Dye, Pete

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    A Rare Rainout Suspends Players Championship With Three Tied for Lead

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    Torrential rains flooded the fairways at T.C.P. Sawgrass, a course that already features multiple water hazards. The tournament won’t end before Monday.PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — This year’s Players Championship, a signature event of the PGA Tour, will take an extra day to complete after torrential rains on Friday in northern Florida suspended play for a second consecutive day. Golfers endured Friday’s foul weather for only a few soggy hours at the T.P.C. Sawgrass golf course, one day after the first round was twice interrupted by rain delays and never completed.The back-to-back postponements will ensure that the 72-hole, four-round tournament, scheduled to end on Sunday afternoon, will not finish before Monday for the first time since 2005.Large puddles had become common on most greens by 10 a.m. on Friday, and maintenance crews used squeegees to remove water after each group finished a hole. But in time, with fairways all but flooded, officials ordered players off the course. The first round is still not complete.“The golf course has just reached a point of saturation, and unfortunately the weather conditions are not providing us any relief,” Gary Young, the chief referee of the event, said late Friday afternoon.Young added that the golf course had received almost three inches of rain in the previous 36 to 48 hours and that the tournament will restart no sooner than 11 a.m. on Saturday. The third round will not be completed Sunday, and severe weather was expected in the area Friday night into Saturday morning, including wind gusts that could reach 60 miles an hour. But the tour is anticipating clearer weather by midday Saturday even though the T.P.C. Sawgrass layout will most likely still be subject to considerable wind.The conditions, coupled with a challenging Pete Dye-designed course that features multiple daunting shots over water hazards, could make for unpredictable results. Moreover, the final-round leaders will be forced to complete more than 18 holes on Monday.On Friday morning, Young said the tour was potentially considering a Tuesday finish to the event, but hours later he said, “We feel very confident that we’re going to be able to accomplish the conclusion of this championship on Monday evening.” A last round on Tuesday was “not really in our thought process,” Young said.It is the eighth time that the Players Championship, which was first contested in 1974, will not finish on Sunday. While Monday finishes are infrequent on the PGA Tour and at major championships — the last Monday finish at the Masters tournament was 1983 — they are not unheard-of, and players have generally learned to adapt.“You just know that you’re here hopefully until the very end of the tournament, and you just get on with it,” said Tommy Fleetwood, who was one of a few dozen golfers to complete 18 holes on Thursday and is tied for the lead at six under par. “Everybody’s in the same circumstances. When it’s your turn to play, you play.“It’s easy to get caught off guard when you’re hanging around for a long time and then all of a sudden you have to try to switch it back on. But you almost have to relax as much as you can and save your energy but always kind of stay ready and in that mind-set that you might be going out at any time,” Fleetwood said. More

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      The Challenges of Whistling Straits

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      Pete Dye designed the course, home to this year’s Ryder Cup, for all golfers, but threw in a few surprises for the professionals.Players come and go, but golf courses remain. The United States will try to wrest the Ryder Cup back from the Europeans this week, and standing between them will be the golf architect Pete Dye and the course he designed at Whistling Straits in Wisconsin.Dye, who died last year, was known for defying conventions.“Pete Dye changed the direction of architecture around the world twice,” said Bill Coore of Coore & Crenshaw, who is a former Dye associate.Over his six-decade career, Dye created memorable and difficult courses, including Harbour Town Golf Links in South Carolina and T.P.C. Sawgrass in Florida. Coore said courses like Harbour Town were “based on finesse and shot placement, and then later in his career he went the exact opposite way with T.P.C. Sawgrass,” building big, brawny courses he once eschewed.The courses are indicative of the ways Dye changed golf design.“You can pick any course with smaller mounding, pot bunkers and small angled greens that was built after Harbour Town’s acclaim, and you can be certain it was influenced by Pete Dye, if not designed by Pete,” Coore said.His work for the P.G.A. of America gave Dye, a former insurance salesman who turned to golf design, the opportunity to build courses that challenged the professionals.“What’s that great line of his,” said Mike Clayton, a designer and former player. “‘Once you get these guys thinking, you’ve got ’em.’ And he was certainly able to do that.”The 17th island green at T.P.C. Sawgrass is an example of how Dye can get in the head of the world’s best. The short par 3 would often be a birdie if it were on dry land, but, surrounded by water and coming late in the round, it’s a challenge.Dye’s courses require golfers to hit the proper side of the fairway to score well. An easier shot from the tee may provide the safety of short grass, but will likely block a golfer’s best scoring angle.A daring shot toward a hazard is often rewarded with an easier scoring chance. As matches conclude this week, notice the options Dye presents players on the par-4 18th hole at Whistling Straits. The split fairway offers a path right to avoid the many bunkers to the left. But an aggressive play over those bunkers, requiring a 300-yard drive, provides a straighter path to the hole and a chance at birdie.“Pete understood exactly how talented the pros were, and he really did design for them,” Tom Doak, another former associate, said. And yet, Doak said Dye also understood how to build for the average player, which came from his wife, Alice, an excellent player.“Because of Alice’s influence, Pete’s whole design style was thought out to scale down for those who couldn’t hit the ball so far,” Doak said.He said Dye accomplished this, in part, by not placing hazards at logical yardages, like a bunker at 280 yards down the right, just because that might force an average player into a tough spot. By focusing on angles and sides of the holes for players to score, Dye allowed his designs to flow seamlessly in challenging the professional and the everyday player.Over his six-decade career, Pete Dye created memorable and difficult courses, including Harbour Town Golf Links in South Carolina and T.P.C. Sawgrass in Florida.Phil Sheldon/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesHerb Kohler, executive chairman of the Kohler Company, said he was so taken with Dye’s designs that he had him build four courses at Whistling Straits.“Pete’s greatest contribution to growing the game of golf was that he considered golfers of all age and skill levels,” Kohler said.Steve Stricker, who lives in Wisconsin and is captain of the U.S. team, said Kohler put Wisconsin on the golf map.“Whistling Straits is a tremendous test, a beautiful piece of property,” he said. “It’s just one of those iconic places here in our state thanks to Herb and his family. It started right here for Wisconsin golf, to be quite honest.”The Ryder Cup is, of course, about challenging the pros. Jason Mengel, director of the Ryder Cup, which ends on Sunday, said he believed that the course was “One of the finest tests of golf anywhere on the planet.”There will also be the raucous crowd on the first tee, where Mengel said they had put hospitality tents in high visibility areas to help set the atmosphere. Coming down the stretch, Mengel said the par-3 17th hole, named Pinch Nerve, “could play a critical role” in determining the winner.Pinched Nerve continues a Dye tradition of testing the mettle of a golfer late in the round. Cut into a hillside, the green is flanked by bunkers left and right with a severe falloff on the left of the long, somewhat narrow green. Past those bunkers is Lake Michigan. Should golfers err toward the right and push the shot onto the hill, they will have virtually no chance to stop the ball from racing off the green from the elevated perch.Looking at the course’s two finishing holes, it’s hard to believe that it lies on land that was once an airstrip. Dye cut into the bluffs that overlook the lake to create a ragged appearance, as if the course had always been there waiting to be discovered. Doak said the dirt he excavated from those bluffs then allowed Dye to create the dunes and mounding found throughout the course.Dye’s courses continue to test the best players. He had a singular vision, which was not that each course must possess a set of qualities, but that a golf course should push golfers to play their best by thinking their way around the course. The pressure of the Ryder Cup will compound that thinking. More

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      The Ocean Course, Long Absent From Golf’s Spotlight, Is Back

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      The masterpiece on Kiawah Island, designed by Pete and Alice Dye to be as challenging as it is breathtaking, has not been the site of a major tournament in almost a decade.KIAWAH ISLAND, S.C. — The P.G.A. Championship is returning this week to the Ocean Course, a daunting place rich in golf lore. Despite the course’s almost spiritual status in the sport — “The Legend of Bagger Vance” was filmed there — this will be only the second major championship held on the site.Pete Dye, who with his wife, Alice, began work on the course at Kiawah Island in 1989, never questioned whether his creation would be one of a kind. In 2012, as he walked the course one quiet evening a month before the P.G.A. Championship that summer, he stopped to wave a hand across the windswept landscape, where the crash of ocean waves is an ever-present soundtrack.“It is the only course we built that walks and swims,” Dye said. “It is of the land and it is of the water.”Head down, Dye marched about 10 strides, then turned to add, “You can go from Miami to New York and you won’t find a golf course like it on the Atlantic Ocean.”The P.G.A. Championship’s return to the Ocean Course has been made more poignant by the deaths of Pete last year at age 94 and of Alice in 2019 at 91. The Dyes, who were married for nearly 70 years, were golf architecture royalty: Pete as the most influential designer in the last half of the 20th century, and Alice as his constant partner who became the first female member and the first female president of the American Society of Golf Architects.Pete and Alice Dye in 1991, the year their Ocean Course at Kiawah Island opened.PGA TOUR Archive, via Getty ImagesTheir work at Kiawah Island symbolized their bond. During one of the couple’s surveys of the property as the final nine holes were being laid out in 1991, Alice said: “Pete, I can’t see the ocean on this nine. I don’t want to just hear it, I want to see it.”The fairways were raised several feet, which provided more than an upgraded view. Elevated fairways exposed the closing holes to seaside winds so fickle that they bedeviled the charging, or fading, tournament leaders. The gusts have become a hallmark of the endlessly memorable course.The Dyes will be missed this week at the masterpiece they created, but their presence will be felt, even by those who were toddlers when the course made its debut.Webb Simpson, who is ranked 10th in the world, did not make the cut at the 2012 P.G.A. Championship, but he left Kiawah Island forever impressed.“I did not play well, but I didn’t blame the golf course,” Simpson, 35, said in an interview this month. “I loved Kiawah. I remember leaving in ’12 and thinking it was like a British Open course where you have to trust your lines over corners, over bushes, over marsh. There’s a 66 or an 80 out there every day for any golfer, which is exciting for a major.”Keegan Bradley tied for third at the 2012 P.G.A. Championship, which was won by Rory McIlroy. Bradley, 34, believes the Ocean Course’s relatively rare appearance on the calendar of elite golf events is part of its appeal.“It’s not a major championship venue that we go to every five years,” said Bradley, who won the 2011 P.G.A. Championship. “It’s become a special place for us to go.”Tiger Woods preparing to putt on No. 9 during the final round of the P.G.A. Championship in 2012. He finished tied for 11th.Sam Greenwood/Getty ImagesThe Ocean Course was not always held in such regard.Seated in matching white wicker chairs at their South Florida home during a 2011 interview, the Dyes recalled the course’s earliest days.“I saw its future the moment I got there, even if there was nothing but myrtles and ugly bushes,” Pete said. He laughed. “Of course, the first time the P.G.A. folks saw the land they almost threw up.”Then Hurricane Hugo blew through the southeastern United States in September 1989. Kiawah Island was declared a national disaster area. At a 1990 news conference for the 1991 Ryder Cup, Pete was asked where he planned to put the huge galleries of fans expected to attend.“Galleries? How do I know?” Pete answered. “We don’t even have holes yet.”Alice’s memory of the day was slightly different.“You had a plan, Pete,” she said in 2011. “You just didn’t want to tell them yet.”Alice and Pete later agreed that Hugo had oddly helped their project. It ruined the work already done on several holes, but the destruction gave the Dyes the opportunity to rebuild sand dunes and other natural elements to their liking. Flood lights were set up so work crews could put in 16-hour days to get the course ready in time.The course revealed to the golf world ahead of the 1991 Ryder Cup was stunningly beautiful. Playing it was less than pleasant. David Feherty, a television commentator who was on the European Ryder Cup team that year, called the course “something from Mars.”Ian Woosnam in a bunker on the 17th hole during the Ryder Cup at the Ocean Course in 1991.Stephen Munday/Allsport, via Getty ImagesThe competition, won by the American side after three exhilarating days, became the most famous Ryder Cup, in part because of the treachery of the finishing holes at the Ocean Course. The television ratings for the event eclipsed those of that weekend’s N.F.L. games, a first for any golf competition.The Dyes’ creation at Kiawah Island immediately climbed near the top of the rankings of America’s best courses.But it was always impossible for the Dyes to choose a favorite among the more than 100 golf courses they designed.“We think of them like our children,” Alice said, “not pieces of history.”This week, the Ocean Course, after nine years on the sidelines of major championship golf, will take another turn in the spotlight. And with it will come another chance to appreciate the brilliance of Pete and Alice Dye, a golf team like no other. More