The other half of the Dye twosome has a strong say on golf course design.

Alice insists on accommodating women and other forward tee players, but admits the Dye courses can be hard on them, especially some of the newer ones. “Everyone who builds a course these days wants a strong ranking and slope. They think the harder it is, the more people will come. I was a lot better player when I played our earlier courses.” She adds: “Sometimes you get a piece of land where you just can’t do this, but basically we prefer to stay away from forced carries.”

Obviously proud of his wife, Pete Dye says, “Alice was a good friend of Babe [Didrikson-Zaharias]. She was on the USGA and PGA boards and was the first lady president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects. The main thing, she’s played with all these good players, Snead, Byron Nelson, Patty Berg. And every Tuesday, she plays with three women who can’t break a 100. Then she goes out and looks at a course we’re working on and asks, ‘How in the world is Mary Smith going to play this course?’”

“When Pete was setting the yardages at Kingsmill,” says William Nooe, vice president for golf operations at Kingsmill Resort in Williamsburg, Va., “he would turn and look at the superintendent and the shaper and ask, “Is that over 100 yards? If not, Alice won’t like it.”

One of the Dyes’ great joys is working with students. “It’s fun,” Pete says. “We go rent some equipment and dig some holes.”

Take Purdue University in Indiana where he had taken courses in agronomy. In 1994, he was walking the old North Course at the university. “While there, I got to thinking and I went up to see the president. I told him I thought I could fix up the old course, build a new one, and they could move the agronomy school to the area.”

“He liked the idea but asked how much I would need to get for a job like this. I told him, ‘Well, I’ll charge you $1.’ He didn’t say anything. And I said, ‘I’ll use your students to build it and I’ll rent equipment here.’ Then for some reason, I added I’d raise the $8 million they would need.

“He jumped out of his chair and shook my hand. That was the sum total of our contract. As soon as I closed the door, I said to myself, ‘You idiot.’ You can’t raise $8 million. Go back and tell him you’ve lost your mind.’ “I drove back home, the 50 miles, walked in the door and told Alice. She said, ‘Get back in the car, drive back and tell that man you’re crazy.’ But I raised the money and built it with the kids. One of them is still working with me. He’s down in the DR (Dominican Republic) right now. Another is working for Greg Norman. Three or four from that bunch are in the business.”

Today, Dye’s Kampen Course at Purdue is ranked as one of the top collegiate courses in the country and one of the hardest circuits in Indiana. It has been awarded 4.5 stars on Golf Digest’s “Places to Play.”

About building the spectacular Ocean Course at Kiawah Island, venue for the 1991 Ryder Cup and the PGA Championship in 2012, Dye says, “I not only designed the course, I built it with help from students from a local agricultural school.”

The job took a sharp turn when Hurricane Hugo roared in and washed away everything. Dye rebuilt the dunes, the marshes, the whole lot. But a strange thing happened in the process. A surveyor who was staking out the critical line — the line protecting the buildable area from unbuildable areas — dropped a stake by mistake, making the driest (and most buildable) part of the land off limits.

This required constructing the two nines around this section, separating them so the front nine runs through marshes and live oaks while the back nine winds through the dunes. Later, when the mistake was revealed, this middle section became the driving range and a parking area.

**READ KATHARINE DYSON'S WICKED GENIUS PROFILE HERE**