Golf architect Pete Dye left his ‘stamp all over’ Hilton Head, the SC Lowcountry
To accompany Pete Dye on a visit to a golf course project was to agree to an adventure.
The visionary golf course architect, who helped make Hilton Head Island and Kiawah Island coveted destinations in South Carolina, died Thursday at 94.
He had been staying with his son, PB Dye, in the Dominican Republic and was hospitalized in recent days, said Sea Pines executive Cary Corbitt, a longtime friend.
A then little-known Dye scrambled to craft Harbour Town Golf Links with wife, Alice, and hall-of-fame golfer Jack Nicklaus under a tight deadline before the first Heritage golf tournament in 1969. The long-running PGA Tour event and accompanying television coverage of the island and iconic candy-striped lighthouse have directed visitors here from all over the world.
“He says and he has said Harbour Town made Pete Dye, but also Pete Dye made Harbour Town,” said Corbitt, director of sports and operations at Sea Pines. “His influence on the Sea Pines resort is very much tied to our success at the resort and the success of our golf properties. His stamp is all over Sea Pines, now all over Hilton Head.”
Dye wound Harbour Town between the leaning pines and oaks, with greens the size of quarters, sprawling waste bunkers and tiny pot bunkers. He pushed the 18th hole out to the edge of the Calibogue Sound, a feature Nicklaus said might not be permitted if the course was built today.
“Pete was pretty good at asking for forgiveness rather than permission,” Nicklaus told The Island Packet in a 2018 interview.
The course was lauded for testing the best players in the world while checking in at less than 7,000 yards.
After Harbour Town, Dye built the highly regarded and exclusive Long Cove Club on Hilton Head and scratched out one of the two 18-hole layouts at Colleton River in Bluffton that has hosted numerous USGA events.
Dye’s treacherous Ocean Course at Kiawah Island set the stage for a thrilling 1991 Ryder Cup and lifted the stature of that resort.
The contract to design Harbour Town first went to Nicklaus, the golfer recalled in the newspaper interview. Nicklaus told Sea Pines visionary Charles Fraser he’d be happy to do the job but didn’t have the ability to do it on his own.
He told Fraser about his friend Dye, who had offered to consult on a project in the past. Fraser said he’d never heard of Dye.
“I said, ‘I think you’d like him,’” Nicklaus told the Packet. “Pete is very creative and he’s not done very many golf courses yet, but you’re going to hear of him.”
Dye wore the pride for his work on the sweaters and caps he wore. As he took final stock of his rebuilt Ford Plantation in Georgia in 2014, Dye sported a Colleton River jacket. On Dec. 29, Dye’s 94th birthday, PB Dye sent Corbitt a photo of his father wearing a navy blue sweater vest with the Harbour Town logo.
Before Alzheimer’s stole Dye’s mind during his final years, he was hands-on at his courses into his late 80s.
“I don’t know; I’ve got to be crazy,” Dye told The Island Packet in 2014 of continuing to work at age 89. “I enjoy doing what I do.”
Accompanying Dye on a site visit meant being ready to get on your hands and knees in the dirt, climb through bushes or trudge through a sticky marsh to survey an angle, said Bob Patton, the longtime head golf professional at Long Cove who first met Dye while working at Dye’s TPC Sawgrass in Florida.
“He didn’t think twice about it,” Patton said. “And you just went along with him.”
Patton said Dye was the first to make golf architects a household name. Like other courses, Long Cove operators consulted with Dye before touching a tree or moving ground if it meant potentially affecting the intent of the design.
Caretakers of Dye’s courses will now have to decide how best to maintain the integrity of his work when making changes, Patton said. That could mean consulting with Dye’s sons, who are also golf course architects, or with one of the many understudies who went on to forge their own design careers.
The expansive tree of architects Dye influenced is displayed as part of an exhibit honoring him in the Harbour Town clubhouse.
When Long Cove underwent a recent renovation, it enlisted Dye protege Bobby Weed, whose first project was working with Dye to build Long Cove.
Working with Dye meant arriving for on-site meetings to find Dye had already been the course for an hour. Dye would walk the course backwards, searching for ways to bedevil golfers by using subtle movement to affect how a player sees a potential target, Corbitt said.
Dye attributed many of his most beguiling architectural features to wife Alice, who died in February. The island-green 17th hole at Sawgrass, the bunker and bulkheads encircling the 13th green at Harbour Town and raising the Ocean Course at Kiawah to capture the sweeping views but also the breezes all sprung from Alice’s mind.
He brought Scottish influence in the way he used the available terrain, in his trademark railroad-tie bulkheads and pot bunkers. He dedicated extra care to crafting his greens, which were typically small like at Harbour Town but not always.
He dug his bunkers with distinctive angles. He gave freely of his time when asked to return to one of his courses.
“What he loved best was once you broke ground and he could get out in the middle of a project and create his genius,” Corbitt said. “Every project he did he had excitement going into it and all through it.”
This story was originally published January 10, 2020 at 2:13 PM.
