The Marquis de Sod In Winter (Maybe Late Fall)

People have the idea I’m in love with island greens. Well, I've designed two in 50 years. Once you’re stereotyped, it’s almost impossible to lose it.  PETE DYE

In my prior post we had some fun with the Golf.com 11 Most Terrifying Things in Golf.  One that I deliberately skipped, because it's dead wrong, was this one:

The Phrase "A Pete Dye Design" 

Gulp. You know you are in for forced carries, tricky landing areas and slopes in the 150s on a Dye design. Consider the 17th hole at Whistling Straits. Hit your shot left of the green and you'll be in one of the course's hundreds of bunkers, 20 feet below the surface of the green. Jail.

If that's your take on Pete Dye, you really need to get out more.  Mind you, he's been guilty of all of that and more at times, but that's only part of the picture.  I've always there's good and bad Pete Dye, let's call it Dr. Pete and Mr. Dye.

But even as my ball bounced of an unnecessary railroad tie, I've always been favorably disposed towards the man, for the following reasons:

1. He is by all accounts one of the nicest men you'll ever meet (not that I've met him);
   
2. I love everything about his marriage to the famed Alice.  The fact that they were both great players, that they've been together for so long and that he so readily credits her for much of his success;
3. His shop was the incubator for so much of the current minimalist golf architecture.  Do you like Bill Coore, Bobby Weed, Tom Doak and Jim Urbina?  They all learned their craft under Pete, speak with obvious affection about the man and his work.  And that takes so many with only a superficial knowledge by surprise, as Pete's work sometimes seems to be the antithesis of minimalism;
4. The work.  In case one hasn't noticed, it's damn good and holds up well over time.

A tip of the hat to Shackelford for alerting us that Jeff Silverman's wonderful Golf Digest profile of Dye at age 88 is now available online (as well as for the Dye quote above).  You've heard this from me before, but you really need to go read the whole thing, as there's more in it than I can possibly convey.  

First, an overview of Dye's philosophy, wherein he doesn't design golf course, he builds them:

For Dye, this is home Gulfstream Golf Club, where Dye has his winter home), a decidedly under-the-radar and relatively kind 18 designed by Donald Ross in the 1920s. "He made one trip and laid it out and had some other guy build it," Dye declaims incredulously. "He didn't spend time building courses." 

Dye does. 

It's his hallmark. Spending time. Discovering. Rediscovering. Planning on-site. Sculpting freely in the dirt. Pass after pass, that's where he finds the little things -- the contours, the slopes, the zigs and the zags -- that have been driving golfers crazy for half a century. In Dye's complex and creative mind, that is where courses are minted: in the dirt, not on paper. Good thing, too, because he's not much with a pencil. "Hell," he growls, "my dog can draw better than me."

It's great stuff, including the fact that Dye was on the Greens Committee for years before they let him help out.  Pete Dye on yours Greens Committee.  And you ignore him... 

What's of greatest interest to this architecture geek, was this quote:

As Coore says, "Nobody else has ever changed the direction of golf architecture twice."

TPC was the second swerve for Dye, but the first might have been the more significant:

At the moment the conversation is hopping around TPC Sawgrass, Dye's second great architectural swerve. The first came at Harbour Town, in the late 1960s, where, teamed with a rookie consultant named Nicklaus, he made a conscious decision to concoct an alternative in the South Carolina lowcountry to Robert Trent Jones. Short and strategic, Harbour Town was the anti-Jones incarnate, a revelation with its priority on finesse and its premium on ingenuity above power, the exact kind of golf the Dyes, superb shotmakers both, enjoyed playing and played so well. The greens were small. The fairways were wide, but deceptive. Railroad ties and cedar planks offered visual contrast and something to think about; so did the stunning view to the sea and the lighthouse to highlight the heroic finish Dye would become synonymous with. The construction was so hands-on that Dye -- with Alice in her customary role as editor of his manuscript -- was still touching up the morning of its debut as the site of the first Heritage Golf Classic in 1969.

 Harbor Town is, in my opinion, Dye's stunning masterpiece.  The anti-Trent Jones course that's still relevant as distance has exploded further than Dye could have ever conceived.  

I'm going to leave the profile here and trust you to read it all.  You'll thank me later, as there's so much interesting detail and wonderful anecdotes.  Heck, you should read it just to see good sticks Pete and Alice were.  Well, let me give you a taste:

Dye, a true lion in winter, may have lost a step or two in his gait and more than a few miles per hour from the swing that got him to six U.S. Amateurs, a British Amateur, and the 1957 U.S. Open (where he gleefully exhales that he tied Arnold Palmer and bettered Jack Nicklaus), but his aura and attitude? "He's the oldest teenager I know," says Weed. "He's the Energizer Bunny of golf."

 I'll close with a few of my own thoughts on TPC, which you'll no doubt be watching this weekend.  I took two Willow Ridge trips there and played it 4 or 5 times.  I went prepared to not like it at all, it being anathema to the insufferable purist in me, but came home with a new-found respect for it and its creator.  It will never be a favorite of mine, far too much water and the like for me, but I'd be happy to play it anytime.

I've always through Dye to be the absolute Zen-master of angles, never more so than at Sawgrass.  And please remember, it was a flat swamp offering the designer nothing in the way of contours or elevation changes.  I believe it was Dye, and if it wasn't it should have been, who said minimal land requires maximal architecture.  Yes it's artificial in so many ways, but on that site it couldn't be otherwise.

But the angles are truly amazing, never more so than on the Par 5's.  To cite one example, the second hole is one of the more forgettable holes on the golf course, a classic reverse dogleg requiring a draw off the tee and a fade into the fairway that angles left-to-right.  But identifying the precise line and distance for that lay-up is incredibly daunting, and there's no visible cues for the player.  It's a lay-up for God's sake, but a really difficult shot that quickly gets into your head.

There's one more thing I'd like to say about TPC, which never gets discussed.  I've always thought that the hardest aspect of course design is ensuring that it plays right for a wide range of golfing abilities.  Even a place like the Stadium Course, designed specifically to torment the greatest players in the world, has to accommodate hackage for some 50 weeks a year.  TPC accomplishes this very well, by offering reasonably wide corridors and bail-out options.

TPC offers four separate tee boxes (including the ladies), and the most brilliant set of hybrid tees I've ever noticed.  The hybrid tees split the difference between the blues and whites, but do so by eliminating about four very difficult forced caries off the tee.  This to me is the art as it should be creating a test for those with the skills to take it on, but offering an option that's appropriately playable for those that can't carry it 250 off the tee.