JAY FLEMMA: Okay. Lets talk a little bit about Tom Doak.
PETE DYE: I haven’t been out to play any of his courses, but just last night some guys I know told me how much they love Bandon Dunes. And now I hear he put a golf course out there in Palm Springs with greens of five feet elevation change. I couldn't believe it.
Photo: © J. D. Cuban /Allsport | | Looking down the 18th fairway at the Pete Dye Golf Club in Bridgeport, West Virginia. |
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JAY FLEMMA: Tell us about working with Doak.
PETE DYE: Tom Doak started working for me picking up sticks at Long Cove. He was good at that…picking up sticks. And then if I remember correctly, the next time I saw Tom, he was working for my son, Perry and he was learning to run a bulldozer down at River Bend or something like that in Colorado. And I helped Tom get his scholarship over seas is all I can remember. But he worked for me there at Long Cove as a stick picker when we were building it.
JAY FLEMMA: So what can you tell me more about his career as he's moved on?
PETE DYE: Well he's done really fine. And he's got to be a hell of a salesman. He’s done good. That Bandon or Pacific Dunes is really a success.
JAY FLEMMA: Okay. You once played golf against Dan Maples in a tempest in Bermuda at the ASGCA tournament, do you remember that, playing him in a rainstorm?
PETE DYE: I probably do. Danny's a good player.
JAY FLEMMA: He said you edged him out in extra holes.
PETE DYE: Danny was a good player, nice guy too.
JAY FLEMMA: Have you played many of his courses?
PETE DYE: I played that Pit course of his in his town, that's quite a course.
JAY FLEMMA: In what respect?
PETE DYE: Well, you know, once you get in the sand dunes and all that stuff, you just do so many things that you can't do many other places.
JAY FLEMMA: Like what?
PETE DYE: Well hell, all of the great courses I've ever heard of in the world, are built on sand. I mean, I have yet to hit a sand pile on every golf course that I have. A lot of mine are either mud, or rock, or swamp, I have never hit sand. But he did everything you could think of down there. And it looks so much more like a golf course, because it is on the sand. And when it is on sand, it looks like a golf course.
Photo: © Casa de Campo | | One of Pete Dye's most famous courses is the "teeth of the Dog" at Casa de Campo in the Dominican Republic in which nine of the holes are played on the ocean. |
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JAY FLEMMA: Does it also play at all like Scotland because the great Scottish and Irish courses are built on sand, at least the seaside ones?
PETE DYE: Yeah, I'd say it does, if I remember correctly. I was really impressed with the course. I don't remember it that well, it's been ten or fifteen years ago I played it, but it was a nice golf course.
JAY FLEMMA: If you could go back ten or fifteen years ago and make some changes to some courses that you've done, are there any mistakes you’d like to fix or any things that you've thought, boy I sure would like to correct that, or any instances where if you had it to do differently, you would?
PETE DYE: Oh yeah, well I've gone back now and rebuilt the Tournament Players Club three times and I hope I'm getting closer. And I've rebuilt Long Cove twice, and they're all well known golf courses. And the Ocean Course, I’ve been back there three times now.
JAY FLEMMA: What did you correct that you think is better now?
PETE DYE: I think I did the greens better, and I get the runoffs better, and I get the drainage better and all that stuff.
JAY FLEMMA: What in particular besides the runoffs and drainage, perhaps some strategies? For example, I know you wrote in one of your books that you wanted the 17th green at Sawgrass to slope away from the players and Alice talked you out of it. And I know you wanted to have the 16th green slope away from the player, and that unfortunately didn't come to pass either…
PETE DYE: Yeah, well maybe we should probably do that one. I don't think I'd change much. At Harbour Town I’d just slow the greens down. At TPC the only ones I changed this year was the 12th green quite a bit. We'll see how it works out. I changed seven a little bit and then modified the rest of them, just a tad here and there. But seven and twelve are a little different.
JAY FLEMMA: In what respect are they a little different?
PETE DYE: Oh, bunkering is probably different on seven, the green is more severe, and the green is entirely different on 12.
JAY FLEMMA: 12 is the short par-4.
PETE DYE: Exactly, yep.
JAY FLEMMA: The one that's almost, if you're in the wrong place, you've got a semi blind shot.
PETE DYE: Right. We added a few yards, but not a enough yardage to make a real difference. What's going to make the difference up there is they had all that organic build up on the fairway and so we took all that off. It'll play as close to the sand as you can in the swamp. I mean, there's no hope down there. When you look at Scotland and Ireland, there's sand all the way down, it rains and then it's soft. But then the wind comes and hour later it dries it right out. In the United States, you put sand down a foot, but then you've got to have perfect conditions for it to dry out, because it's got something on top of it.
JAY FLEMMA: Clay or mud?
PETE DYE: Yeah, muck or something. So it’s very difficult. I mean I laugh every time one of your writers says something about bump and run in the United States. Well you've got bump and running up in Maine and Northern Michigan where you have pure sand. But then you have Bent grass and Bermuda grass down here, the day after they put it in, it’s gonna have organics in it so you're not going to have bump and run.
JAY FLEMMA: Now you were speaking about how sandy soil is so important for the bump and run, and it's so important for the authentic seaside courses in Scotland or Ireland, yet you said you've never had an opportunity in all your many years to build on sandy soil.
PETE DYE: Well, I’ve got one coming.
JAY FLEMMA: Which one?
PETE DYE: It’s in New Jersey, if I ever get it done, It’ll be the first one I've ever built on sand.
Photo: © Sal Johnson | | 18th hole at TPC Louisiana, one of Pete Dye's newer courses is the home of the Zurich Classic of New Orleans. |
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JAY FLEMMA: Why have you not had a chance to design a seaside course in the UK or Ireland yet?
PETE DYE: Oh I don't know. I wouldn't go over there.
JAY FLEMMA: How come?
PETE DYE: You know how many times I go to a golf course when I build one? Hundreds! Do you know how many times I’d have to fly back and forth to the UK? That’d be crazy?
JAY FLEMMA: Okay, but you still build in Switzerland and in the Dominican Republic?
PETE DYE: But I lived down there for six years! If you live there for six years, you ought to be able to get something done, you know.
JAY FLEMMA: Fair enough. When you look at a world map, for example, Europe, or a map of South America, people always say all the great sites are gone or close to gone. But there's coastline in Germany, Poland, Russia, there's coast lines in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, but why no great coastline golf courses?
PETE DYE: There'll be some, though. One of these days they'll show up. But basically the world will see something like that.
JAY FLEMMA: If you were to recommend to my readers, great, inexpensive, public golf courses, some of them can be yours, and some of them of other designers, what would you pick?
PETE DYE: Well there's so many good public courses in Scotland and Ireland. There are a lot of them that you never hear of. .
JAY FLEMMA: How about here in the US?
PETE DYE: In the United States, I like the Midwest. There's probably a half a dozen golf courses in Indiana that are good and that are fun to play. People could play those. They can come down and play Purdue, and they go down and play Brickyard Crossing and then they'll play The Fort then they've got other guys golf courses in town and there's a half a dozen right there in Indiana.
JAY FLEMMA: Like Rock Hollow and The Trophy Club.
PETE DYE: Yeah, there's those courses and you can go play golf like that and it's for a reasonable amount of money and I'm sure that there's other places that I'm not familiar with or forgetting right now, sort of like Indiana's golf trail. I don't know what the Jones Trail costs in Alabama.
JAY FLEMMA: It's about $45, $50 a round.
PETE DYE: Well that's right I the same ball park as Indiana I’m sure.
JAY FLEMMA: What about Bethpage?
PETE DYE: Where the hell is that, New York?
JAY FLEMMA: Yeah.
PETE DYE: I've never been there either. But it's got to be good.
JAY FLEMMA: Brian Silva said that his moment of clarity as a golf course architect was when he saw number five at PGA West Stadium Course. Where the tee shot is draw off the tee, and then it's a fade into the green. When did the light bulb go on for you? A) When you first decided you wanted to be a golf course architect and B) this is how to build great, strategic design holes?
PETE DYE: Well, I got into the business accidentally. Actually, I was selling life insurance and doing pretty good. I was the youngest life member of THE MILLION DOLLAR ROUND TABLE. I was doing well. And I played a lot of golf. I played five or six national amateurs. I played in the Western Amateur. I won the state amateur. My wife had won everything that had been played in golf, she won the state amateur nine times, the city amateur eleven times, she won the North and South. We just played a lot of golf together. In the meantime, as a kid, I worked on the golf course. Now when I was in the parachute infantry during WWII, and when I returned home to Fort Bragg I became the greenskeeper at Fort Bragg Golf Course. And then when I got out of school, I got to the USGA in their greens section.
JAY FLEMMA: So when you got out of school…
PETE DYE: Yes, out of college. And then I met the chairman of the greens committee of the Country Club of Indianapolis. Meantime, Purdue had short courses to take in agronomy. And I went through all of them and I never passed any of them. But I was more interested in the agronomy of the golf courses more than anything else. But because of that, a guy asked me to build this nine hole course south of town. He called me up to find somebody. He had no money, and no one wanted to work for him, he said, “why don't you go do it.” So I went down, and I built the first nine USGA greens ever built in this country.
JAY FLEMMA: Really, at which course?
PETE DYE: El Dorado. Now it’s called Royal Oaks.
JAY FLEMMA: And that's in Indiana?
PETE DYE: Yeah, that was in Indianapolis, so it had the first nine USGA greens and nobody had every built the USGA greens before, and I had been very interested in promoting the USGA greens. Nobody knew how to do it. So I was always interested in the agronomics of this deal, and then after I built that course, Doctor Harlan Hatcher came down from the University of Michigan. He came down and played that golf course, just those nine holes, and somehow or another called me up and said Trent Jones and Dick Wilson wanted to talk to me about building The University of Michigan Course. I told him I was in the insurance business not the golf course building business. He said, don't worry, I'll work that all out. So I went up there, and low and behold, I had built the University of Michigan course. And when I came back, after that, I said “Alice?” She said “What?” I said “why don't we give this a try, because it's fun.”
JAY FLEMMA: So you said why don't “WE” give this try? We…
PETE DYE: Yeah, that's right. I said we. So “we” did it. And we’ve been doing it ever since. She’s just great. I've probably built eighty golf courses in 47 years. The new guys will build four, five, six a year and Nicklaus it might be twenty. But I build a golf course, you gotta understand that. If the labor doesn't show up tomorrow, I get a phone call, where I have to fly out there and stand out there in the summer heat because the pump house fell down or something!
JAY FLEMMA: Now with all the great contributions that Alice has had, like the 17th green at Sawgrass…
Photo: © David Cannon/Getty Images | | Pete Dye's wife Alice with European Solheim Cup captain Katrin Nilsmark. |
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PETE DYE: Alice has gotten really good. She’s got just the greatest experience. She’ll be eighty next month. She played with Byron Nelson, Mickey Wright, Babe Zaharias, she played in an LPGA Championship where Mickey Wright won. Mickey Wright was first, and Alice Dye was second.
JAY FLEMMA: How come Alice hasn't had a chance to design a golf course on her own?
PETE DYE: She doesn't want to.
JAY FLEMMA: Why hasn't she wanted to?
PETE DYE: Well, she knows how I do it, but she's not a builder. She'd have to draw plans and she's not going to do that. But see, on a day like today she's out there playing golf. Some days, she plays with alot of girls that just got off the tour. And then other days, she's out there playing golf with… in fact she’s doing it today right now…playing with three girls that can’t break 130. So now she's gone from Ben Hogan to that. But when Alice comes into look at a golf course, I may sit there and listen to her. But why does she want the headache of building it? Here comes Alice, she’s not worried about the labor not showing up, she is not worried about the weather, she isn't worried about the D10 blowing up, or somebody breaking and blowing up the gas main, or any of those things. She looks at it and she says, “well why aren't you doing this?” And I roll my eyes and say, “oh my, that’s a good idea,” meanwhile I know what it's going to cost to get it done, but it's helpful. So I may build the golf course, but I’ll tell you something. At PGA West, more women played on that golf course then anybody else because Alice would come in and say, “how is Mary White going to play this hole?”
JAY FLEMMA: So perhaps Alice's greatest contribution is that—
PETE DYE: I'll tell you something. She thinks that you can't build a par-3 too severe, because she can just come in after and put in a ladies’ tee someplace so they can play the hole.
JAY FLEMMA: But she still made sure that the 17th green at Sawgrass didn't slope away.
PETE DYE: (Laughter) She was right.
JAY FLEMMA: Well perhaps Alice's greatest contribution is that she's got an eye not only for professional and expert amateurs, but horrible players as well?
PETE DYE: Sure, that's exactly it. She’s out there today playing for five hours with three girls that can’t break 130. Now there's another thing. Those women don't get in trouble right or left.
JAY FLEMMA: They get in trouble short.
PETE DYE: Right.
JAY FLEMMA: How did you meet Alice?
PETE DYE: Well we were in school together.
JAY FLEMMA: Which school?
PETE DYE: Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. I was 22 and she was a junior at that time.
JAY FLEMMA: Do you remember your first date?
PETE DYE: Well, I played golf with her. I met her on the golf course. And we got married after she got out of school.
Photo: © Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images | | Pete Dye. |
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JAY FLEMMA: Why do most playing professionals, Ben Crenshaw aside, why do most professionals design courses that don't really resonate well with ardent golfers?
PETE DYE: Well, most of the golf courses are built by people in the golf course design business. With the pros, it's a side line. And the quality of the golf course is decided by whoever’s working for them. And some have good organizations and some have trouble. I don't think there's many out there that are into it for real. Jack is more interested into it now, because he's older and retired, he's more into it. But somebody young as a player they have no idea what's going on, or any understanding. See, today even more so then just a few years back, is all the restrictions and governmental restrictions. And I'm sure that Tiger Woods is not aware of them. He's not worried about some mitigational floor plan, nor is anybody or any player like that who’s gotten into the business.
I like Bill Coore. He spends his life on the golf course. He graduated from Wake Forest as a…he was supposed to be some kind of a teacher…some strange language, I don’t know what it was. But he was always a golfer, and he got into it, and he dug ditches, and then worked on the golf course maintenance, and he was superintendent for a while. So he's got all that background, so when Crenshaw and Coore got together, and Bill's a good friend of mine, I've talked to Ben about “get with this guy” and don't diminish it, make a partnership, and they did. He doesn’t overshadow him telling him “do this or do that.” He knows Coore knows how to get the thing done.
When you're building a golf course, we've got to work with in winter, rain, hitting rocks, everything wrong I could think of and I still think I told the guys it would probably get built for X number of dollars. So everything you can think of can go wrong, but if the weather's good, they might still get it done. But anyhow, you get somebody who's got that much experience, it's bound to be good.
JAY FLEMMA: Some architects say that you have to compromise and make trade offs pretty much at every course. Can you recall some moments that you had to make some trade offs that you were concerned about initially that actually might have worked, just specific examples from some courses that you built?
PETE DYE: Well yes, The Ocean Course, it was a big plot of land right in the middle of things. We had nine holes on one side and nine on the other, and there was a plot the government wouldn’t let me touch. It drove me crazy. We could've put the whole thing together. Environmentally, in my opinion, there was no difference. But they didn’t let us. And then what else have I done that's just been driving me nuts?
JAY FLEMMA: How about perhaps not environmentally, but perhaps from the plot of land itself? Maybe at Bulle Rock or at the Fort or at the PGA Dye course?
PETE DYE: Every piece of land I've ever worked at it been like Sawgrass, just trying to get it dry, and get Harbour Town dry, it was a big challenge, sometimes at PGA Village, it's hard to get it dry. See you walk there, and you looked at it, it's not raised at all.
Here’s what's happening, I think, in golf. The golf clubs, the big heads and the lighter shaft help the higher handicap players. That's fine. That doesn't hurt anything. The aerodynamics of the golf balls are such that they help the better player percentage wise more then the higher handicap player. Lower handicappers can spin the ball better then the higher handicappers. Well what they've done, they've figured out the aerodynamics, if you get a club that's 115 to 120 they do, hit that ball and the ball goes through the air like a bullet, it doesn't spin, it does not spin. The air, the dimple configuration shoots that thing through the air so they get all this distance. So, say for example, a lady that swings at 50 miles an hour and hits one of these balls, compared to a ball twenty years ago? She might get two percent more, or one percent more, so instead of hitting it 120 yards, two percent of that, so you're getting a couple more yards. That's it. Then the guy that’s swinging sixty or seventy or eighty miles an hour and who’s lucky if he’s getting 200 yards? He might be getting three or four percent. That brings it up to 208. But then the guy swinging the clubs like Hogan and Nelson and hit 118, to 119, to 120 miles an hour, they hit the ball 260-270. But now, because of that speed, they're picking up ten to fifteen percent. So that dog gone ball’s going thirty yards farther. I don't care what anybody says. Now there's no question the big head and new clubs help John Q. Public, no question about it. That's okay. But why in the world are they letting this other thirty yards get by on these other players?
Now, I don't care what they shoot, I don't care if they hit the ball 330 yards, but look at Purdue University. They ask me to build a golf course. I charge them a dollar. I went out and I raised the mind to build a golf course because they had the Big Ten tournament coming. Just four or five years ago when I built it, I put the bunkers out 300 yards out, and nobody carried them, never. Then last year, they had a field last year where twenty-one guys carried those bunkers. So now, with the Intercollegiates coming in 2008, here I did it, I raised the money, paid the guy that did the work, charged them a dollar, and now I know all the long hitters are going to be able to carry the bunkers. So, I have to go back, and the University's don't give you money to do this, it's just me. And I'm sitting there trying to change it because of those guys, just six or seven years after the thing's built. You're spending money to try to contain those hits. And I guarantee you, those kids who play in 2008, are not any longer or stronger than those kids who played in 2003. I don't care what anybody tells me. There were just as many strong guys in 2003 as there's going to be in 2008.
JAY FLEMMA: But how do you think it's the tour’s fault for that?
PETE DYE: Well nobody comes out and fights the golf balls. And then the pros get used to hitting it 320 and 330 yards, they don't want to go back. They changed the whole game. I don't mind, I can stand them changing the game, I’m yelling about the cost. It's escalating cost, always goes back to the people trying to pay $50, and $75 instead of $100, or $200. And just like everything they do, it escalates that cost. So now, it'll be me, or it'll be the next guy coming to the golf course trying to add length to it. At TPC we added a few more yards, but it trickles down all the way to the Municipal Golf Course of Timbuktu. So mentally they think their course is too short, so they put another tee in the back. Then they have to cut the tee, then the ground, then the irrigation, and everything else.
JAY FLEMMA: And they have to buy more land to expand the golf course.
PETE DYE: And the next thing you know, it’s the greens. We've got to get them down faster, so they cut them, and it takes more chemicals, more fertilizer, more this, more sand, everything more. So sooner or later, John Q. Public is not going to be able to afford to play the game, that's the truth. And then of course, if it's bad enough, they have to pay $500 for a golf club. That's bad enough, but that's a one time event, hopefully.
Now, when you come out there and a guy is trying to maintain the golf course, that's a good thing. But if you take the way they cut fairways on a lot of golf courses; that was almost like the greens 30 years ago! So it escalated as well and it goes on and goes on. Now I'm building a golf course, for a resort in southern Indiana, but the deal is they had the PGA Championship there in 1926. Now they're hopefully going to try to get some kind of event there for the pros. Well this is 2007 and they said it’d be at least six or seven years down the road. What in the world is the game gonna look like then? They keep telling me the aerodynamics is not going to change the golf course, just put another twenty yards on this end. There is not one soul out there fighting that has any chance of stopping it.
JAY FLEMMA: Is that also because the equipment manufacturers are the ones spending so much money on the advertising out on the tours?
PETE DYE: It's all controlled by the manufacturers, sure. Sure it is.
JAY FLEMMA: So what can we do?
PETE DYE: Nothing. We're on the rocket sled to hell. That's where we are, because Jack may come out a little bit, Arnold maybe. But if you don't get Tiger and those people, to come out and say this is getting to be ridiculous…
JAY FLEMMA: How do you contain those people?
PETE DYE: Well, I think the only way is you go out to 330 yards, and just put a chasm out there so they can't hit any farther. So the guy that hits it 330 yards has to lay back to 300.
JAY FLEMMA: Which I assume probably would not too dictatorial for your average player, because your average player can still hit driver and not have to worry about driving it into the chasm.
PETE DYE: Right, that's what you have to do.
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