The Legacy Of Pete Dye: How He Changed Golf
/
Pete Dye will be remembered in so many ways that it’s hard to pinpoint where golf would be had he not come along.
The ace golfer turned-insurance salesman turned-restless artist forever changed the sport with his extreme links-inspired features and hybrid of strategic and penal elements, all delivered with a dry, Midwest-rooted wit to squelch the haters.
Tributes will flow over the coming days from the many architects he brought into the business. Flags will be lowered at the venues where his legacy is so profound every day they are open for play. And we will hear tributes from the tours whose tournaments have been forever made more compelling thanks to Dye re-imagining how a “championship” venue should play.
While his work has aged in both beautiful and bizarre ways, Dye’s design legacy will never be rooted in one particular course. This, even as the impact of TPC Sawgrass and “Stadium golf” alone made him World Golf Hall of Fame worthy. Instead, the real genius of his work is almost overwhelming to contemplate. Dye put a stop to the runaway craze of 1950’s runway banality built to punish and all with so little character. This, after playing the great links of Scotland and Ireland and giving up his career to pursue better ways to design a course. And his brilliance was not merely in copying a few features or bringing back “template” holes when he returned. Dye expanded on what he saw overseas, pushing the art of course design places well beyond anything seen before.
Sure, some of it didn’t work, some of his designs were excessive and he had to remedy problems that surfaced on the tournament stage. But like any of the great anarchists and outliers, that Pete Dye could jam railroad ties against lake walls, force offensive blind shots from the middle of the fairway and get away with building other unmaintainable features, spoke to his artistic eye. Pete Dye courses inspired golfers to test their skills against him even when they knew he’d get the best of them.
Pete Dye broke the cardinal rule of timeless design by making about himself instead of a battle against nature. Yet he got away with the outlandishness. It was that wink of his eye and self-deprecating manner which, when combined with oddball touches—like the noose hanging from a dead tree that he left behind from the construction process—that made Dye lovable even as his designs violated most of the time-honored traditions of the great works. Alice’s editing, questions and golf savvy also should never be underestimated in making Pete what he was.
Pete Dye’s hands-on approach to construction also began a renaissance in the building of courses, His attention to detail and willingness to shape features approach took longer-than hoped to break the model of contractor-built, assembly-line golf courses that appeared stamped on the landscape by a blueprint. Eventually, however, his disciples have returned elite golf architectural creation to the field and away from the office.
And it is those Dye-inspired legacy of acolytes that have taken his lead in a renaissance of links golf, an emphasis on fun, and rekindling elements of design whimsy to offset the sport’s cruelty. Even the restoration movement responsible for rejuvenating so many classics, can almost entirely be tied to the awareness Pete Dye brought to the works of those who came before him. At heart, he was a traditionalist who played up his simpleton Midwest roots, but deep down inside there was a rebel, a nutty genius and imagination like no other. I hate to think what the game would look like had Pete Dye decided selling insurance was not for him. Thankfully, we don’t have to.
