Pete Dye - Design Career

Design Career

Dye made the decision to become a golf course designer in his mid-30s. Alice supported his career change and became partner in the new venture. In 1961, the couple visited and talked to noted golf architect Bill Diddle, who lived nearby. He warned them about the economic uncertainty of the profession, but they persisted.

The first design from Pete and his wife was the nine-hole El Dorado course south of Indianapolis, which crossed a creek thirteen times. Those nine holes are now incorporated into the Royal Oak course at Dye’s Walk Country Club.

Their first 18-hole course was created during 1962 in Indianapolis and was named Heather Hills. It is now known as Maple Creek Golf & Country Club.

Dye designed the Radrick Farms Golf Course for the University of Michigan in 1962, but the course did not open until 1965. At the time, he was using the design style of Trent Jones, but after seeing the work of Alister MacKenzie, who designed the 1931 Michigan course, Dye decided to incorporate features from two greens into his next project.

Dye visited Scotland in 1963, and made a thorough study of the classic courses. The Scottish use of pot bunkers, bulkheads constructed of wood, and diminutive greens influenced his subsequent designs.

His first well-known course was Crooked Stick Golf Club in Carmel, Indiana, begun in 1964. It later hosted the 1991 PGA Championship, won by John Daly.

In 1967, he designed The Golf Club near Columbus, Ohio, where he solicited input from a young Jack Nicklaus, a Columbus resident. The two would work together to design the acclaimed Harbour Town Golf Links, opened in 1969, the site of an annual PGA Tour event ever since. Nicklaus credits Dye with significant influence on his own approach to golf course design.

In 1980, Dye designed and built a new course for Austin Country Club, one of the oldest private clubs in Texas, after the membership voted to move across town to a wooded Texas Hill Country site on the shores of Lake Austin. Working with turf school graduate ("turfie") Rod Whitman who later became an accomplished course designer in his own right, Dye created another classic course with narrow tree-lined fairways using his "target golf" philosophy. Pete worked with Whitman and a small contingent of immigrant workers armed only with chain saws for months as he personally pushed through the dense cedar and live oak trees with his hand-drawn routing and ruler to find appropriately sloping small pieces of land for landing areas and greens. Dye believed that the course was already there, he just had to find it. The course was well under construction before Pete bothered to locate some of the tees. One day during a tour of the construction, he told Austin natives Tom Kite & Ben Crenshaw, "Any fool can find a place to build a tee box."

Dye is considered to be one of the most influential course architects in the world. His designs are known for distinctive features, including small greens and the use of railroad ties to hold bunkers. His design for the Brickyard Crossing golf course at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway utilized the dismantled outer retaining wall from the race track. He is known for designing the "world's most terrifying tee shot". Known as the "Island Green", it is the 17th hole at TPC at Sawgrass located in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. Dye's designs have been credited with returning short & medium length par fours to golf. Many of the best young golf architects have "pushed dirt" for Pete, including Bill Coore, Tom Doak, John Harbottle, Butch Laporte, Tim Liddy, Scott Poole, David Postlewaite, Lee Schmidt, Keith Sparkman, Jim Urbina, Bobby Weed, Rod Whitman and Abe Wilson.