Pete Dye
Pete Dye is the most famous golf designer of the past 50 years, his determination to unsettle the professional golfer through his courses changing the very way the sport is played. This is everything you need to know about the ‘Van Gough’ of design, the man behind Whistling Straits, Kiawah Island, and the world’s most terrifying tee shot.
Ohio-born. Paul Dye Junior was born in 1925 and grew up in Urbana, Ohio. Son to Elizabeth and Paul Francis Dye, he was known by his initials ‘P.D.’ as a youngster to differentiate him from his father, a nickname which later became ‘Petey’ and finally Pete. His father was an insurance salesman, local postmaster and also an amateur golf-course designer, building a nine-hole course on family farmland that became Urbana Country Club, where Pete would grow up working and playing.
An amateur talent. Dye was a skilled golfer as a youngster – as a junior at Urbana High, he won the individual title at the 1943 Ohio High School Golf Championship. He went on to state and national competition, playing in five U.S. Amateurs, the 1957 U.S. Open (finishing ahead of Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus) and the British Amateur in 1963 – the latter would be foundational to his design career.
High-school sweetheart. After a stint in the 82nd Airborne Infantry, Dye enrolled at Rollins College in Florida where he met Alice Holliday O'Neal, a junior pre-med student and accomplished golfer – she would win the Indiana Amateur nine times it total. Alice became his wife four years later in 1950, and they moved to Indianapolis where they worked in insurance alongside pursuing golf.
The tinkering begins. Alongside playing golf during the day and working at night, Dye was also acting as green chairman at the Country Club of Indianapolis. He attended agronomy classes at Purdue University to gain knowledge and began to learn the ropes of course design, moving bunkers and planting trees. By 1959, Dye told his wife that he wanted to move on from insurance to build golf courses, and he and Alice became partners in the venture.
El-Dorado. Their first design, the 9-hole El-Dorado Golf Club in Indianapolis, was completed in 1961, a course now known as Royal Oak at Dyes Walk Country Club. Even in their first design the hallmarks of his philosophy was on show, the course criss-crossing a creek at the heart of the property 13 times, forcing players into difficult shots. The Dye’s first 18-hole course was built in 1962, then as Heather Hills and now as Maple Creek Golf & Country Club.
Scotland changed it all. In 1963, Dye qualified for the British Amateur at St Andrews. He lost in the third round, but he and Alice took the opportunity to tour 30 of the great Scottish links courses on their trip, coming across many a pot bunkers, wooden bulkhead and diminutive green along the way. These would become telltale features of Dye courses for the years to come as they formulated their ‘target golf’ style, with wide, undulating fairway giving way to small targets.
Crooked Stick. With 10 designs completed, Crooked Stick was Dye’s first well-known course, construction beginning in 1964 and coming of age when it hosted the 1991 PGA Championship, won by John Daly. This layout put the Dye paring on the golfing map and was the first of a stream of courses that soon became regarded among the best in the US, such as the celebrated Harbour Town Golf Links, now the annual host of the RBC Heritage that’s played the week after the Masters, and the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass.
Sketch for TPC at Sawgrass
Terrifying tee shots. The par-three 17th hole at TPC at Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach is one of the most intimidating and recognisable tee shots in all of golf. Known as the "Island Green," it gained worldwide notoriety in 1982 during the first Players Championship at the new course, spawning countless imitations around the world. The whole course is one of the best examples of pure Dye golf, combining the demands of distance with target, sink-or-swim golf, protected by undulating greens.
Casa de Campo Resort
Call of the Caribbean. Dye was coaxed to visit the Dominican Republic in the late 1960s by sugar manufacturing baron Alvaro Carta to build a destination to spur tourism. With soil too dry for sugarcane growing and too sparsely vegetated for rearing cattle, Dye set about creating what would become ‘Diente del Perro’ (Teeth of the Dog in Spanish, after the local workers’ name for the surrounding coral formations). Opening in 1971, it was the first course of the Casa de Campo Resort, a complex that changed the Dominican nation as a destination. Dye would later complete five courses on the complex and lived there with Alice for many years. After his death here in 2020, his ashes were spread on back of the green of par-four 8th hole.
Kiawah Island Ocean Course
The 1991 Ryder Cup. Kiawah Island might just be Pete’s most ‘Dye-abolical’ creation. Often considered the first course designed for a specific event – the 1991 Ryder Cup –this linksland-meets-lagoons layout is the coastal masterpiece that was created when the Dyes were tasked with creating a course that would be a challenge to the very best professionals. The Ocean Course is not for the faint hearted, one designed to test patience where you simultaneously marvel at its beauty while cursing its difficulty.
And again, at Whistling Straits. Hosting three PGA Championships and the 2021 Ryder Cup, Dye’s 1998 design transformed a flat abandoned army air base alongside Lake Michigan into a Ballybunion-inspired beauty. Peppering the rugged fairways with over a thousand bunkers, which remain unranked during a day’s play in keeping with the Irish tradition. Whistling Straits is one of the sternest tests even for the top professionals, a testament to Dye’s desire to get into their psyche and purposely try and unsettle.
Mentors to the future. One of the great legacies of Dye is the legion of future designers that started their careers under him, the likes of Bill Coore, Tom Doak, Tim Liddy, Greg Muirhead, Lee Schmidt and Bobby Weed, not to mention their own two sons, Perry O'Neal Dye and Paul Burke (P.B.) Dye – known as the ‘Dyeciples’, Pete and Alice famously treated them all as their own children. He even kickstarted the design career of Jack Nicklaus in 1965 when he helped consult on a number of Dye’s projects, the two formally collaborating on four courses including Harbour Town Golf Links.