When I wrote my book on the 2021 Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits, one of the wildest stories I encountered in my research came from Herb Kohler, who was 82 years old then and still very entertaining. (Kohler, who ran the Kohler Company and brought championship golf to his corner of Wisconsin, passed in the fall of 2022. For the design of the River Course at Blackwolf Run, Kohler chose Pete Dye as his designer. This was in the early '80s, but Dye's reputation already preceded him—brilliant, cantankerous, the ultimate individual.
The two men became great friends in time, but Kohler also was a powerful man used to getting his way, so when he refused Dye's request to cut down a grove of elm trees for the 17th hole, he expected his hire to follow orders. Dye didn't. One day, annoyed at Kohler missing a meeting on the course, he took matters into his own hands, cut them all down, and left town. When Kohler finally made it out to the River Course, all he saw was a pile of smoking timber where the elm trees had been.
Somehow, their relationship survived, but the story says so much about Pete Dye, the man who in 1979 was hired to design the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass, where next week's Players Championship has been held every year since 1982. That design played with such difficulty that it was wildly unpopular with the pros, and Dye even got chucked into the water by 18—humorously? maybe?—by the '82 winner Jerry Pate. (The fact that he was so controversial was actually part of his appeal for Kohler a few years later.)
To quote Golf Digest's Jerry Tarde, in a piece that ran in 1983 and which you can find in the Golf Digest Archive with a Golf Digest+ subscription, "They say Dye walks the line between genius and madness." Tarde contrasts Dye, the most infamous design figure in the game back then, with Jack Nicklaus, who himself had emerged as a serious designer with courses like Muirfield Village on his resume. In simple terms, Tarde writes, "One lures, the other intimidates." Or, to quote the title, Nicklaus says "come on over" while Dye says "I dare you."
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Of course, things were never quite as they seemed with either man. Dye's visually intimidating tableaus, utilizing "mounds, swales, hollows, elevated tees, and sandy wasteland," often disguised a shot that was actually easier than it looked, while the opposite effect was frequently achieved (with the same tools) by Nicklaus in his more "comfortable" aesthetic.
Tarde's piece shines as he visits each man in his element—Nicklaus while designing the mountain course Elk River in North Carolina as the head of Golforce Inc., Dye running a comparatively mom-and-pop style outfit with his wife Alice in Florida. Nicklaus once considered himself a protege of Dye, but the two very publicly clashed after the completion of Sawgrass, and Nicklaus' design theories in the '80s can be seen as a reaction against Dye's punitive visual style, with blind shots and nearly convex greens.
"Nicklaus likes to give the golfer a well-defined target," Tarde writes, illustrating the contrast. "While you may not be able to see the ball land on a Nicklaus course, you know where to hit it. If the bottom of the flagstick cannot be seen, Nicklaus builds what he calls ‘false fronts,’ which are extensions in front of the putting surface that really don't come into play but give the golfer in the fairway the illusion of seeing the green."
Looking back now, this article comes with a certain fascination, and if you're like me, you'll be unable to avoid picking a favorite. My heart belongs to Dye, with his "Scottish style of rugged, natural-looking, ‘target golf’ courses’ that "came along when American architecture was moving toward the velvety, lush look of Augusta National," as Tarde puts it. Give me the guy who had to drain a swamp to create Sawgrass, or "dynamite a mountainside" for Austin Country Club every day over the more expensive Nicklaus courses with their soft looks and "immaculate conditioning," churned out at high rates via his companies. (I also laughed that PGA Tour players accused him of designing left-to-right slanting greens to accommodate his fade.)
Not that Dye skimped; when he designed Oak Tree, the owner Joe Walser quipped that "I gave him an unlimited expense budget and he exceeded it."
Tarde concludes by noting that the "definitive judgment of history" will have to wait, which made me think of a moment a few years ago at the Players Championship, when Brandel Chamblee stopped in the media center to chat with the journalists and one of us asked him about Dye.
"Incredibly creative, controversial, wasn't afraid to take chances, did things that didn't really make sense, and certainly didn't make sense to me," Chamblee began. "I don't know where he came from. He has no precursor. Everybody always says, ‘Alister MacKenzie is who I follow’ or whatever. But not with Pete. Pete just showed up, and he had no precursors, and nobody could even copy him. Nobody even tries. He was a complete original, and that's genius."
