54 The triumph of the Dyeciples DYE APPRENTICES Written by Adam Lawrence FEATURE Adam Lawrence asks why architects who trained with Pete Dye are so dominant in today’s golf design business. 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
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzQ1NTk=