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 But not in the case of Pete Dye. Often hailed as the father of golf course architecture — and reviled for making courses that rank among the hardest in the world — Dye is a genuine superstar of golf design. His use of railroad ties, inspired by the classic British courses, is his most distinctive feature. But it’s the difficulty of his courses — from the TPC at Sawgrass to the TPC Stadium Course at PGA West in La Quinta — that give a Dye course its unique personality. Look at any list of top golf courses, and you’ll likely see a Dye connection. Dye, who has homes in Florida and Indianapolis, is well represented in Southern California. His courses include Lost Canyons Golf Club in Simi Valley, three courses at the La Quinta Resort & Club, and several more. He also originally designed Ocean Trails Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes, which has since been redesigned and renamed Trump National after its purchase by Donald Trump. We caught up with the outspoken, salty designer and asked him questions ranging from his style to his reputation. How would you define your style? I had one well-known golfer say I didn’t have a style, so I appreciated that comment more than any other I’ve ever heard. A lot of my golf courses are very different from each other, and I like that. You began designing in the late 1960s. Has your design approach changed over the years? I’ve drastically changed the way I do things because the equipment that players have and the way courses are maintained have drastically changed. In the past 10 years, there’s been a tremendous difference in the way greens and fairways have been maintained, so I’ve modified nearly all the greens on my older courses in order to slow them down. How involved are you in courses after they open? I pride myself on staying pretty close to my golf courses. I go back to the TPC and Harbour Town every four or five years. But the people in California never invite me back. I don’t know why. What’s the main difference between designing courses today and back in the golden age of golf design? It’s all about land. Take the desert. It’s flatter than a pancake, so you have to create the whole thing. Even the Mountain Course at La Quinta was located in a big flood retention area and that’s entirely different than what the old-line architects worked with. They were told to go find a great piece of ground and then build a golf course that the man upstairs had already did a good job of designing in the first place. In this day and age, to build a golf course you’re going to have to create on land that used to be a landfill, or a city dump or had some other problem. It’s completely different. Lost Canyons gets great publicity. What do you think of that track? It’s a very scenic course, but also very severe, since it’s built against the mountain. When you get a severe lay of land it’s a fight to get a good golf course because you have to flatten it out to some degree and that brings up all these restrictions. But that was a great piece of ground to begin with and we kept it that way for the most part. It’s often said that you design courses that are extremely hard, the kind that average golfers have no chance of enjoying. Do you agree? I agree that my courses are challenging. But I also think I design for high-handicappers. Because it’s the high-handicappers that will go any place in the world to play golf. Let me ask you this: a guy has a 20 handicap and belongs to a Philadelphia country club with good food and marvelous conditions. In the summer, when the weather gets really good in Philadelphia, he hops on a plane to London and then takes a smaller plane to Edinburgh and then plays for three weeks in the rain. You call that guy average? No way. That’s the golfer I design for. There are so many high-handicap golfers who would climb Mt. Everest if you put a flagpole up there. The guy that will go to a resort golf course like the Stadium Course at La Quinta and beat himself to death and then come right back next year and do it again. Those are my golfers. n |
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