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Five Pete Dye CoursesThat Matter – And Why
By John Steinbreder
With design credits for more than 100 golf courses around the world, Pete Dye’s portfolio is not an easy one to break down with a “Best Of” list. That’s partially because there are so many good ones on that roster, and also a result of golf courses being a lot like wine when it comes to picking favorites. Beauty, as is so often the case, is in the eyes of the beholder.
It is less difficult, however, to select the most significant courses from his body of work. So here are five of his that matter most, and the reasons why:
“This is an early course of Pete’s, one of my favorites and very much a minimalist design,” says Tom Doak, a protégé of Dye’s and the celebrated architect of some of the finest designs of the past three decades, of this track, which opened in 1967. “It’s a great golf course, and it has as good and simple a routing as you could possibly want.”
Doak doesn’t mince words when he talks about Dye’s seaside track in the Caribbean. “I have long felt that Teeth is Pete’s best golf course,” he says. “It has as many holes on the water as Pebble Beach, and because Pete and (wife and design partner) Alice had a house in the D.R., he was able to tweak it a bit every time he went down there.” Golf historian and architecture critic David Normoyle feels much the same way. “The design and routing are so good, and there is all that water,” he says. “It’s the best of Pete’s work in the 1970s.”
“With Harbour Town, (which opened in 1969 and which Dye designed with Alice and a young and generally inexperienced Jack Nicklaus), Pete built a new kind of course based on old ideas,” says Normoyle. “Very strategic and very demanding of good shotmaking. With railroad ties, small greens and bunkering on the scale no one had really seen before.”
“Pete reinvented himself a few times during his career, and TPC Sawgrass was one of those transformations,” says Normoyle of the course that Dye started building for the PGA Tour in 1978, and that hosted its first Players Championship four years later. “With this course and its dramatic hole designs and the viewing areas he created for spectators, the stadium concept was born.” While Dye receives well-deserved acclaim for this gem, it must always be acknowledged that the idea for the iconic island green at No. 17 came from Alice.
As far as Normoyle is concerned, Dye put himself at the forefront of another trend in golf when he constructed Whistling Straits in the late 1990s. “This was one of the first of the modern destination courses built in the middle of nowhere,” Normoyle says. “And with Straits, he created an Irish-style links on what had been a completely flat site on the shores of Lake Michigan.”