By Daniel Rapaport
If you keep up with trends in golf architecture, you know there’s been a huge movement toward cutting down trees on courses around the world. The thought process here is generally to open up vistas, increase optionality and help turf grow better.

Gary Player isn’t having it. Not even close.

Player stepped into the broadcast booth during the Payne’s Valley Cup, the exhibition featuring Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, Justin Thomas and Justin Rose to celebrate the opening of Woods’ first public course design. He was asked what he’s more proud of—his playing career or his record as a golf course architect—and used the opportunity to discuss the environmental concerns of building a golf course.

First, he mentioned the need to not use too much water and too much fertiliser. Then, he really got cooking.

“The other thing that is driving me crazy, my brother went to war to fight for the Americans when he was 17 years of age,” said Player, who is South African. “And he became one of the world’s leading conservationists. And he was a tree-hugger, the same way that I am. I am a tree-hugger.

“And I’m seeing trees on golf courses today that were 80 years old and they’re slicing them down by some city slicker. They should be fined for doing this. All the great golf courses of the world—Augusta, Pine Valley, Royal Melbourne, one of Jack’s courses at Muirfield [Village], one of Jack’s most beautiful courses—they’re treelined.

“It’s nonsense to be cutting all these treelines. It’s unfair. Worry about the Amazon cutting down the trees, and we’re contributing to the same effect. For goodness sakes, stop cutting them down and plant more. If you don’t know how to get a golf course with great shape, brush up on your knowledge. Because I can tell you, all the great golf courses of the world were treelined, around the greens and around the fairways.”

Player, 84, won nine majors and 160 tournaments worldwide during his playing career. He has also designed more than 400 golf courses around the world—most of which, you have to think, are treelined.

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By Ron Whitten
As we sit around and contemplate our world amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve had ample time to think about the future of course design, and what might be in store over the next decade. We asked 20 or so golf-course architects to reflect on the business and its future. The consensus is a pragmatic one: There won’t be a boom in golf course development during the next 10 years.

Most feel that any new development will be resort courses built in spectacular locations and that the same four or five design firms will continue to get the bulk of those jobs. The names Tom Doak, Bill Coore & Ben Crenshaw, Gil Hanse and David McLay Kidd were the ones most frequently mentioned. (Of course, in 10 years, Coore will be 84 years old, Crenshaw 78, Doak 69, Hanse 66 and Kidd 63, so presumably a younger generation of design talent will move into the spotlight by then.) But it’s hard to say who that might be. Five years ago, aspiring designers that seemed destined for great work included guys like George Waters, Will Smith and Trey Kemp. Those three are no longer in the design business, at least not full time.

Sand-based locations will continue to be the likely locales for resorts. Architects say there’s still potential for new development along the Oregon and Washington coastlines, in parts of eastern Canada, west Texas and along the Great Lakes. Architect Tim Lobb of England tells us the coast of Poland contains miles of untouched sand dunes that could be ideal for destination golf. Several designers reluctantly admit to seeking work in Saudi Arabia (despite human-rights issues) and Vietnam (despite the distant yet indelible pain of American deaths in the Vietnam War.)

No architect mentioned Cuba, but this writer feels it will be the next emerging market for resort golf in the Western Hemisphere in the 2020s.

The 409-yard 18th at Cuba’s Varadero Golf Club is one of two holes that run along the Atlantic Ocean.

For most architects, the primary source of work, when clubs begin to reopen and return to normalcy post-COVID-19, will continue to be in remodelling existing courses. Many courses built in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, still in their original condition, now have aging, often out-of-date irrigation, drainage, tees, bunkers and greens that need retrofitting or replacement. The seeming excesses of those decades are finally being addressed. Many architects see future business in reducing the number and size of sand bunkers on 25-year-old courses, because labour costs are so high, labour shortages are rampant and, frankly, because those courses had far too many bunkers to begin with.

Khalid Redza/Asian Tour/Getty Images
The Bluffs at Ho Tram Strip in Vietnam, a course on Golf Digest’s World 100 Greatest courses ranking. Vietnam is a country that continues to see increasing construction of new courses.

As architect Damian Pascuzzo points out, many clubs have put off improvements due to costs. In some cases, the clubs are now at a tipping point and are finding the only solution is to “repurpose” a portion of their property. Pascuzzo is involved with redesigning one well-established 18-hole course in the Los Angeles market into a 12-hole par 45 to free up 30 acres to be sold for commercial development. Other architects are involved in similar endeavors in other parts of the country. All point to lifestyle changes, particularly the need to accommodate golfers who don’t have time for a full 18 holes, as the reason alternative golf, like 12-hole layouts, will be far more acceptable in the coming decade.

Canadian architect Riley Johns reminds us that the 2020s will mark the centennial of the cherished “Golden Age of Golf Course Design,” and many clubs celebrating 100th anniversaries in the coming decade are already, or soon will be, upgrading their vintage courses as part of an overall celebration. He predicts a great deal of work for course architects in the field of restoration in the next 10 years.

Riley Johns and Keith Rhebb, a course builder for Coore and Crenshaw, teamed up to rip apart and restitch the Winter Park 9 outside Orlando. Their project might be worth looking toward as a model for the future.

Not one architect we spoke with had anything good to say about advances in club and ball technology; all feel that technology has reduced the challenge and original character of many classic golf courses as well as posing new safety issues for anything they design or remodel. But several look to other forms of technology being beneficial in assisting lifestyle golfers in their quest for some golf, but less than 18. Architect Beau Welling suggests a phone app that can determine the slope and rating of each individual hole played, so golfers can still post scores on rounds less than nine holes for handicap purposes. Designer Nathan Crace forecasts a pay-for-play device that will automatically debit a golfer’s account as he or she finishes a hole, so a golfer can play a quick six without paying for a full nine.

Only two architects predict that a full 18-hole course made of artificial turf will be built sometime in the next 10 years. Most feel the tremendous cost of synthetic materials would not be recouped by savings in water and chemicals because of the short shelf life of synthetics. Others, like Kansas City architect Todd Clark and his associate Brent Hugo, are unsatisfied with the performance of artificial turf on several par-3 courses they’ve built. “The greens that putt well won’t hold a shot,” Hugo says, “while if we add enough resilience to hold shots, they putt erratically.”

Weston Weber, founder of the backyard greens empire Southwest Greens and now operator of a rival company, Celebrity Greens, insists that he can build putting greens that accept shots and putt true, but admits the turf has not yet been perfected for fairways. He is involved in R&D in creating synthetic blades that can withstand the repeated impact of clubheads from full swings. Presently the blades tend to melt or shatter, leaving divots that can’t be replaced.

Most designers don’t have interest in regulation synthetic turf golf courses. The market simply isn’t there, says Todd Eckenrode, so it won’t happen. There’s also the heat issue. “Stand in the centre of a college football field in 90-degree heat,” says Michael Hurdzan, “and you’ll realise why synthetic fairways won’t happen. Fake grass radiates heat.”

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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.

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.

Yes, early in his career he admitted to imitating famous predecessors — MacKenzie, Ross, Langford and Raynor, and contemporaries like Trent Jones. Later, after a tour of Scotland, he claimed allegiance to a far earlier generation. Yet Pete Dye architecture was ultimately original, not quite like anything golfers had ever seen before or since.

Midwest born and bred, Middle American to the core, Pete’s originality conjured up the thrills of a county fair – the Tilt-a-Whirl in a triple-level green that plunged side to side and downhill; the Fun House in a zigzag par 5 with a putting green perched on a fault line 20 feet above a hazard; the Dunk Tank in an island green glaring like the eye of a gator in a deep dark pool.

His wife, Alice, was the more successful competitive golfer, the better writer (ghosting every early article bearing his byline) and the smarter businessperson. Pete owed much his fame and fortune to her tireless promotion, and it was tragic when she passed away in early 2019 at age 91.

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.

What was most impressive about his 50-year design career was that Pete constantly rethought his architecture. He began with a few modest designs where his attention focused on shaping sprawling, rolling greens. Then came some meaningful projects in the Midwest: 36 new holes for the relocated Des Moines Golf & Country Club, Radrick Farms for the University of Michigan and Pete’s first great golf course – Crooked Stick near Indianapolis, which he organized and where he would never stop tinkering. Then he entered a new phase, building ground-hugging, lay-of-the-land layouts, short and tight with greens the size of porch mats: The Golf Club near Columbus, Ohio, which seduced Jack Nicklaus into a second career long before he ever realized he could make money from it, then Harbour Town Golf Links on Hilton Head Island, one of five collaborations Pete did with Jack. It possessed what Dan Jenkins perceptively identified as “instant character.” In the early 1970s he produced the sublime Teeth of the Dog in the Dominican Republic, literally sketched in the dirt and scratched into reality by a legion of Dominicans hand-planting individual tufts of turf.

But when pro golfers became Schwarzeneggers, Pete resorted to utter upheaval of the land, with bazooka-length holes edged by massive battlefields of bunkers, and greens girdled by earth sculptures he called grenade attacks. These are his most distinctive and recognizable layouts: the Stadium Courses at PGA West and TPC Sawgrass, the Straits at Whistling Straits, the Dye at French Lick. Throughout his career, golfers could never play their usual game on his designs; they had to leave their comfort levels at the first tee.

Dye at his World Golf Hall Of Fame Induction
Photo: Marc Serota

Pete’s unorthodoxy captured the fancy of magazine editors and at least one Tour Commissioner, Deane Beman, but it soured many who played the game for a living and expected satisfying results for even those most marginal of shots. Despite that animosity, or maybe because of it, Dye’s designs dominated magazine course rankings and the PGA Tour schedule, with the occasional major at Oak Tree, Crooked Stick, Whistling Straits and Blackwolf Run.

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.

He genuinely thought his steep slopes and black hole bunkers could be easily maintained, although countless course superintendents felt otherwise. So he fiddled with unconventional grasses that he felt would need less TLC. Those experiments fizzled and today his courses bear the same strains of conventional turf as anyone else. Likewise, his idea of hooking pumps to underground pipes produced efficient drainage on flat courses but created geysers on hilly ones.

Dye’s inventiveness inspired a baby boomer generation of golf architects who worked for him with near-religious fervour, hence their nickname, The Dye-ciples. Some embraced his approach and style to such a degree that they mostly reproduced his designs over and over – his sons Perry (born 1952) and P.B. (1955) come to mind, as well as the late David Pfaff, David Postlethwait and Tim Liddy. Hence, they never fully emerged from his overpowering limelight.

Others adopted his work ethic but not his schtick and achieved grand acclaim – Bill Coore, Tom Doak, Bobby Weed, Lee Schmidt, Brian Curley. But if any are remembered a hundred years from now, it will be partly because they got their starts working for Pete Dye.

What Pete did better than any other designer before or since was to throw back the curtain and reveal the wizard at the controls. In his mind, Mother Nature was never really a golf course architect. She merely provided foundations upon which humans would endeavour. Other designers tried to fool golfers into thinking Mother Nature truly created their courses. Pete made sure every golfer knew Pete produced his puzzles; Mother Nature would never have puckered a sand bunker atop a giant anthill.

In the end, Dye perished the way many a creative person has, from sheer exhaustion of the imagination. It is both a sad and sobering time. Golf design shall never see another like him.

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