Q&A: Architect Dye on course design, Hall of Fame

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Pete Dye, architect of the TPC Sawgrass Stadium Course, was elected into the World Golf Hall of Fame last year.

Pete Dye never got the dirt out from under his fingernails.

Not while serving as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division. Nor while playing on the Rollins College golf team in Winter Park, Fla., or winning the 1958 Indiana Amateur. Not while selling life insurance in his adopted hometown, Indianapolis, where he became one of the youngest members of the "Million Dollar Round Table."

Dye always wanted to design and build golf courses. He got his start in 1959. He took the summer off to build a nine-hole course called El Dorado on Indianapolis' south side. Its greens were the first built with USGA mix -- a soil formula developed at Purdue University and Texas A&M.

Dye always was an experimenter, an innovator, an iconoclast.

He continued with a series of local, lowbudget projects until 1963. While attending the British Amateur at St. Andrews, Dye and his wife/design partner, Alice, visited and studied about 30 courses in Scotland, England and Ireland.

He returned inspired. He went around town knocking on doors. He recruited 60 "members" at $6,000 each, bought a featureless Indiana cornfield and set about building his first great course, Crooked Stick Golf Club, in Carmel.

In the years since, Dye has built more than 110 courses, 15 of which have earned distinction among America's 100 Greatest Golf Courses, as ranked by Golf Digest, including TPC Sawgrass.

Dye turned 83, or as he says, "half of 166," in December 2008, but he remains relentless. He still puts in long days on projects from the Dye Course in French Lick, Ind., to the PGA TOUR's TPC San Antonio. He's an old shoe; wispy hair, deferential manner, soiled khakis sagging over dusty boots, and often as not, his white German shepherd "Sixty" at his heel.

On Nov. 10, 2008 Dye became the fifth golfcourse architect inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame but the first insurance salesman. Why not? Charles Blair Macdonald was a businessman and member of the Chicago Board of Trade. Alister MacKenzie was a physician. Donald Ross was a club professional. Among the Hall's architects, only Robert Trent Jones Sr.,went directly into golf-course design.

Phil Richards, longtime golf writer for the Indianapolis Star, interviewed Dye in late August 2008 for Partners Magazine.

PARTNERS MAGAZINE: What was the worst piece of ground you had to work with?

DYE: The TPC [Sawgrass], right there in Ponte Vedra Beach.The lake on No. 18 is 6 feet below sea level. There wasn't a dry piece of ground on the whole thing. Mr. [PGA TOUR Commissioner Tim] Finchem's going to kill me; that's their home course. But that was as difficult as any. The land had the densest tree coverage, and then we had a big rain and I had to go out there in a rowboat to go over the whole golf course.The tiles under the greens were floating all over the place. I was getting worried we'd never get it done. We finally got a canal built to get all the water drained.

PARTNERS MAGAZINE: Do you design holes from tee to green or from the green back to the tee?

DYE: I think the green location is probably the prominent thing in the design of the hole.

PARTNERS MAGAZINE: What's your biggest design regret?

DYE: I don't think I've ever had one. I never had a golf course I was interested in and somebody else built it. Most courses I've built, I've built them. Other people, they do the designing, then they get somebody else to do the construction. Most of the golf courses I've built over the last 20 years have been for people I built for a long time ago. French Lick [Pete Dye Course, scheduled to open this May] is the first course I've had in a long, long time. I think the TPC San Antonio [spring 2010] will be the fifth for the [PGA] TOUR.

PARTNERS MAGAZINE: What are your thoughts on being accepted as a course architect and Hall of Fame inductee after years of questioning from players about how quirky your designs are?

DYE: A lot of my friends have built golf courses, and they've been fine courses, great courses, but they've never had the TOUR pros play them. The Stadium Course at PGA West, they [TOUR players] all condemned it.They put up a petition never to come back; it was just awful. I was really hurt and upset. But now this thing has been out there for more than 20 years and it's the most-played golf course in the desert, and they charge an awful high fee and every [residential] unit around that place hasbeen sold out.

PARTNERS MAGAZINE: Is there a basis for your golf-course design, a greatest influence?

DYE: There's nothing new in golf design, so I kind of mix a Ross look on a hole and then a MacKenzie look on a hole and maybe a Raynor look.You look at Oakland Hills today on television and all the bunkers look the same. A lot of designers like that. I've always figured differently. Somebody will say,"You build pot bunkers." Well, I build pot bunkers on one hole or two or three or four or five, but not on every hole. You look at the bunker on 10 at Crooked Stick and the bunker on 11, and they're totally different. I built some bunkers at French Lick like I've never built before. What happened is the guy was just piling dirt between the second and third hole. Instead of knocking the pile down, I just smoothed it off around the edges, where you can mow it, and put sand on top. Never done that before.

PARTNERS MAGAZINE: The trend is for courses to get longer. What do you think of this and what would you do to save the "classic" shorter courses such as Merion?

DYE: The [golf club and ball] manufacturers have given tremendous distance to players today. You're trying to maintain the integrity of the game so where a great professional player every once in a while has to hit a pretty good drive on a par 4 and then a 5-iron to a green. Well, they're hitting a 5-iron about 230 yards. So the par 4 is a 530-yard hole. So instead of making the hole look ridiculous and build it 530 yards, you've got to build it slightly uphill so it's 499 but plays 530.The problem is, Mary Jones is still hitting it 120 yards and she's going to be at that course 300 days and the pro is only going to be there five. So they expect you to go backwards, but it's hard. If you're going to build for a client who expects to have the PGA TOUR there, you can't just go to sleep. Merion has years of reputation, so to keep those guys from shooting lights out, they'll get the greens so fast and make the rough so high it's a different game. I don't agree with that because it changes the game so dramatically.They're going to hit 3-woods and 2-irons and 3-irons off the tee. I think you want the guys just to play golf, and if they shoot 65, fine. I don't worry about that. If you tighten the rough like they did at Oakland Hills, it takes the driver out of their hand, and I always felt, higher handicap or lower handicap, the driver is the most fun club. It takes out the enjoyment.And I always felt that the professionals, if you could keep that driver in their hand, they're going to finally get in trouble. Tiger's just smarter. He'll 2-iron around the place when they play there.

PARTNERS MAGAZINE: What's your most memorable moment on a course you designed in a professional tournament?

DYE: During the [1991] Ryder Cup at the Ocean Course, this girl ran the tournament; she was the tournament director. She ran the buses and everything, the whole works, and she never came out on the golf course. So the last day she finally came out. Hale Irwin is standing right there, whole thing on the line [on the 18th tee in the decisive match with Bernhard Langer], and he duck hooks the ball and hits that girl or he'd have gone down in the swamp where he couldn't have played it. She'd run the whole thing and that's the only time she came out. [Langer missed a 6-foot par putt and the U.S. team won, 141/2 -131/2.]

PARTNERS MAGAZINE: You've had quite a run of awards over the past dozen years. Does your induction in the World Golf Hall of Fame in the Lifetime Achievement category tie it all together?

DYE: I keep saying they reached down to the bottom of the barrel. I never expected that at all. Never. I was really thrilled when I got one from the Golf Course Superintendents Association, and the PGA of America and the TOUR because I've worked for them a lot. I never, ever gave a wild thought to the World Golf Hall of Fame because that's more for the golf professionals.

PARTNERS MAGAZINE: How did you get the word?

DYE: When Mr. Finchem called me, I'd been doing a lot of [renovation] work at TPC Sawgrass, and I thought,"Oh, my God, what's gone wrong now?" Then he told me I was going in the World Golf Hall of Fame. That was a real switch. I thought surely I was going to have to go down there and dig up some dirt or a drain line not working or somebody was mad about something.

PARTNERS MAGAZINE: You were the fifth architect inducted, joining C.B. Macdonald, Alister MacKenzie, Donald Ross and Robert Trent Jones Sr. Is that a thrill?

DYE: They got me before I went out the window. It was really a thrill to hear that. You always hear about Dr. MacKenzie. Mr. Jones is worldwide. Donald Ross you hear every day of your life. And I had the good fortune to meet Mr. Ross right after the war in September of 1945. He was at Pinehurst and I was at Fort Bragg [as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division]. I'd been made the greenkeeper of the old Fort Bragg course and I had six months in the service to finish out my term. I played Pinehurst almost every day for six months, and that's where I got to see Mr.Ross and talk to him. Pinehurst had grass greens and Fort Bragg had old sand greens. He told me how he kept topdressing the common bermudagrass on the greens and that's how they grew over the years. He used to come out on the golf course and follow us because I was playing pretty good golf in those days and the captain and lieutenant who hauled me over there, they were good golfers. Mr.Ross had this little fellow with him and we all knew who he was. He was J.C. Penney.

PARTNERS MAGAZINE: You had an ace on the sixth hole at Crooked Stick Golf Club on the Fourth of July in 2008. How many have you had?

DYE: That's six. It was 184 yards. I can't see that far anymore and I'm the only one who still carries an old Ben Hogan 2-iron. I cranked it up and next thing everybody was jumping up and down, saying it went into the hole. So there you go. I had the first one down at the old Martinsville [Ind.] Country Club back in '46. All the others were on courses I've built. I had one earlier on 13 at Crooked Stick. In the Dominican Republic, I've had one on the 13th and the fifth, and then on Old Marsh on the 16th hole.

PARTNERS MAGAZINE: Do you still rent your cars?

DYE: Sure do.

PARTNERS MAGAZINE: Why not buy or lease?

DYE: Never have. I got to thinking, if I bought a new car, how much would it cost me to own a new car and pay the insurance and upkeep and this and that, and then everywhere I go, I'd have to rent a car. So if I go down to Indianapolis Airport and take off for four or five days, I'd have to pay a premium just to park the car, and then wherever I went, Jacksonville or Timbuktu, I'd have to rent a car. So finally it dawned on me to quit worrying about it, and wherever I was I'd walk into National Car Rental and rent a car, even if I stayed here in Indianapolis for four or five days. I finally figured out in the long run it costs less.And wherever I am I have a car. I just take the first car in line. I get the car and then I park it and I never remember what it is. Nowadays, with keyless entry that honks the horn, I finally can find my car. I'm always honking the horn all over the parking lot.