‘We want you to move it to the East Coast for TV reasons’. Landmark had just bought the Kiawah Island site and they committed the Ryder Cup to go there before they’d even started building it. Lee and I went to visit the site with Pete, and there were deer ticks all over the place. Pete was obsessed by the ticks. We were having lunch, and Pete had pushed his chair back from the table. He had his shirt right up and he was scraping his body with the butter knife looking for ticks.” Curley headed up Landmark’s design office for years, until the opportunity that would change his life came about. “It was when the World Cup was held at Mission Hills in Shenzhen, China, in 1995,” he says. “Fred Couples and Davis Love won; it was the first uncensored TV event in China. The guy who ran the event knew the people from Landmark and mentioned that Mission Hills wanted to do a couple of other courses, so I went to China, and really hit it off with the chairman, Dr David Chu. We went out for karaoke, and I sang House of the Rising Sun. People said to me, ‘You can’t sing that, that’s the chairman’s song, but we ended “ Courses by the people who learned with Pete don’t always look like Dye courses, but there’s a lot of commonality in terms of angles” Curley with Pete Dye and Lee Schmidt in 1987, and with Mission Hills chairman David Chu in 2001 Photos: Brian Curley
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