Pete Dye has seen a lot of changes in his more than 40 years designing courses, including technology. Never one to temper his opinions, during a panel discussion at the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America conference in Atlanta, Dye appealed to the USGA and other organizations to take a more heavy-handed approach to regulating technologies.
“[The industry] needs to get together and try to stop the golf ball for the great players,” Dye said. “This hitting a golf ball 400 yards is ridiculous. You can’t make golf courses 8,000 yards long, with the environment and the costs - it’s crazy.”
Dye said one solution would be having two sets of rules - one for professional golfers and another for the average golfers who make up the vast majority of the golfing population.
“The ball’s going farther for the good player, but they’re not going any farther for Mabel Smith, who tees off on Tuesday morning and hits the ball 135 yards. Not one ball today goes one inch farther than the ball they made 50 years ago,” he said. “So Martha Burk ought to be yelling at the golf ball manufacturers that they’re discriminating against all those women who play the golf courses every Tuesday morning.”
Dye also said many golf course developers start off on the wrong foot when building golf courses. According to Dye, too many owners and developers try to cut costs by not hiring a superintendent until after construction and sometimes grow-in are complete. Dye said ideally, a superintendent should be on-site long before groundbreaking.
“Hell, they should be there before I get there,” he said. “The developers who start these things, they don’t have any knowledge about what they’re doing. They always think they can save $3.75 by letting the contractor run around out there, screwing up the golf course. Then they wait until after we’re gone and bring the poor guy in there blind and he’s trying to fix all the mistakes. You can sympathize with them a little bit because they don’t know.”
However, Dye said he wouldn’t refuse a job simply because the developer hadn’t yet hired a superintendent.
“I go in and say, ‘Look, you should have a golf course superintendent,’ but the owners are putting up the money, so you’ve got to go along with it because you want to live, you don’t want to starve,” he said. “I try to get them to hire a superintendent on the job. I believe the superintendent doesn’t come there just to watch, he comes there work, and he puts his crew together right there in the beginning because they’re going to have to take it over.”
If a contractor won’t hire a superintendent during construction, Dye said he hopes they will do so before grow-in at the very least.
“I can’t ever understand why they want a golf course contractor to grow in a golf course. That’s about the damnedest thing I’ve ever listened to,” he said. “I think the superintendent should take charge and grow in every golf course. It’s crazy to have a guy running a bulldozer one day and the next day cutting the greens. But it happens all the time.”
One area where Dye differs from many architects is in contracts. He said while he realizes he should have one for every job, he never signs one.
“I should have a contract when I design a golf course for people, but I’ve always found that no matter whether I have a contract, the owner has a hell of a lot more money and a lot more lawyers than I do. So I don’t have a contract,” Dye said. “He can fire me anytime he wants to, and a lot of them have.”
When it comes to bunker placement in his designs, Dye said his philosophy has changed over the years, mainly because he has designed so many TPC and other tournament courses. Today’s players, he said, have more or less perfected their bunker play.
“I used to put all my bunkers real tight to the greens, but they can get in there and pop it up, no problem,” he said. “So now I’m trying to make the bunkers where the ball will kick farther away and make a longer bunker shot to the green.”
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