By now everyone in the golf universe knows the story. PGA Championship. Whistling Straits. Leader Dustin Johnson pushes his tee shot into a tiny plot of trampled waste area on the 72nd hole, far above the fairway. It’s well into the gallery and people are crowded around his ball, obscuring most of the sand beneath their feet.

One of them is Pete Dye.

“I was standing right there,” the famous — or infamous? — golf designer told Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Gary D’Amato two weeks after Johnson grounded his club in the bunker Dye himself put there, costing him two strokes and a shot at his first major victory.

“When he hit the ball in the bunker, the referee walked up to him and said, ‘Do you need anything?’ and Dustin said, ‘No, I’m good.’ There were no beer cans in the bunker, there were no chicken bones in there. Ray Charles could have seen it was a bunker.”

Ol’ man, Pete, who turned 85 on Dec. 29, wasn’t about to take the blame for Johnson’s mistake. He’s nothing if not outspoken and opinionated.

He’s also nowhere near retiring from the profession he revolutionized in the 1950s and ’60s and has excelled at ever since.

Whether moving gazillions of cubic feet of dirt at a place like Whistling Straits — which now ranks as his most controversial design, blowing by TPC Sawgrass with that one tournament-turning incident in August — or keeping a site as natural as possible, he’s never far from a headline when he completes a course. Or when he revisits an old friend for some nip-and-tuck.

In 2004 at Kingsmill Resort in Williamsburg, Va., Dye was standing atop a pile of dirt on the 18th hole of the River Course while his shapers worked on the green. It had been 20 years since the course opened, and he had “finally conned them into letting me go and put the thing in shape.”

Pointing to a spot on the rough earth he chuckled, “This will be a very tough pin placement. There will be a subtle dip here. People will think they’ve hit a great shot but won’t realize their ball may have rolled far past the hole.”

Sure enough, in 2007 at the Michelob Ultra LPGA Tournament Pro Am, Annika Sorenstam hit a shot to the 18th. “It looked perfect,” recalls Wayne Nooe, Kingsmill’s vice presidents of golf and club operations. “Everyone was high-fiving, but when they got up there, they saw her ball had actually run 25 feet past the hole — just like Pete had envisioned it.”

Arguably the most influential architect of the past 50 years, the Ohio native looks many years younger than the number on his driver’s license. He continues to walk his courses, test the soil, tweak his designs and build new courses. “Pete would show up at 7:30 and spend the day walking and walking,” Nooe says. He never sat down, and he ate lunch on his feet. He’s got phenomenal energy.”

A hands-on kind of guy, it’s the building part he loves. When his new course at French Lick was being carved into a rugged hilltop in southern Indiana, Dye estimates he spent about 280 days down there.

Pete (Paul B.) Dye grew up in Urbana, Ohio, where his father built a nine-hole course on the family farm. Playing and working on the course from an early age, he quickly developed a love of golf and an understanding of the land.

Alice Dye, Pete’s partner in business and life since they married in 1950, was born in Indianapolis. An exceptional golfer, she won 50 amateur championships and many state and national titles. The couple met on the driving range while attending Rollins College in Florida. Pete was captain of the men’s team, she of the women’s team.

**EXTRA DYE: READ HOW ALICE DEFENDS SHORTER HITTERS**

Starting out in the insurance industry, it didn’t take long for them to consider the golf business. When they asked well-respected architect Bill Diddle for his advice, “He wasn’t very encouraging,” Alice recalls. “Our friends and family weren’t either.

“By then, we had two young children (Perry and P.B.), and the golf profession was not what it is now. My parents said, ‘You’ re going to do what?’ And my dad, who was an attorney, told Pete he couldn’t call himself an architect as he didn’t have a degree, so Pete’s always called himself a golf course designer.”

Throughout their life, the Dyes have worked out of their home — no big office or crew of employees. “If I had to fire my staff, I’d have to get a divorce,” he laughs. Off and on, they have worked with their sons, both golf course architects with their own businesses.

In 1963, the Dyes went to Scotland. “There’s nothing like seeing 30 courses all very similar yet all so different,” Alice says. “It was an eye-opener. When we came back, that’s when Pete started using (railway) sleepers.”

His new designs reflected their Scottish discoveries: squiggly, undulating fairways; deep pot bunkers; small, contoured greens; swales, mounds and vigorous roughs planted with indigenous vegetation.

One thing he could not bring back were Scotland’s hard fairways, which encouraged the finesse of bump and run. “You may find them a bit on Long Island and some in Maine, but with the type of grasses and irrigation systems we have, the only way to get bump and run here would be to put cement under the turf,” he says.

Their first course was El Dorado (now Royal Oak Country Club) in Indianapolis, while Crooked Stick (1964) was the first to garner national acclaim. Perhaps best-known for John Daly’s grip-it-and-rip-it PGA Championship victory in 1991, Crooked Stick will host the BMW Championship, a FedEx Cup playoff event, in 2012.
If there is one constant in Pete Dye’s long career, it is a reputation for innovation with features like the “volcano” mounds that dot the new French Lick course; huge carries over wetlands; deep pot bunkers; a robust use of rock and boulders; and scary island greens like the 17th at TPC Sawgrass. Each course is a different contract between Dye and nature, so you never quite know what he will come up with next. “Every course you do, you should have a different thought,” he says.

What you can expect is the unexpected.

When Dye became known for using rail ties to shore up banks and bunkers and other architects started doing the same thing, he stopped using them. “I haven’t used a sleeper (rail tie) in years,” he says.

Dye is also known for working miracles on impossible sites, building courses atop bedrock like the new AT&T Canyons Course at TPC San Antonio. And he prides himself on building drainage systems, so much so that he tells of the day his course at the PGA Village in Port St. Lucie dried up faster than anything else after a storm: “After 10 inches of rain, you could play golf — but you couldn’t get there because the roads were flooded.”

“One guy called and asked me if I was interested in building his course,” Dye says. “I told him, ‘When you find a swamp or rock pile, you call me.’ I was waiting for an answer but he hung up.”
When he built Harbour Town Golf Link at Sea Pines Resort in Hilton Head, S.C., he worked with Jack Nicklaus. “At the time we were building Harbour Town, [Robert] Trent Jones [Sr.] was building another course at Hilton Head. I had great respect for Trent, but the only way I could get any identity was to go dead opposite.”

Coming off the trend to build longer courses, he built this one shorter at just 6,012 yards (now 6,916 yards), establishing difficulty with small, contoured greens and precisely placed hazards, live oaks, cypress trees, bunkers and water.

“One day Jack comes down and looks at one of the par 3s and says, ‘Make the smallest green you can.’ I did, and it turns out he was the only one who could reach it. We’ve always had a close relationship. We thought about a partnership, but Jack wanted all kinds of drawings, and I didn’t want to do that.”

Dye has never worked from drawings. “I like to build. If I had to draw plans and give them to someone to build, I’d still be peddling life insurance,” he quips.

Building the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island (host of the 2012 PGA Championship), “Pete came to a large dune, looked at it from all sides, then realizing it would make a perfect green, told the crew to lop off the top,” recalls Mike Vegis, Kiawah’s public relations director. “It was built in a day.”

Like an artist who continues to tinker with his paintings even after they’re hung, Pete continues to tweak his work. “I’ve rebuilt the TPC in Jacksonville four times, Harbour Town three times and Crooked Stick two or three times — I’m just outliving all of my old golf courses. They grow and change over time, and the vegetation gets thicker or thinner. Agronomics — how they grow grasses — has changed dramatically. Golf equipment has also changed the game dramatically,” he says. “But I’ve always really enjoyed coming back to the courses.”

At TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Verde, Fla., the first of the stadium courses characterized by generous viewing areas for spectators, he eliminated many of the behemoth waste areas and modified the small, tilting greens.

Discussing the additional work on Mystic Rock at Nemacolin Resort in southwestern Pennsylvania, he says. “I didn’ it build it strong enough. It was always in between, so I’ve gone back and strengthened it and made it more severe.” In 2009, Mystic Rock was named No. 1 in the state for “Best Courses You Can Play” by Golfweek and holds one of the highest ratings in the country at 78.3 with a 153 slope.

Alice describes their courses as deceivingly difficult. “Courses like Harbour Town may look scary from the tee, but when you get out there, it opens up. Pete tricks you. You get out there and you wonder why you thought it was so hard with such wide landing areas, but the good players get into more trouble with their driver. ... Pete purposely likes to set the holes up so the better players, the longer hitters, find difficulty.”

And they do.

There are a lot of adjectives you could apply to a Dye design: tough, innovative, controversial, diabolical, impossible, fun, thoughtful. More than one golfer has walked off the 18th green ready to kill him.

When asked what word he’d like applied to his courses, he answers “playable.” And what does he think about his reputation?

“All bad,” he says with a wicked smile. FG