Pete Dye Interview Part 1

This interview was conducted in January.  Parts of the interview will be published in print magazines early next year.

JAY FLEMMA:  One of your greatest golf courses is Sawgrass and one of the reasons why it’s so great is that it resonates both with professionals and amateurs alike.  It keeps the player off balance.  For example, let’s take 14 and 15, where one of the holes is draw off the tee and fade into the green, and then the next hole is fade off the tee draw into the green.  My colleagues like to call that “routing.”  And then also you’ll keep the player off balance on the tee, one minute they can hit driver but the next hole they can’t.  Can you tell us some of your other designs that you think particularly have a great routing, so that it keeps the player off balance, having to hit different shots all the time?

PETE DYE:  Well, if you can make the hole feel like the one shot goes left to right, and the next shot right to left, it’s more trouble for good player to adjust but the higher handicapped player is not aware of it at all, they’re never aware of it.  Then if you make one side look a lot more open then the other side, then the player will play away from the hazard.  But you know all that changed so dramatically in the last ten to fifteen years.  John Daly crucified Crooked Stick with his length, and now John Daly is sixteen years older, and he’s fatter, and has everything else, and yet he hits the ball farther.  You see, the United States Golf Association has completely lost control of the equipment.  The next thing that’s been changed dramatically is the maintenance of the golf course.  The green speeds when Hogan won at Oakmont, the fastest greens in the world were about five or six on the stimpmeter.  Today they’re twelve or thirteen because they cut ’em down.  So when you’re building the golf course today, as opposed to just five years ago, you can’t even remotely build the same thing if you’re trying to stay abreast.  And my problem is most of the golf courses that I have that are on the PGA Tour.  So when you talk about trying to make the golf course compatible for the higher handicaps as well as pros, it’s almost totally impossible.  Just like when anybody says they were building a Donald Ross golf course.  The most ridiculous thing I’ve ever listened to, I’m the only one that knew Donald Ross, knew him well, talked to him, and if he was around today, he wouldn’t anymore do what he did in 1923 then would the man on the moon!

JAY FLEMMA:  How do you think Ross would have changed over time?

PETE DYE:  Well he would change dramatically.

JAY FLEMMA:  How?

PETE DYE:  Well I can tell you that first hole over here at Gulf Stream was 423 yards uphill in 1923.  What do you think the man would think today? 

JAY FLEMMA:  He would probably think it needed to be a little longer and the approach shot needs to be a little tighter?

PETE DYE:  Well he had all his approach shots pretty tight.  But at Pinehurst, he was going to tear up all the greens before he died and he didn’t do it.  He wanted to put them back the way they were.  And anybody who says Pinehurst’s greens are Ross’ greens is listening to a figment of their imagination.  They don’t know what they’re talking about.  When they converted Pinehurst to grass in about ’37 or ’38 or something…

JAY FLEMMA:  From sand?

PETE DYE:  Yep, sand.  Everybody was playing on sand greens down there.  So they had common Bermuda grass that was top dressed very heavily, and the greens just grew like a mushroom, about 18 inches crowned off.  And then when he was alive, he told me he was going to cut those crowns off.  And when he died in ’48, Mr. Tufts, who was a good friend of my wife, who the North and South, kept saying I’m going to cut these crowns off, well they never cut the crowns off.  It was sold to a truck driver, and he came back and rebuilt the greens to USGA sub base.  But anybody that talks about Donald Ross, I just sit there and laugh, because Seminole is supposed to be a good Donald Ross golf course and it’s not remotely the same.

JAY FLEMMA:  Now let’s talk a little about the—

PETE DYE:  But it’s not even close to being what Ross built.  So that’s why Seminole in the ’30s and the ’40s, is not even close the Seminole being this way.  Sit right there, don’t move.  I want to show you something.  Really anybody that says I’m a Donald Ross expert, I’m glad, but I cannot believe it.

JAY FLEMMA:  Okay, but let me ask you this.  Do you possibly find that the crowned greens, that exist at Pinehurst today are more interesting because of their severe contours and dropoffs?

PETE DYE:  I’m not saying the new greens are good, bad, or indifferent.  I’m just saying they’re not the same Ross built.

JAY FLEMMA:  No question about that.  As an article that appeared during the 2005 U.S. Open said, “Donald Ross would not recognize these greens.”  That being said, any true golf enthusiast knows that the adventure should just begin when you get to the green.  Do you find that greens that have more character and contour make the game more interesting?

PETE DYE:  Oh, well, how would I answer that quickly?  You know, you’re right.  But how are you going to control the organizations that put on the golf championships?  If you’re going to have a PGA championship, or they’re going to have the Ryder Cup, or they’re going to have this tournament or that played at your golf course, you’re going to do what they do under today’s playing circumstances.

JAY FLEMMA:  Which is that they’re going to speed up the greens so much that the contours become almost unplayable?

PETE DYE:  Exactly.  If you’re in the business, and your golf course is going to be exposed to tournament conditions, you’re either going to have another Shinnecock… 

JAY FLEMMA:  When you say another Shinnecock, you mean in 2004 where people were ping-ponging back and forth and across the greens?

PETE DYE:  That’s right.  And so if you don’t want that to happen to your greens, you’re going to have to change the contours as well as your thinking.  I totally agree that it’s better for the game to leave greens the way they were because that was part of the strategy.  We had greens all over this way, all over that way.  Now you have greens that are second class.  I also agree that the contours that they used to have on the greens had more undulations than we have now.

JAY FLEMMA:  Why is it second class?

PETE DYE:  They were more interesting.

JAY FLEMMA:  Why do you think this happened?

PETE DYE:  Because the United States Golf Association and other people  pride themselves on eliminating them.  They think “if this course that got a tournament did it, I’d better do it.”  But my golf courses are different.  I’ve had eight major championships played on my golf courses, eight majors.  The golf pros play the TPC every year.  They come to Harbour Town every year.  And then I get the LPGA Championship coming to Bulle Rock.  Now I can’t dictate what they do at a major.  I can’t tell them “I want the greens at eight.”  A course may be great that has speeds of eight and the greens may be terrific, but probably nobody else ever sees that golf course.

JAY FLEMMA:  And that’s a bad thing isn’t it?

PETE DYE:  Yes.  I’m building a golf course right now that I think they’ll have major championship on, I’m not going to go out and put contours in the greens, like maybe I might like to, because I know what’s going to happen to them.  Here I am half of 162 years old.  I don’t agree with it, but there’s nothing I can do to fight it.  And then the Tournament Players Club, I’ve rebuilt that thing three times.  And every time I’ve just softened the greens that much.  But here’s the thing, it costs a lot more money to maintain greens at speeds of ten and eleven.  No question about it, no question.  Now the old greens, they’ve lost something.  When it comes to the tour, only on the old greens would you have a lot of slope or contour coming into the green.  But now, I don’t run City Hall, and I guarantee you where they have the US Open this year, where is it?

JAY FLEMMA:  Well particularly this year because it’s at Oakmont.

PETE DYE:  And where’s the PGA again?

JAY FLEMMA:  Southern Hills.

PETE DYE:  Well they’ll do the same thing at the US Senior Open at Crooked Stick, and they’re talking about playing the golf course at 7300 yards for the seniors, so it’s gonna be about 11 on the stimpmeter for the greens.  Now that’s the US Senior Open Championship!  So at Crooked Stick, which I built, I had to go back and modify the greens for when they had the PGA championship there.  I had to modify them for the Solheim Cup.  So every time I’d go back…whether it’s Crooked Stick, Harbour Town, TPC, The Ocean Course, since I built them originally, I went back softened all those greens, no matter how they ran when I first designed them.

JAY FLEMMA:  What can we do to change people’s thinking about that?

PETE DYE:  Well you can write the United States Golf Association, tell them they got their brains polluted. 

JAY FLEMMA:  Do you think that perhaps television contributes to this preconditioning by making the general public think that this is acceptable? 

PETE DYE:  Well sure television has a lot to do with it.  Primarily television has a lot to do with it because it’s the image they get from Augusta, and the image they get from the US Open, and the image of any major championship and all they talk about on the television is the speed of the greens.  Now that wasn’t true 25 years ago.  And so a lot of the old golf courses, they say, “why haven’t they been able to hold their own?”  Well you take Pine Valley, any of the old golf courses—

JAY FLEMMA:  Or National Golf Links of America?

PETE DYE:  Sure, any of the old golf courses that still have the contours that they built for six or seven, and now they’re mowing them at 11, heck yes, it’s a battle to hold their own.

JAY FLEMMA:  Now, nevertheless, you’ve mentioned Sawgrass and Augusta, but also let’s take some modern courses, for example, a couple places that will host tournaments this year.  Isn’t there a fundamental difference that the newer courses we’re seeing on tour, the greens are much flatter then they are at Augusta or at Sawgrass or National.

PETE DYE:  Well that goes without saying.

JAY FLEMMA: Let’s take Harbour Town and Fowlers Mill on one hand and Kiawah Island and Whistling Straits on the other.  How would you say you have changed over time in terms of your design strategies over the last 40 years?

PETE DYE:  I don’t think my strategy has changed much at all.  I think that I used to reward the long drive maybe, if it made you hit near a hazard.  It’d give you a reward, but I don’t reward the long drive anymore.  That’s a hard thing to do.

JAY FLEMMA:  Why is it a hard thing to do?

PETE DYE:  It just is.  A guy hits it a mile on a 500 yard par four, and he hits it 360 yards and he’s got 140 to go and he’s got a wedge in his hands.  It just shows the game is playing backwards now.  And then more than that, there is less play.  It costs a lot more, cost is one of the biggest problems and that leads to even less play.  But even the greatest players out there today, never have the chance to stand out there and hit a good drive and be left with a three or four iron just to get a par on a par-4.  That part of the game is gone.  And then when they get on the green, the greens are just absolutely perfect, they got a perfect speed of 11, so the good players, and there’s no problem for them.

JAY FLEMMA:  Why do you think we’re chasing people away from the game if we’re making the holes shorter because of technology?

PETE DYE:  The technology is not helping the guy who that hits it 200 yards, It’s not helping him at all.

JAY FLEMMA:  All right, so let’s talk a little more about Harbour Town.  Deane Beman said that it reminded him of Scotland, but to an untrained eye, it looks like a low country shot shaping course.  What’s Scottish about Harbour Town?

PETE DYE:  Who said that?

JAY FLEMMA:  Deane Beman.

PETE DYE:  Darned if I know.  But I really love Harbour Town.  The reason for Harbour Town is this.  When I first started in the business, Mr. Jones – Trent Jones – the first few courses I built, I copied a lot of Mr. Jones’ style.

JAY FLEMMA:  Like what?  Runway tees?  Pedestal greens?

PETE DYE:  The tees, the greens, the bunkers, everything.

JAY FLEMMA:  And the style of bunkering on both sides of the fairways?

PETE DYE:  Yes, the bunkering.  Trent had a lot of fine golf courses, and he was a good friend.  So the first course I built was the University of Michigan, and it was a lot like Mr. Jones’ course, and he always liked it.  So when I went to Harbour Town, I moved there.  And when I went to build the dang golf course, he was building Palmetto Dunes.  And it occurred to me that the only way I would ever get an identity was just go the dead opposite. 

JAY FLEMMA:  So what did you do that was dead opposite?

PETE DYE:  Well the greens are much smaller, and the profiles of the greens, if you walk Harbour Town you see I didn’t raise anything 18 inches in Harbour Town, nothing.  Nothing at all.  And I imagine why Harbour Town got a shot in the arm was that Arnold Palmer won the first tournament, the Heritage Classic.  That probably had as much to do with it as anything.  And maybe Calibogue Sound had something to do with it.  And when it first opened, you feel isolated, because there were no houses around it, and you’re just going through the woods, great big live oak trees.  And it looks nothing more like Scotland then anything as far as I can see.   Maybe Deane thought so.

JAY FLEMMA:  What are your favorite strategic moments at Harbour Town?

PETE DYE:  Well I don’t know about strategic moments, but I think at that time nobody did something like it.  When I first went over to Scotland and Ireland, the railroad ties were part of the bunkers and you saw them all different places, and they were part of the golf course.  You’d get in these bunkers and they had these pilings up coming out, because they were all built along the railroad tracks.  That’s the way people traveled back and forth.  But at Harbour Town, I don’t think I was thinking of Scotland or Ireland, but it dawned on me to keep it low and keep people from trying to mow the bank of the lagoons because they have grass going down.  So I just thought to put the railroad ties and bulkhead it.  I think that was the first golf course that the lagoons and the canals were bulkheaded.  I think that the press saw it as being different.  And another thing, by bulk heading that way, I could keep the profile of the greens down which was just the opposite of what Trent Jones, who was a great friend and a great friend of Alice’s, but it was just the opposite of what he was doing, dead opposite.  Now fortunately enough, I worked on it with Jack Nicklaus, who’s also been a good friend, and he’d fly back and forth and we talked about the strategy.  But I built this course, and Jack I remember his biggest input at one time, he said, “why don’t you build the smallest greens in the world?” Well it being a resort we weren’t thinking too good.  But we built the 15th green and I don’t think that’s 3000 square feet.  That was also different from Mr. Jones too, big time.

JAY FLEMMA:  Now how about Fowlers Mill?  That’s from roughly the same time period.

PETE DYE:  Well that golf course was built with John David Rice and it was supposed to be a company course.  TRW, Thompson Radio.  John David did great at all his courses.  Well I built that thing up there and it was entirely different then Harbour Town, it had so much more contour and it was self contained, there were no houses, it was an entirely different ball game.  And I was very thrilled to get to build that thing up there. 

JAY FLEMMA:  And now it’s a purely public facility that has a great low price of $60 a round.

PETE DYE:  Yeah, that’s a good price.  But that was a company golf course they built.

JAY FLEMMA:  What are some of your favorite holes there and why?

PETE DYE:  Oh, I think the ones that are on the pond down there, the lake, that’s an artificial lake we built, God knows why.  That thing has broken down before. 

JAY FLEMMA:  Tell us about number nine.  That’s the one where there’s sort of a bern that runs parallel to the line of play and divides it bisects the fairway left and right. 

PETE DYE:  Yeah, I remember that hole.

JAY FLEMMA:  Did you get the idea for that from Scotland or from somewhere else?

PETE DYE:  Well, I used to play halfway decent golf.  I played in the National Open.  I beat Nicklaus.  I’ve played a lot of golf, and when I was building it, I tried to build something that I thought was different and particular at that time.  See here’s what you’re doing.  When you’re building a golf course, like I’ve got one going right now in Indiana, and I know exactly what’s going on up there and you have to know exactly what’s going on damn near every day.  Because kids that are working there work for me and I know the progress that they’ll make under the weather conditions and so forth.  So somebody will say, well how in the hell are you getting this done?  Well first, you go in and talk to them about the basics of what you want.  For example, the landing area we’re trying to get fairly wide enough so somebody can play golf and the greens sort of in place and so forth.  And these doggone golf courses now have gone from two to three million dollars to just unbelievable costs.  The fuel cost, and the machinery costs, equipment for the irrigation has gone crazy.  The USGA has come up with their sub bases, it’s just nuts.  And then if you don’t build the sub base according to the specs, you’re cooked.  Then everybody, all these guys all talk about is how much dirt you moved from here to there.  And they forget when Donald Ross was building a golf course, they had so many mules and people out there, they moved more dirt then we ever—can move here.  I went down and built the one in the Dominican Republic.  I didn’t have a truck or bulldozer and I moved more dirt down there with labor.  You could do it, but hang on.  Here’s where I come back into it.  So we get it all roughed in there and looking pretty much like a golf course.  And I put together a B-4 or B-5 bulldozer, and that costs maybe $100. So, I go in there and on the sixth green or the sixth hole or whatever it is, I say look, you ought to do this, do that and say it takes him two days, so he spends $2,000.  So if I spent $2,000 on every hole, that’d be $36,000 on a $6 million project.  In the mean time, these guys that do drawings that are to the inch, they get so many stakes out there, it takes the bulldozer operator five times as long to get it done, as opposed to me just showing them.  I’ll do it quickly myself, and show them.  And then they all argue back and forth or whatever it is, and a lot of times when they do it again, it looks better then I ever imagined.

JAY FLEMMA:  Let’s back up for half a second and… 

PETE DYE:  So that doesn’t cost anything, I can change the greens, I can go in and change the greens five times for $5,000 on a $6 million project.  On a bulldozer, if I go in there and say look, change the contour, takes them an hour, two hours, $200.  If I’m responsible like that and they’re all responsible to me – the construction manager, the bulldozers – it all channel down and saves money.

JAY FLEMMA:  Well let’s back up a second and let’s talk number nine at Fowlers Mill for an example…or 12 okay?  Is that also not completely different then Robert Trent Jones, in that the hazard is in the center line, and that because the hazards in the center line, it creates more options off the tee.  Does that also set you apart from Trent Jones?

PETE DYE:  I don’t know about that, maybe.  When I did Harbour Town, I was trying to get a different look then Mr. Jones, but when I did those kinds of things, because I played a lot of golf, I knew that you could play it.  It would bother me as a good player.

JAY FLEMMA:  Which makes it “good” in terms of getting in the head of the professional players, but also creating more options for the amateur player?

PETE DYE:  Of course.  Sure.  See, in amateur golf, there’s a guy that plays five times a year, then there’s a guy that shoots 90 that plays 50, 75 times a year.  And those guys, no matter what you do, you can’t do enough to discourage them, because their thinking is entirely different then the guys that say “oh, I’m not going back to that course, it’s too hard.”  So, there are a certain group of people that play golf that they belong to five clubs, and yet, they’ll drive every Wednesday and Saturday to Pine Valley and play it, and won’t post the score when they finish.  Or they belong to everybody’s club up here in Palm Beach, and live just three minutes on the ocean away from it, and they’ll drive all the way into town and go all the way up north to Seminole, and play everyday, and still shoot 90, and come back all the way through the traffic, and right past everybody’s clubs, and two minutes they’re home.  They’ll do it.  That golfer puts his wife in the car or in those airplanes, goes back to Philadelphia, live right next to Philadelphia Country Club, but he goes every Wednesday and Saturday to Pine Valley, drives all the way out there.  Why?  I don’t know.  And then when the weather gets real good in Philadelphia, he puts his wife in the airplane, goes up to JFK, flies over to Heathrow, in a melee of all these people and his bags, and all that, flies all the way up to Edinburgh, and plays golf for three weeks in the rain in Scotland.

JAY FLEMMA:  And?

PETE DYE:  And then turns around and comes back, and he hasn’t broken 90 yet.

JAY FLEMMA:  Okay…and?

PETE DYE:  So those people, they’re an entirely different group of people, they’re ardent golfers I call them.  When somebody calls them average, you ain’t never going to hear me call the man average that does that, lives that kind of a life.  Comes over here, plays golf over here and shoots 85, 90, flies over to Scotland or goes all the way up to Carne in the worlds worst weather and plays for two weeks and comes back and all he can talk about is going back next year.  I go down to the Dominican Republic and watch, and when you built a golf course, like Whistling Straits, or anything like it where you get that type of play, and every time I’ve worked on a golf course, and try to ease it off, I’ve never been as successful as the other way.

JAY FLEMMA:  Well what can we do to turn the game from the ardent player who’s playing all the private clubs flying all over, to the ardent public player who will drive two hours to play great public golf courses, and at the same time, turn the preconditioning of that player from what we see on the TV to the center lined bunkers and options and diagonal hazards instead of all the trouble being on the sides, narrow fairways that you just can’t hit?

PETE DYE:  Well, like when you build resorts, it’s public course like Kiawah’s a public course, Harbour Town’s a public course, and TPC Sawgrass is, The Fort is public.  That course is difficult course in Indianapolis and the greens fees are good.  And Purdue.  Purdue’s my favorite golf course.  It’s a university course, and they’ve had the Big Ten tournament there and other big tournaments there.  They beat out Southern Hills.  They beat out Country Club of California.  They beat out Inverness.  They beat out Sea Island, where they’ve had the intercollegiates.  It’s a public course and people play there for 50 bucks.  That course I like as much as any course I’ve ever built.

JAY FLEMMA:  Why?

PETE DYE:  Because of what it does – It offers the public player an inexpensive alternative that has a good design

JAY FLEMMA:  And the PGA Golf Club Dye Course in Port St. Lucie does the same thing, doesn’t it?

PETE DYE:  Yeah, yeah, up there is another good example.  And like the University Course I built at Virginia Tech.