"They got me while I'm still upright, so that's pretty good, too."

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may_dye_299x360.jpgBill Fields reports that Pete Dye is headed for the World Golf Hall of Fame.

"I can't believe it," Dye told Golf World of the honor. "I was totally surprised. They're putting me in there with a lot of people who have done a lot for the game of golf. They got me while I'm still upright, so that's pretty good, too."

Dye, 82, will become the fifth person enshrined for his work as a course architect, joining Robert Trent Jones, C.B. Macdonald, Alister Mackenzie and Donald Ross.
Meanwhile, Josh Sanburn at golf.com interviews Dye.
What's the biggest issue facing everyday golfers?

Cost. Fewer people are playing but they're paying more. If you add tees and length to a course, you have to escalate the cost. And they're not only lengthening courses, they're putting in new grasses and increasing the speed of the greens. "We're not as fast as Augusta!" — that's all superintendents talk about. And now you've got a $40,000 machine cutting them.

So what's the solution?

The escalating costs will stop that. The USGA and the Augustas — they haven't been listening. We have to cut back costs and make courses more environmentally sensitive. You don't have to have emerald green from one end of the course to the other.

Over at CBSSports.com, Steve Elling points out that the TPC Sawgrass is a democratic design.

In an era when PGA Tour courses often are amenable mostly to certain styles of play from week to week, favoring either ball-bashers or ball-trackers, Sawgrass discriminates based solely on talent, a masterstroke of design carved from a snake-choked swamp by a man who on Tuesday was announced as the first member of the World Golf Hall of Fame class for 2008.

Psssst. Truth be told, it's an accidental masterpiece on that front.

"It's a secret," Dye deadpanned when asked about the course's open-arms value. "If I tried to tell you, I'd just be lying, so what the heck? I haven't any idea, to tell you the truth."