The aged man pulled up to the ninth green at Old Marsh Golf Club, stepped out of a golf cart and surveyed the scene.
He sized up the contours, walked around for perspective, eyed a nearby pond where an alligator floated languidly just beneath the surface.
But this was no ordinary midday round of golf for a senior citizen on a sun-splashed Florida afternoon.
The bespectacled man was Pete Dye, renowned golf course architect, who was in Palm Beach Gardens to renovate a course he first finished in 1987.
As he stood where the ninth hole used to be, Dye pointed at piles of dirt where bunkers may eventually go and where the new greens could roll and undulate.
Dye took no notes as he spoke to the half-dozen men who followed him around the first nine holes of the course. He dictated and directed, gesturing with his arms as he envisioned the final layout.
"It's like watching Picasso paint," said Thomas Dyer, the director of golf at Old Marsh. "The stuff he picks up is unbelievable. He can make a piece of land enjoyable for all those different abilities of golfers."
Dye has been doing just that for four decades, since he and wife Alice built a nine-hole tract near Indianapolis. And even though he is now 78 , there are no thoughts of retirement.
"(Not) as long as somebody will have me," Dye said. "I'm booked pretty good for next year, so they must think I'm going to hang in there next year."
His schedule for 2004 is enough to make a younger man wilt in the summer heat, but Dye seems to handle it easily.
Last week, he left Indianapolis on Tuesday for Birmingham, Ala., then traveled to Boca Grande on the Gulf Coast of Florida the next day.
That Thursday morning, he and Alice drove across the state to Palm Beach Gardens, where he examined Old Marsh, then left for an evening flight to the Dominican Republic where he was working on yet another course.
"He has no intentions of slowing down," Alice Dye said. "I think he'd like to not schedule it like this, where he had a little more time. But it doesn't work out that way."
Not for Pete Dye, whose name is all the advertisement a course needs to attract every level of golfer. Not when the managers of courses he designed decades ago want him back to tweak the tracts once again or are willing to openly sing his praises.
"They have the knack of being visionary," said Rick Whitfield, director of golf at Loblolly Pines Country Club, which was designed by Dye and his son, P.B. Dye.
"We had some rough drawings on a napkin, there were no (topographical details). It was done by the seat of their pants. And it turned out unbelievable."
While there has been occasional grumbling in the past from some quarters that Dye's courses can be overly difficult, Alice Dye said they try to construct tracts that are playable - though challenging - for every level of golfer.
It's a philosophy that seems to have worked, given that Dye's services are still in high demand.
Along with the Old Marsh renovations, Dye is building new courses in the Dominican Republic, Virginia, Boca Grande and New Jersey. There are also dozens of other requests flowing in on a regular basis.
But even as golf course designing has grown into a lucrative industry over the past four decades, Dye's operation has remained family-oriented.
Alice Dye said they still run their business from the kitchen table of their Delray Beach home. Sons Perry and P.B. have worked with their father on some designs and branched out to do their own work on others.
And there doesn't seem to be any sign of slowing Pete Dye down any time soon.
"Pete wouldn't do it," Alice Dye said, "if he didn't like it."
Source: The Stuart News/Port St. Lucie News (Stuart, Fla.)