Pete Dye, R.I.P.

We've known it was coming, especially since the loss of his beloved Alice. 

I loved the man, excepting those times when I loathed him...  It was very much a package deal.  I'l acknowledge other strong contenders such as Jack-Barbara, Arnie-Winnie and, heck, even Ben-Valerie, but to me Pete and Alice were the best marriage in golf.  They truly worked and played together, and Pete was always happy to cede Alice the spotlight.

Additionally, while Pete might seem an odd fit among today's minimalist architects, the majority of them earned their spurs working for Pete.  You'll know the names, one of which, Ron Whitten, pens this loving tribute:

Pete Dye, the man who reinvented golf course design, is gone, succumbing to that bastard Father Time at age 94. He was a legend, a Hall of Famer, a showman and a friend. He built over one hundred golf courses, but his real legacy is how those courses impacted the game and millions who play it. 

Before Pete, golf architects mass-produced their products. Assembly lines of bulldozers stretched from coast to coast and chugged out facsimiles of the latest fashions. Some would eventually be deemed top-flight tests of golf, but all bore trademarks of one another. 

Pete was a disruptor 50 years before that became a corporate buzzword. We called his style of design “target golf,” for it embraced abrupt change in its landforms, its sink-or-swim choices, its death-or-glory options, its my-way-or-the-highway reasoning. 

Pete Dye instilled emotion into a previously staid game. That was an inevitable byproduct of his formative years. He was a teenage paratrooper during the last years of World War II, so he wanted golfers to feel the same sweaty palms and pit in the stomach as they faced their personal moments of truth, off a tee or into a green. He sold life insurance for a living, so he made golfers risk everything for a decent return.

Ron tries to explain Pete's MO:

Pete played golf with Donald Ross and Donald Trump and mined nuggets of knowledge from them both. He was a reactionary when golf was especially conservative. Pete threw a monkey wrench into every golfer’s swing. Where other architects strove to make golfers contemplate options before they faced a shot, Pete made golfers doubt; doubt their own eyes, their own capabilities, their own passion for the game. He did so with invention, deception and railroad ties. He found inspiration from Popular Mechanics, Model Railroader and an army manual.

He was a master at visual confusion, though many will consider it visual intimidation.  But so much of it defies explanation, such as this:

Pete wanted those who constructed his courses to be absolutely devoid of any knowledge about golf, lest they shaped holes that would look and play like everything else on the block. Dig me a swimming pool, he’d tell a crew when he wanted a bunker. Build me a giant birthday cake, he’d say when he wanted an elevated green. Occasionally, he’d wander off and the crew would be left to their own devices. A green famously created from dune buggy races in the sand was one result.

You'll want to read the whole thing.  Shack has aggregated many reactions to the loss, including this from his Pravda obituary:

Rarely using a set of grading plans for construction, relying instead on his instincts as he laid out a course, walking it in khakis and work boots or sitting atop a tractor, Mr. Dye emphasized strategy over raw power. 

“I think of Pete like Picasso, somebody that has created a nontraditional design, whether it’s a painting, a sculpture or a golf course,” the prominent course designer Arthur Hills was quoted by ESPN as saying. “He was so innovative in a profession that is very traditional.”

Let me circle back and interject this from the prior Ron Whitten tribute:

Pete never called himself a golf course architect because that implied education and technical training that he did not possess. He didn’t even like calling himself a golf course designer, for he lacked artistic talent and his sketches of golf holes looked like stick figures. Pete called himself a golf course builder, a guy who messed around in the dirt until he’d come up with something different than anyone had played before. He worked by trial and error, a very ineffective manner if you’re footing the bill, but acceptable if you’re looking for true art. It was particularly inefficient when Pete would rip up a fully grassed and playable golf hole because he just had another brainstorm.

Someone, probably Mr. Kohler, noted that they gave Pete an unlimited budget, and he exceeded it...

Most folks associate Pete with artificial features, railroad ties and island greens.  In fact, Pete has a wonderful quote about how he's always associated with island greens, whereas he's only built the two, that Google refuses to find for me.  Many will be surprised to find that he became something of a purist:

The turning point in their career came in 1963, after Mr. Dye competed in the British amateur championship on the Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland. Pete and Alice toured more than 30 courses in Scotland and England, and they photographed them as they played. 

As Mr. Dye recalled in his memoir: “My new understanding of the use of small greens, wide fairways, the impression that ground-level greens were elevated, contrasting grass mixes, severe undulations in the fairways, pot bunkers, railroad ties, blind holes and the inclusion of gorse-like vegetation to frame holes would affect all our future designs.”

I'll admit it's hard to find the links influence in this hole.

 And this from Ran Morrissett, which hints at the architectural linneage:

Dye famously remarked that he didn’t need to produce plans because he would be on site every day. That practical, hands-on approach spoke to his Midwestern roots. It also made an impact on people who worked for him, including Bill Coore and Tom Doak. Those two headline the Dye Tree of architecture, and their firms have gone on to produce more World Top 100 courses as selected by GOLF Magazine than any other architects over the past 25 years. Other notable designers who are quick to acknowledge Dye’s influence include Rod Whitman, Tim Liddy, Brian Curley, Lee Schmidt and Bobby Weed. The list goes on.

There's also that Nicklaus guy, though perhaps we might have asked Pete whether he wants that on his conscience. 

Geoff posted Jack's lovely Instagram tribute, including these wonderful photos:

Of course, the ugly plaid sports jackets come from the Harbor Town event, which was allegedly a Nicklaus-Dye collaboration.  

In the immediate aftermath of the sad news, Geoff took to his keyboard to try to explain the importance of Pete.  I'm guessing that he won't mind me quoting him in full:

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.

Anarchist?  OK, I wouldn't dream of going that far, but one can see where it kind of fits.

I've long thought there was good Pete and bad Pete.  The good Pete, and Harbor Town tops my list, is indeed very good.   

Even Sawgrass, which I so wanted to dismiss out of hand, is far more playable and enjoyable than one can ever imagine.  I'm undecided as to whether his lasting legacy should be as the nicest guy in the game or than Coore, Doak bloodline.  Or, you know, all those great courses.  best of all, he's with his beloved Alice.

R.I.P.