Speaker 1: The fried egg requires a different technique.
Speaker 2: What you need to do is actually square the face
Speaker 2: so it'll dig down underneath that bad lie and propel
Speaker 2: that ball right out onto the green.
Speaker 3: Here's the thing. Playing out of a buried lion of
Speaker 3: bunker is completely different than playing out of a nice
Speaker 3: clean lion of greenside bunker.
Speaker 4: You need to be aggressive on any shop weather. It's
Speaker 4: sitting cleanly for its Friday egg.
Speaker 2: Well, we've all faced it, the dreaded Frida egg.
Speaker 1: It's not to be feared, though. It's actually a pretty
Speaker 1: easy shot to hit.
Speaker 3: Sailing out of Gravesend, England on the trade route, Captain
Speaker 3: William Hilton one August morning in sixteen sixty three came
Speaker 3: upon an island peaceful and serene.
Speaker 5: What you're hearing is the telecast of the nineteen sixty
Speaker 5: nine Heritage Golf Classic. It was a new event held
Speaker 5: at a new golf course, Harbortown Golf Links had been
Speaker 5: built by a forty three year old architect named Pete Dye.
Speaker 5: Back then, Pete Dye wasn't well known in the mainstream way,
Speaker 5: but his collaborator had a more recognizable name.
Speaker 4: Hello, I'm Jack Nicholas. This is Pete Dye.
Speaker 5: The two men lean against the balustrade of an outdoor stairway,
Speaker 5: both looking a little flushed in their full suits.
Speaker 6: Pete and I have worked together to design and build
Speaker 6: the Harbor Town Golf Links here at Seapin's plantation. We're
Speaker 6: here on the eve of the first Heritage Golf Classic
Speaker 6: to be played over the Thanksgiving weekend. Having a golf
Speaker 6: tournament on the first year of operation, it's a dream
Speaker 6: come true for.
Speaker 2: Both of us.
Speaker 3: And the golf course looks straight.
Speaker 7: Down the sea.
Speaker 8: That's beautiful, Jack, Really, it's been a lot of fun
Speaker 8: here and we have that's a great contrast today the
Speaker 8: unagrasses with a behea centipede mine strong brings you back
Speaker 8: to Pinehurst and some of the old Briddies golflings.
Speaker 7: Looks great.
Speaker 5: It was quite a coup for Pete Dye to be
Speaker 5: there on TV side by side with the greatest golfer
Speaker 5: in the world. If you were a golf architect in
Speaker 5: nineteen sixty nine, he didn't get an awful lot of
Speaker 5: press unless your name was Robert Trent Jones. So the
Speaker 5: opening of Harbortown marked a turning point in Pete Die's career.
Speaker 5: Here was a course to be discussed. It was quirky
Speaker 5: and challenging, and it proved popular among the pros. One
Speaker 5: of those pros was Dean Beeman, who played his first
Speaker 5: Heritage in nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 3: My favorite golf course was Harbortown, and Harbortown was today
Speaker 3: is many players' favorite golf course.
Speaker 4: They really like it.
Speaker 3: Harbortown is a golf course that has just as many
Speaker 3: right right to left as left to right holes. It
Speaker 3: has small and green. It demands accuracy. It doesn't fit
Speaker 3: a long hitter versus a shorter hitter. So I thought
Speaker 3: it had a great balance and it was a great
Speaker 3: test of golf, then a fair test to golf.
Speaker 5: By nineteen seventy eight, Beeman was commissioner of the PGA
Speaker 5: Tour and he had just negotiated the purchase of a wild,
Speaker 5: soggy property near Jacksonville, Florida. There he intended to build
Speaker 5: a new venue for the Tournament Players Championship. He wanted
Speaker 5: the course to tax the abilities of the world's best
Speaker 5: golfers while providing a better viewing experience for spectators. It
Speaker 5: would be a stadium golf course, and he knew the
Speaker 5: man to build it was Pete Dye. Today on Frida
Speaker 5: Egg Stories, we are going back four decades to the
Speaker 5: building of the stadium course at TPC Sagrass in the
Speaker 5: nineteen eighty two Players Championship. This story has been told
Speaker 5: and retold over and over, and since it's Player's week
Speaker 5: right now, you'll no doubt be reminded by various journalists',
Speaker 5: TV hosts and podcasters of the usual bits of lore.
Speaker 5: Dean Beeman purchasing the property for one dollar, Pete Dies
Speaker 5: sketching a routing on the back of a place mat,
Speaker 5: the creation of the island Green, the complaints of the pros,
Speaker 5: and Jerry Pate after his victory in eighty two hauling
Speaker 5: both Beaman and Die into the pond next to the
Speaker 5: eighteenth Green. Don't get me wrong, we'll replay a few
Speaker 5: of those hits in this episode. We're not about that.
Speaker 5: But the real reason I'm curious about the TPC Sawgrass
Speaker 5: story has to do with the personalities involved in the
Speaker 5: contrasts between them. On the one hand, you had Pete Dye.
Speaker 5: Golf architecture was a passion for him, not just a
Speaker 5: business enterprise, and as we know in the way he
Speaker 5: designed courses. He was intensely hands on and independent. He
Speaker 5: was an artist. On the other hand, you had the
Speaker 5: PGA Tour under the leadership of Dean Beaman, thirteen years
Speaker 5: younger than Pete Dye. Beeman was energetic and assertive, a
Speaker 5: deal maker. TPC Sawgrass was his venture, and he had
Speaker 5: ideas of his own about what it should be. No
Speaker 5: less an authority than Alice Dye, Pete's wife and most
Speaker 5: trusted design consultant, had her own doubts about the partnership
Speaker 5: between Dean and Pete. Oh, Pete, you're crazy, she said,
Speaker 5: you can't build for Dean. He's particular, he's efficient, he's
Speaker 5: all the things you aren't. He'll have his hands in
Speaker 5: there trying to tell you what to do. Don't do it.
Speaker 5: But he did, and oddly enough it worked. In this
Speaker 5: episode of Frida Egg Stories, we'll try to figure out
Speaker 5: how today the PGA Tour is the eight hundred pound
Speaker 5: gorilla of the golf world. Back in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 5: it was more like a newborn computian. The Tournament Player's
Speaker 5: Division as it was then known, had just separated from
Speaker 5: the PGA of America, and it was a scrappy operation.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it was really a mom and pop shop back then.
Speaker 5: Adam Shupack is a golf journalist and the author of
Speaker 5: Golf's Driving Force, a biography of Dean Beaman.
Speaker 9: When the Tour moved its headquarters to Panaviter Beach, it
Speaker 9: was working out of a four bedroom home with Dean's
Speaker 9: office was the master bedroom. The garage had the copier
Speaker 9: and postage meter, and you know for an intercom, they
Speaker 9: just yelled at each other.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 9: It was a really small staff and Beaman took over
Speaker 9: in nineteen seventy four and used to say that, you know,
Speaker 9: the largest capital ast that they had was an IBM
Speaker 9: Selectric typewriter. They had about twenty walkie talkies and they
Speaker 9: did it on. They had three Budweisers and the Canna beans.
Speaker 9: I mean, it was a time period where bowling was
Speaker 9: still attracting higher ratings than golf, and tennis was the
Speaker 9: sports surging and popularity. So you know, he had a
Speaker 9: lot of work cut out for him when he took
Speaker 9: over his commission.
Speaker 5: It didn't take long for Beaman to start making aggressive moves.
Speaker 5: He was in his mid thirties and he had a
Speaker 5: background not only as an elite golfer who had won
Speaker 5: two US Amateurs, but also as an insurance broker, he
Speaker 5: knew his way around tax documents as well as boardroom negotiations.
Speaker 9: You know, he was an intense man. He's got these
Speaker 9: piercing blue eyes, and you know, his friends used to
Speaker 9: say that, you know, he could deliver a look that
Speaker 9: could exterminate headlice. And it was a job that required toughness,
Speaker 9: because you know, he had this quest to kind of
Speaker 9: roll over the status quo in this traditional game, make
Speaker 9: golf a bigger sport. And you know, he wanted to
Speaker 9: create a fan base that was much broader than just
Speaker 9: its own participants, and that meant doing things a little
Speaker 9: differently than they'd been done in the past.
Speaker 5: In his first year, Beaman converted the tour into a nonprofit,
Speaker 5: exempting it from paying income taxes and changing its financial fortunes.
Speaker 5: Beeman's other signature project was the new tournament Players Championship,
Speaker 5: later known as the Players Championship and now apparently as
Speaker 5: just the Players Anyway. From the beginning, Bemon had big
Speaker 5: plans for the event. The USGA had the US Open,
Speaker 5: the PGA of America had the PGA Championship and the
Speaker 5: RNA had the Open, why shouldn't the PGA Tour have
Speaker 5: its own major. Well, for one, it's not easy to
Speaker 5: manufacture prestige, but Beeman tried his best. After staging the
Speaker 5: first three tournament players Championships at three different courses, he
Speaker 5: decided to stick with one that it had worked for
Speaker 5: the Masters after all, So starting in nineteen seventy seven,
Speaker 5: the players absorbed to the Greater Jacksonville Open and set
Speaker 5: up shop at Sawgrass Country Club, which.
Speaker 10: Was a very dynamic golf course that was played in
Speaker 10: March where the wind blew. It was as close to
Speaker 10: an ocean side course as you could get, and so
Speaker 10: it had all those elements in them.
Speaker 5: But while Beeman liked Sawgrass as a course, he thought
Speaker 5: it could be improved as a venue.
Speaker 11: There was going to have to be a substantial investment
Speaker 11: made in the golf course and the facilities to accommodate
Speaker 11: both the players and the gallery and what we wanted
Speaker 11: to do.
Speaker 5: So Beeman attempted to buy Sawgrass Country Club, but for
Speaker 5: a variety of reasons, the deal never happened. Instead, he
Speaker 5: set out to build a new course, the home course
Speaker 5: for the tour, just across the road from Sawgrass Country
Speaker 5: Club was a huge tract of wilderness. The owners knew
Speaker 5: that being in business with the ascendant golf tour would
Speaker 5: raise the value of their land, so they sold four
Speaker 5: hundred and fifteen acres to Beaman for one dollar. From there,
Speaker 5: the commissioner pieced together financing from a non recourse loan,
Speaker 5: a few dozen expensive founding memberships, and a few thousand
Speaker 5: cheap annual memberships. It was a tidy sum acquired at
Speaker 5: minimal risk.
Speaker 9: As PGA Tour commissiony, he's working for a board, he's
Speaker 9: working for the players, and they had a lot of doubts,
Speaker 9: and they pretty much said, you can't risk any of
Speaker 9: our assets. They didn't have a lot to day, but
Speaker 9: they didn't want to put anything on the line. And
Speaker 9: if he failed, it was his neck. And so he
Speaker 9: went out figured a way to do it where they
Speaker 9: just couldn't say no. And it was you know, that
Speaker 9: is one of the most brilliant deals ever in the
Speaker 9: game of golf.
Speaker 5: After all that, though, Beeman found himself in possession of
Speaker 5: a piece of land that, to put it mildly, seemed
Speaker 5: ill suited to golf. Here's how Pete Dye described it
Speaker 5: in his autobiography Bury Me in a pop bunker. When
Speaker 5: I first inspected the proposed site for the player's course,
Speaker 5: my only compatriots in the impenetrable swampy jungle were deer, alligators,
Speaker 5: wild boar, and deadly snakes. In order to cut a path,
Speaker 5: I followed deer tracks that led me to dry areas
Speaker 5: in the swamp before I nearly drowned in the depths
Speaker 5: of the marshland well.
Speaker 4: The property was.
Speaker 3: It was dead flat. It had a lot of standing
Speaker 3: water on it. There's substantial rainfall here in Jacksonville. Following
Speaker 3: rainfall until it dried out, it was a pretty wet
Speaker 3: piece of property.
Speaker 5: It hadn't always been that way. The array of oak, pine, sweetgum,
Speaker 5: and magnolia trees on the site indicated that it had
Speaker 5: once been an upland, but when the Intracoastal Way was
Speaker 5: built nearby in the early nineteen hundreds, water began to
Speaker 5: collect on the site. By the nineteen seventies, it was
Speaker 5: a Florida forest mashed up with a Florida swamp. But
Speaker 5: Beeman didn't mind that the property was flat and would
Speaker 5: need to be almost wholly re engineered. To him, it
Speaker 5: was a blank slate where he could realize his vision
Speaker 5: for a stadium golf course.
Speaker 3: No golf course up to that point had been bought,
Speaker 3: had been built that more interest was concentrated on the
Speaker 3: gallery than the players.
Speaker 4: Most golf courses are built for players.
Speaker 3: We needed to build build one for the players, but
Speaker 3: we also had to we want. I wanted to build
Speaker 3: a golf course that would be the first what I
Speaker 3: called a stadium golf course.
Speaker 4: Well, I wanted. I wanted two things. There were two.
Speaker 3: Elements that I thought were extremely important in making a
Speaker 3: stadium course as successful as it could be. One is
Speaker 3: that you did all you care to build the spectator
Speaker 3: areas in the highest places on the course and the
Speaker 3: golf courses in the playing serfs on the lowest point
Speaker 3: of the golf court, so that the spectators were actually
Speaker 3: walking with you, and they would be above the players,
Speaker 3: and so more people could see. And that's the concept
Speaker 3: of a stadium. The second part of the concept that
Speaker 3: I thought was very important was the routing of the
Speaker 3: golf course should be in a way that produced the
Speaker 3: most what I call areas of activity. Instead of spreading
Speaker 3: the golf course out and stringing the holes out they
Speaker 3: should wind back and forth in a way that created
Speaker 3: us hubs of activities where a spectator could maybe walk
Speaker 3: two or three hundred yards and see four or five
Speaker 3: different shots close to a couple of tees, a couple
Speaker 3: of greens, and and may be a fairway and not
Speaker 3: have to walk five miles to watch a lot of golf.
Speaker 3: Because there are some spectators that want to follow their
Speaker 3: favorite player and others that just want to watch golf.
Speaker 5: It's striking how these ideas, although novel at the time,
Speaker 5: call to mind the features of certain time tested tournament
Speaker 5: golf courses. As Pete Dye pointed out in his autobiography,
Speaker 5: the Links courses of Great Britain and Ireland have dunes
Speaker 5: that form natural spectator mounds along the fairways and around
Speaker 5: the greens, and Beeman's notion of hubs of activity reminded
Speaker 5: me of how Augusta National returns to certain landforms, creating
Speaker 5: gathering spots where spectators can see multiple greens and teas
Speaker 5: at once. Perhaps in part because he appreciated these historical references,
Speaker 5: Pete Die took beeman stadium concept and ran with it.
Speaker 5: Over dinner at the Homestead restaurant in Jacksonville. Die sketched
Speaker 5: a back nine routing on that now famous Place Mat
Speaker 5: and Beeman knew he had the right architect. Granted a
Speaker 5: Place Matt is a lot easier to work with than
Speaker 5: a four hundred and fifteen acre alligator pit.
Speaker 7: We killed rattlesnakes and moccasins all the time, almost every day.
Speaker 7: Were also alligators and spiders and all kinds of stuff
Speaker 7: out on the site, and you wore snake boots or
Speaker 7: you didn't really go out there.
Speaker 5: Vernon Kelly was the project manager at TPC Sawgrass.
Speaker 7: There was something out there we called blue gumbo clay.
Speaker 7: What it was was almost a plastic kind of clay.
Speaker 7: It was like quicksand. And when you were digging sand
Speaker 7: out of the pits, because wherever you found sand, we
Speaker 7: excavated it for the golf holds, and that's how we
Speaker 7: created seventeen. Of course, almost anywhere you see a lake
Speaker 7: out there, it's because there was sand in that area
Speaker 7: and we didn't have the money to buy sand. And
Speaker 7: once you excavated the sand, sometimes you would hit this
Speaker 7: gushy kind of play material and it didn't seem to
Speaker 7: be the bottom to it, and out on I think
Speaker 7: it was number seven. One night we went a backo
Speaker 7: when we were digging building the green, and he got
Speaker 7: into that stuff, and I mean literally, without a couple
Speaker 7: of hours, it completely covered the tracks of the back
Speaker 7: hoe and was up to the cab, which is about
Speaker 7: five feet. We were able to pull it out with
Speaker 7: a dozer, but it just showed how treacherous the sight was.
Speaker 5: Early on, it could seem like the land itself was
Speaker 5: rejecting the golf course.
Speaker 7: The first thing we had to do was to find
Speaker 7: the property, so we had the boundary surveyed, and the
Speaker 7: surveyors actually went out there and cut the survey line
Speaker 7: with the cheties, and then you know, went from point
Speaker 7: to point and marked the points with the survey steaks
Speaker 7: and survey tape. Well, the vegetation grew so fast out there,
Speaker 7: literally within a couple of days, you could barely find
Speaker 7: the cut lines, which were the pass from state to streak,
Speaker 7: and you couldn't find the steaks at all.
Speaker 5: And then there was the wildlife.
Speaker 7: So one day we were walking along it as hot
Speaker 7: as could be, and the bugs were about to carry
Speaker 7: off the skews and the rest, and I was talking
Speaker 7: to David.
Speaker 5: That would be David post Away, Pete Dies Construction superintendent.
Speaker 7: He said, do you think there are any alligators out here?
Speaker 7: I said, oh, yeah, they're all over the place because
Speaker 7: they can travel in this water. It's about knee high
Speaker 7: and they can move from place to place. And he said,
Speaker 7: those are step on one. It's all. We won't do that,
Speaker 7: but you can find them because there'll be a an
Speaker 7: alligator pit. And what they do is they'll be in
Speaker 7: an area of sawgrass and they'll root around and make
Speaker 7: an alligator pit that's probably twenty feet square around where
Speaker 7: they ripped up the vegetation and kind of dug the
Speaker 7: butt a little bit deeper, and that's where they live
Speaker 7: and that's where they sleep in the water. And all
Speaker 7: they're scavengers. They don't eat live meat. They kill things
Speaker 7: and they put it in that pit to rot and
Speaker 7: when it's real gamey, then they'll eat it. So when
Speaker 7: you come to one of those pits, you can tell
Speaker 7: what it is because it stinks to high heaven. And
Speaker 7: he said, boy, I hate to be in something like that,
Speaker 7: and I said, yeah, me too. So in the meantime,
Speaker 7: we're pushing through. We're pushing through the sawgrass and it's
Speaker 7: about five feet high, and it's so thick. I mean,
Speaker 7: you can't. It just wears you out to push against it,
Speaker 7: sort of leaning leaning into it. I was in front
Speaker 7: and Dave was following me, and all of a sudden
Speaker 7: I was leaning. All of a sudden it just parted
Speaker 7: and I fell in this hole. And I knew immediately
Speaker 7: what it was because it's stunk to high have it,
Speaker 7: and I'd fallen into an alligator.
Speaker 2: Kid.
Speaker 7: Fortunately the alligator was home, but you know, said, I'm
Speaker 7: laying of this thing, and my full concentration is on
Speaker 7: keeping my balpha order. All of a sudden, David comes
Speaker 7: pops right through the grass and falls right on top
Speaker 7: of me. He looks around. He says, oh my god,
Speaker 7: he says, the stinks that I haven't what is this.
Speaker 7: It's what we were talking about. It's an alligator. He's gone.
Speaker 7: He just disappeared. He was He took off so fast.
Speaker 5: How did you get out?
Speaker 7: Oh? I got out. I was. I was right by,
Speaker 7: but nothing happened to it.
Speaker 5: Kelly, who hadn't worked on a peat dye project before,
Speaker 5: quickly got a taste of Die's creative process.
Speaker 7: When we first started working with him. We had to
Speaker 7: get upset of plans from the bank in order to
Speaker 7: just strin alone. It was the hardest thing to get
Speaker 7: a set of plants. Pete resisted it and just didn't
Speaker 7: want to give us a set of plants. And finally
Speaker 7: we were able to secure a set of plans from him.
Speaker 7: We gave him to the bank and everything's ready to go.
Speaker 7: So we were on the site the first day. We
Speaker 7: were walking out to the first t I said, oh, wait, man,
Speaker 7: I forgot something. And I went running back to the
Speaker 7: truck and got the plans, and son come running, come
Speaker 7: running back, and Pete says to me, what's that And
Speaker 7: I said, Oh, these are the plants. And he said,
Speaker 7: put them back in the truck, and I don't want
Speaker 7: to see them again. That was the last time we
Speaker 7: had the plants on the.
Speaker 5: Job, and that, it seems to me, is exactly where
Speaker 5: Pete Die and the tour could have found themselves at loggerheads,
Speaker 5: the craftsmen versus the corporation, the improviser versus the plan followers.
Speaker 5: But as it turned out, Dean Beeman himself had a
Speaker 5: healthy regard for Die's methods.
Speaker 4: That's Pete.
Speaker 3: Pete wants to be hands on boots on the I
Speaker 3: want to see it. I don't want to see it
Speaker 3: on a piece of paper. I want to see it
Speaker 3: with my own eye and my boots on the ground
Speaker 3: and get wet.
Speaker 5: And from Vernon Kelly's point of view. While there was
Speaker 5: a contrast in styles between Die and Beaman, there was
Speaker 5: also a crucial element that kept the peace.
Speaker 7: There was a tremendous amount of respect between Dean and
Speaker 7: deep In both ways and Alice both ways.
Speaker 5: Years later, Alice I admitted that her initial fears about
Speaker 5: the partnership had been unfounded. Dean was wonderful, she said.
Speaker 5: He let Pete do his thing, and both of them
Speaker 5: let Alice do her thing. She too was on site,
Speaker 5: and she too had a knack for boots on the
Speaker 5: ground improvisation. According to plans, the par three seventeenth would
Speaker 5: have water just on the right, but around the seventeenth green,
Speaker 5: as it happened, was some of the best sand on
Speaker 5: a generally mucky property, So the crew kept digging that
Speaker 5: sand out and using it as foundation for turf elsewhere
Speaker 5: on the course. Eventually there was an enormous pit where
Speaker 5: the seeventeenth hole was supposed to be. Here's how Pete
Speaker 5: Dye recounted what happened next. I called Alice over to
Speaker 5: discuss with her where we could find a new place
Speaker 5: for the green. She said, put the green back where
Speaker 5: it was and fill the hole with water. Simple enough.
Speaker 5: This sort of husband wife collaboration was common on Dye projects.
Speaker 5: One summer when he was in college, Tom Doak worked
Speaker 5: on the crew at die'es Long Cove Club on Hilton
Speaker 5: Head Island.
Speaker 1: They were renting a house three miles away and see
Speaker 1: Pine's plantation, And you know, Pete would be there six
Speaker 1: or seven days a week at six thirty in the
Speaker 1: morning with the crew, and Alice would come out maybe
Speaker 1: two or three times a week, you know, at lunchtime
Speaker 1: or in the afternoon, and she'd just come check on
Speaker 1: progress and see, you know, see what what had been
Speaker 1: done since the last time she was out there, which
Speaker 1: you know, even that would be more visits than most
Speaker 1: architects would make to their own construction sites. And it
Speaker 1: was actually a guy on her crew that would have
Speaker 1: been a college roommate of PD's. You know, Pete was
Speaker 1: shaping on the golf course and Steve, his roommate, was
Speaker 1: out there working on the labor crew. And I get
Speaker 1: to know Steve a little bit, and at one point
Speaker 1: Steve just sort of said, really casually, well, you know,
Speaker 1: nothing's really done out here until miss Sally says it's okay.
Speaker 1: And I thought that was funny at the time, but
Speaker 1: but I really did get the impression by the time
Speaker 1: I was done working for Pete and Alice that Alice
Speaker 1: had a lot to say about you know, maybe not
Speaker 1: the final say, but she was certainly going to tell
Speaker 1: Pee if she didn't think, you know, she thought golf
Speaker 1: course was too hard or too easy, or if that
Speaker 1: feature didn't look right, and you know, hers was the
Speaker 1: most important opinion to Pete.
Speaker 5: So while Pete Die was firm in his own convictions,
Speaker 5: he was also eager to gather input from others.
Speaker 1: I contend, as an architect artist, one of the hardest
Speaker 1: things to do when you're in the middle of a
Speaker 1: construction project is half perspective on you've sort of you've
Speaker 1: gotten away from playing golf on grass and you get
Speaker 1: to lose perspective of this is too hard, is this
Speaker 1: too easy? And it really helps to have somebody out
Speaker 1: there you trust just this you know, it's okay, it's fine,
Speaker 1: or it's O, wait, are you sure you want to
Speaker 1: be doing that? You know, and most architects don't have that.
Speaker 5: The Stadium Course opened in nineteen eighty, but as the
Speaker 5: eighty two Players Championship approached, the first players to be
Speaker 5: held at TPC Sawgrass, the pressure on both Pete Die
Speaker 5: and Dean Beeman ratcheted up.
Speaker 12: It was definitely a move forward for the PGA Tour
Speaker 12: because they were opening their own golf course.
Speaker 5: Sean Martin is a senior editor for PGA Tour dot com,
Speaker 5: and in twenty seventeen he wrote a feature called Leap
Speaker 5: of Faith behind the Stadium Course's wild debut at the
Speaker 5: nineteen eighty two Players Championship. It's really great and a
Speaker 5: major inspiration for this episode.
Speaker 12: So now they were getting into the golf course business,
Speaker 12: and there was debate among the players whether or not
Speaker 12: the PGA Tour should be getting into the golf course business,
Speaker 12: whether or not that was a wise business decision.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 12: You look at Adam Schupack's book about Dean Beeman and
Speaker 12: the early tour was run out of basically, I believe
Speaker 12: it was a town home or a condo at the
Speaker 12: Sawgrass Country Club. So it was a very modest organization,
Speaker 12: so to now all of a sudden get into the
Speaker 12: golf course business. It was a risky venture.
Speaker 5: And the heat on Beeman and Die got turned up
Speaker 5: when the pros started to visit the new course.
Speaker 12: So Sawgrass Country Club, which hosted the players, was literally
Speaker 12: across the street, so when guys were in town for
Speaker 12: the players, they could go over and see TPC. It
Speaker 12: was carved out of a swamp. It was much more
Speaker 12: severe than what you see today. I think some of
Speaker 12: that is just when you build slopes and you shape them,
Speaker 12: they never look quite as severe as when they get
Speaker 12: grass on them. And so just I think of course
Speaker 12: is always gonna be severe when it's new. And then
Speaker 12: also you know, combine some of that with just the
Speaker 12: wild surrounds off the fairway. If you strayed from the
Speaker 12: corridors and hit it into that stuff, I mean you're
Speaker 12: looking at lost balls, You're having trouble hacking out. It
Speaker 12: was very raw and very very penal.
Speaker 5: The players began to make their opinions known, and not
Speaker 5: long after the grand opening, Dean Beaman oversaw some significant changes.
Speaker 3: It was difficult for me to envision what the final
Speaker 3: product would be based on looking at dirt when the
Speaker 3: grass was on it, it was far different.
Speaker 4: Than I had imagined.
Speaker 3: And clearly as soon as it opened, even before tour
Speaker 3: players came in and wanted to play it, I determined
Speaker 3: it was much too severe. The greens themselves were much
Speaker 3: too severe. So during the course of that year, before
Speaker 3: the first tournament, a lot of work was gone to
Speaker 3: take some of the severity out of the green.
Speaker 5: But when the eighty two Players Championship arrived, the course
Speaker 5: was still very rugged and very difficult. Tom Doak headed
Speaker 5: down from Cornell during his spring break to watch the tournament.
Speaker 5: When Doak remembers that era of TPC Sagrass, the image
Speaker 5: of a relatively bare bones golf course comes to his mind.
Speaker 1: You know, one of the things about the TPC that
Speaker 1: most people don't realize is, you know, in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: ninety eighty was terrible recession time in America, and the
Speaker 1: TPC was really built to be a low maintenance golf
Speaker 1: course in a fairly low budget golf course to build.
Speaker 1: And of course once it was opened for three or
Speaker 1: four years, they all of a sudden it was like, well,
Speaker 1: this is the headquarters of the tour. We've got to
Speaker 1: spruce it up, and we've got to make it look
Speaker 1: pretty imperfect. But that was not Pete's idea going into it.
Speaker 1: One of the quotes I remember him saying it that
Speaker 1: the original tournament in nineteen eighty two was everything here
Speaker 1: is the dead opposite of Augusta on purpose.
Speaker 5: When Dope got to the tournament, he went out and
Speaker 5: found Pete Dye on the course.
Speaker 1: I think it was on like the eleventh or twelfth hole.
Speaker 1: Basically he was just going around to one hole at
Speaker 1: a time and watching players come through and you know,
Speaker 1: watching shots and seeing how they reacted. He wanted to
Speaker 1: see how they played them. He didn't want to hear
Speaker 1: how what they said. He didn't cares so much what
Speaker 1: they said about it. You know, he just wanted to
Speaker 1: see if the shots work the way he intended them to.
Speaker 1: And you know, so we just go to one hole
Speaker 1: at a time and watched three or four groups play through,
Speaker 1: and Pete did see somebody hid a good shot and go, oh,
Speaker 1: that hole works. We can go to the next hall now.
Speaker 5: But the pros were coming to their own conclusions.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 12: Going in, people knew I think that there was going
Speaker 12: to be a high Tension Week. This was a players
Speaker 12: were facing something that was new, something that was very penal.
Speaker 12: Players had an opportunity to voice their opinions and voice
Speaker 12: them strongly and loudly, and the press obviously was very
Speaker 12: willing to write them. And so you had some great
Speaker 12: quotes that you know, I think players had probably spent
Speaker 12: some time thinking about. And so you had Ben Crenshaw
Speaker 12: of all people, referring to it as Star Wars golf
Speaker 12: designed by Darth Vader. Jack Nicholas after missing the cuts
Speaker 12: that I've never been very good at stopping a five
Speaker 12: iron on the hood of a car.
Speaker 5: At least one player, however, was in his element.
Speaker 2: As far as a Pete Die golf course, I was
Speaker 2: fortunate enough to play in nineteen seventy four, I played
Speaker 2: the Teeth of the Dog at Casady Compo.
Speaker 5: Jerry Pate was a twenty eight year old US amateur
Speaker 5: and US Open champion. He had a silky, powerful swing
Speaker 5: and a fearless attitude, and he felt that he had
Speaker 5: a bead on Pete Dye designs.
Speaker 2: So I kind of understood Pete strategies. I had a
Speaker 2: feel for how he liked to strategize holes, and there
Speaker 2: were just certain places you couldn't hit the ball. You
Speaker 2: just did you hit it there, you were in trouble.
Speaker 2: And when I saw the Stadium course for the first time,
Speaker 2: a lot of people complained about it because the greens
Speaker 2: were sort of perched up off of the grade, so
Speaker 2: you had a lot of areas that had I would
Speaker 2: call them false fronts in the front, and the green
Speaker 2: ran off on the left side and the right side,
Speaker 2: and there were very very small pinnable areas that were
Speaker 2: little target areas, and if you didn't hint it there,
Speaker 2: the ball would gather some fifteen to thirty forty feet
Speaker 2: away from there into a low depression either on the
Speaker 2: green or off the green. So you had to be
Speaker 2: extremely accurate with your iron. You had to be a
Speaker 2: good driver of the ball, which I was, and you
Speaker 2: had to be a really good iron player, which I was.
Speaker 2: So his designs sort of played right into my hand.
Speaker 5: Still, like everyone else, Jerry Pate was struck by the
Speaker 5: rawness and difficulty of the new TPC.
Speaker 2: And you know, the golf course was wild and willy then.
Speaker 2: It wasn't just naturally managed and manacured light. I mean,
Speaker 2: it wasn't as manicured today. It was natural with palmettos
Speaker 2: and just you know, basically bobcats and rattlesnakes twenty foot
Speaker 2: off the fairway and Armadilla's and you name it. So
Speaker 2: that day there was nothing on earth. I mean that,
Speaker 2: not with it, not with exaggeration. There was no other
Speaker 2: course on the earth more difficult and diabolical than that
Speaker 2: golf course.
Speaker 5: But unlike almost everyone else, Pate wasn't much bothered by
Speaker 5: the stadium course's severity. This was at least in part
Speaker 5: because he just wasn't the worrying type.
Speaker 12: Yeah, so he was this gregarious balls riker, just fun
Speaker 12: loving flagging shots and I guess maybe kind of cavalier
Speaker 12: in that way, aiming at flags and playing I think,
Speaker 12: kind of care free, because when you're that good of
Speaker 12: a ball striker, you can kind of do that because
Speaker 12: the ball's going to go where you aim.
Speaker 5: Pate also had the advantage of having played at the
Speaker 5: grand opening of TPC Sawgrass in nineteen eighty and being
Speaker 5: paired with Dean Beaman himself. Beaman had shown him where
Speaker 5: he could be aggressive off the tee and taught him
Speaker 5: not to be intimidated by Die's visuals.
Speaker 12: Look, the fairways are much wider than they appear. They're
Speaker 12: classic Pete Die deception, you know, who build up bunkers
Speaker 12: or slopes that will make the fairway look smaller than
Speaker 12: they are. But the problem is is really the fairwaies
Speaker 12: or wider than you think. And if you lay back
Speaker 12: off the tee, the second shot you're going to face
Speaker 12: into the greens is harder than the shot that you
Speaker 12: just avoided off the tee. So by playing safe off
Speaker 12: the tee, you're not really avoiding as much trouble as
Speaker 12: you think you are, and you're just bringing that much
Speaker 12: more into play around the greens. And so it is
Speaker 12: very visually intimidating, but you're also going to be best
Speaker 12: suited if you take the challenge on.
Speaker 5: So Pete was even more confident than usual going into
Speaker 5: the eighty two players. Not only did he like Pete
Speaker 5: Die courses and do well at them, not only did
Speaker 5: he have the right skill set and disposition. Not only
Speaker 5: did he have intel on TPC sawgrass, but he also
Speaker 5: had deep family connections to Jacksonville. His father had been
Speaker 5: born and raised there, and his mother had moved there
Speaker 5: in high school. Add it all up and Jerry Pate
Speaker 5: felt that he had destiny on his side.
Speaker 2: I just knew I was gonna win it. It wasn't
Speaker 2: even a fall in my head, you know, I knew
Speaker 2: it all along.
Speaker 5: Well, he didn't exactly jump out to the lead. He
Speaker 5: hung around shooting seventy seventy three seventy. After fifty four holes,
Speaker 5: he was tied for sixth, three shots behind his brother
Speaker 5: in law Bruce Letsky and co leader Brad Bryant. Meanwhile,
Speaker 5: Pate was very aware of the rumblings among veteran players
Speaker 5: about the course and the tour's new direction.
Speaker 2: And they was talking the locker room by the Senior
Speaker 2: Hall of Famers just before they were into Hall of Fame.
Speaker 2: And I won't mention names. Some of them are dead now.
Speaker 2: Somer still lives in their eighties, and the talk was
Speaker 2: they were going to get, you know, have a coup
Speaker 2: and fire Dean because we had no business owning a
Speaker 2: golf course. And it was crazy, and it was competing
Speaker 2: against some of these famous golfers design careers. They had
Speaker 2: their own design careers going. So they're thinking, well, wait
Speaker 2: a minute, PGA Tours hiring some outside guy named Pete
Speaker 2: Died to design their golf cours. Why didn't they hire
Speaker 2: a player, it was victrial. It was anger. The players
Speaker 2: were mad angry. I mean, you could use all the
Speaker 2: It was a big deal politically for Dane and Pete Die,
Speaker 2: I can tell you. And there were some really top
Speaker 2: players in that, as I said, hall of fame, golfers
Speaker 2: that didn't like the golf course at all, in fact
Speaker 2: missed the cut. And then once you get something that's
Speaker 2: negative in your mind, you don't like the golf course,
Speaker 2: you're done. There's no way you're gonna play well. And
Speaker 2: I loved it.
Speaker 5: On Sunday after Burnying twelve, Pate had closed the gap
Speaker 5: between himself and the leaders. The year prior, he had
Speaker 5: won in Memphis, and in celebration he had leapt into
Speaker 5: the lake by the eighteenth green. So rumors were already
Speaker 5: going around TPC Sawgrass that if he pulled off the victory,
Speaker 5: he would do the same today.
Speaker 2: So anyway, as I walked back to thirteen t and
Speaker 2: I heard somebody kind of running up behind me and
Speaker 2: they grabbed my arm. I turned around. It was Alice
Speaker 2: Dye and she looked at me and she said, you've
Speaker 2: got to win this thing, and you gotta throw Pete
Speaker 2: in the lake.
Speaker 5: Alice's idea, it seems, was that a little playful public
Speaker 5: come uppings might do some good. It might provide an
Speaker 5: outlet for the rising hostility toward her husband and their
Speaker 5: design business.
Speaker 2: First, Pete had been catching an ungodly amount of hate
Speaker 2: for this golf course, and Alice, I think, was a
Speaker 2: little bit worried. Can I turn around? Looked at her
Speaker 2: just calm as can be, And everybody used to think,
Speaker 2: you know, when I played, I was cocky. I really
Speaker 2: wasn't cocky. I just you know, I knew in my
Speaker 2: heart I could pull it off, and I said, I'm
Speaker 2: gonna win.
Speaker 5: Pate went on to par thirteen, birdie fourteen, and birdie
Speaker 5: the Island seventeenth hole. He drove it right up the
Speaker 5: god on eighteen and had a five iron into the green.
Speaker 5: Until that point, the most famous moment in Pate's career
Speaker 5: had involved another seventy second hole five iron, this one
Speaker 5: at the nineteen seventy six US Open. He hit it
Speaker 5: so close to a dangerous whole location that some accused
Speaker 5: him of pulling it. Today, the approach to the eighteenth
Speaker 5: that TPC sawgrass is still a scary shot, even when
Speaker 5: pros are hitting eight or nine irons. Almost no one
Speaker 5: goes directly at the pin, but Pate did with a
Speaker 5: five iron, and he knocked it to two feet.
Speaker 2: For me to hit that shot, It's like Ben Crenshaw
Speaker 2: hitting a you know, a six foot pot. He's not nervous.
Speaker 2: Jack Nicholas isn't nervous on a six foot pot. Tom
Speaker 2: Watson wasn't nervous on a six foot but Lee Taveno
Speaker 2: was never nervous on a niney yard web shot, and
Speaker 2: Jerry Pate was never nervous hitting a long iron shot.
Speaker 2: I mean, I nerves weren't even in my vocabulary. And
Speaker 2: when I hit the five iron, and I went to
Speaker 2: the press room, and I think Tom Place was running
Speaker 2: the interview for the PGA Tour, and he said, you
Speaker 2: have any opening statements, and I go, yeah, I guess,
Speaker 2: I guess I pulled another five iron.
Speaker 5: But let's go back for a moment to the eighteenth fairway,
Speaker 5: just after Pate had stiffed his approach.
Speaker 2: And the camera was on me. Little Davy Fence who
Speaker 2: worked for CBS, and Trikennyan is in the truck. I
Speaker 2: knew that, and you know, all my buddies at CBS
Speaker 2: were there and I have no idea what they've said.
Speaker 2: But as I walked up the eighteenth fairway, Davy Fence
Speaker 2: says you're gonna up in the lake, and I said, Pete,
Speaker 2: die will go for a swim.
Speaker 5: As he waited for the groups behind him to finish,
Speaker 5: Pate saw Dean Beeman's wife, Judy, who urged him to
Speaker 5: throw Dean in the water with Pete. As that was happening, CBS,
Speaker 5: with Vin Scully calling the action, was working a bit
Speaker 5: of TV magic.
Speaker 12: There was a gator that had been seen in the
Speaker 12: pond at seventeen, So Frank Trickinney and the great CBS
Speaker 12: producer put up a split screen and there's kind of
Speaker 12: waiting for Jerry to throw them in at the trophy
Speaker 12: ceremony on one side and the other side of this
Speaker 12: gator in the water. But what Vin said was that
Speaker 12: this gator is on the lake at seventeen. The lake
Speaker 12: on eighteen is not connected. And so the television viewers
Speaker 12: thinking they're about to jump into this gator infested pond.
Speaker 2: Now I didn't even think I was going to go in.
Speaker 2: I thought I would just throw them both in the
Speaker 2: lake and that would be it. And then they were
Speaker 2: out there and you know, in the lake. So I
Speaker 2: threw them both in the lake off the bulkhead, and
Speaker 2: then I jumped in behind him. But you know, I
Speaker 2: never realized that high it was, and when I jumped in.
Speaker 2: After the fact, I go back and look at those videos. Heck,
Speaker 2: it was about an eight foot off the water. That
Speaker 2: bulkhead was about eight foot, so it's a pretty big
Speaker 2: racing dive. It'd be eight foot in the air. But
Speaker 2: we didn't care. There was so much, so much adrenaline,
Speaker 2: the emotion of winning. It was an exciting time and
Speaker 2: it was, you know, a memory I'll never forget. It was.
Speaker 2: It was as great as winning the US Open, I
Speaker 2: can tell you.
Speaker 5: Dean Beaman has his own way of remembering the experience.
Speaker 5: How did the water feel?
Speaker 7: It was pretty ugly.
Speaker 5: The jump in the lake and its theater of just
Speaker 5: desserts may have taken the edge off the player's outrage.
Speaker 5: Dean Beaman kept his job and Pete Die kept designing
Speaker 5: courses for the PGA Tour, but the pro's opinion of
Speaker 5: the stadium course at TPC Sawgrass didn't change right away.
Speaker 12: After the tournament was over. Pete's in the lockerroom changing.
Speaker 12: He's just been thrown in the lake. Ed Snead and
Speaker 12: Tom Wiscoff were waiting for him, and Pete knew both
Speaker 12: of them from Ohio, and they had a question about
Speaker 12: the thirteenth hole, which is a par three. There's water
Speaker 12: left and the green is bisected by a pretty severe swale,
Speaker 12: and so the whole locations down on the left. They're
Speaker 12: by the water, but you can use that swale to
Speaker 12: funnel the tea shot towards the hole. However, if you
Speaker 12: miss on the wrong side of it, you're now putting
Speaker 12: down a very steep slope to the hole. Two putting
Speaker 12: is almost impossible. So Ed and Tom had played together.
Speaker 12: They said their tea shots landed within two feet of
Speaker 12: each other. One of them funneled down towards the hole,
Speaker 12: the other state up top. And they were asking, how
Speaker 12: can we have a golf course where two shots that
Speaker 12: land within two feet of each other have such vastly
Speaker 12: different results. That doesn't seem fair. Pete looks at them
Speaker 12: and he says, well, the only reason that happened is
Speaker 12: because you guys are chicken. If you were aiming at
Speaker 12: the hole that two feet wouldn't have mattered at all.
Speaker 12: But you're afraid of the water on the left, so
Speaker 12: you're aiming for a slope in the green to try
Speaker 12: to save you, and that has too small of a
Speaker 12: margin for error, which you just told me you're not
Speaker 12: good enough to hit.
Speaker 5: In spite of appearances, though Pete Dye was not unmoved
Speaker 5: by the criticism, He wrote in his autobiography, the verbal
Speaker 5: assault against our new creation hit like a stake in
Speaker 5: my heart. Still he saw no evidence that the course
Speaker 5: was too hard. After all, Jerry Pate had won at
Speaker 5: eight under. In order to make the top ten, you
Speaker 5: had to break par. In fact, Die said at the time,
Speaker 5: when they learn how to play the stadium course, we
Speaker 5: may have to put in some more obstacles to keep
Speaker 5: them totally frustrated. But ultimately it wasn't Die's call. After
Speaker 5: the eighty three Tournament Players Championship, the pros revolted. According
Speaker 5: to Adam Shupack's account, a group of top players sent
Speaker 5: a letter of complaint to Commissioner Beeman. Among the signees
Speaker 5: were Ben Crenshaw, Hail Irwin, Jack, Nicholas Craig Stadler, Tom
Speaker 5: Watson and Tom Weiscough. Quickly, Beaman arranged a meeting at
Speaker 5: TPC Sawgrass between Pete Dye and a player committee. They
Speaker 5: toured the course and the players grilled Die about the
Speaker 5: green contours. The commissioner saw their side well.
Speaker 3: Some of the lowest areas on the greens that were
Speaker 3: pin positions were in places that the green surfaces at
Speaker 3: the higher part.
Speaker 4: Of those greens were so severe that the.
Speaker 3: Ball coming off the high side down on the low
Speaker 3: side wouldn't stay on the green at all.
Speaker 4: So it was literally impossible to not three parts, many.
Speaker 3: Many times from one transition part of a green to another.
Speaker 3: And the players were right, it was too severe. It
Speaker 3: was still too severe to be really a fair test
Speaker 3: to golf. Yeah, our feelings were still hurt, but they
Speaker 3: were right.
Speaker 5: Months later Ben Crenshaw, the co chair of the architectural Committee,
Speaker 5: presented a list of changes to be made to the
Speaker 5: Stadium course. At that point, Die almost certainly saw the
Speaker 5: writing on the wall. How do you think mister Dye
Speaker 5: reacted to or felt about the fact that he was
Speaker 5: modifying or had to modify the course.
Speaker 3: The answer is he was very reluctant to make the
Speaker 3: changes that we wanted made. He wanted it as difficulty
Speaker 3: could because he wanted to challenge the best players in
Speaker 3: the world.
Speaker 4: But and he didn't care.
Speaker 3: He didn't think off was fair in the first place,
Speaker 3: so he was not He was not happy with the
Speaker 3: continual modifications of it.
Speaker 5: But the modifications were made, mostly carried out by Die's
Speaker 5: associate Bobby Weed between eighty three and eighty eight. Weed
Speaker 5: once said, one of my biggest regrets of being in
Speaker 5: the business is I was the one who had to
Speaker 5: make all the changes. Those changes did, however, mollify the
Speaker 5: pros and TPC sawgrass, which today boasts Augusta like conditions,
Speaker 5: complete with flower beds accenting the arena of the seventeenth Hole,
Speaker 5: is now highly regarded among PGA Tour members. In a way,
Speaker 5: it's become a symbol of the tour that Dean Beaman built,
Speaker 5: sturdy and pressive and efficiently run. Here's Adam Schupeck.
Speaker 9: Dean came along at a time where the PGA Tour
Speaker 9: was just this mom and pop shop, and he really,
Speaker 9: during his twenty years tenures, assembled the building blocks that
Speaker 9: are the foundation of the modern PGA tour. And I
Speaker 9: feel like the PGA Tour is still running. The Dean
Speaker 9: Beam and playbook. It's worked all this time, and it
Speaker 9: continues to seem almost invincible and impenetrable to whatever comes along.
Speaker 9: It's just a well oiled machine.
Speaker 5: Now. Whether the alterations to Die's original design were for
Speaker 5: the best remains a topic of debate in the golf world,
Speaker 5: one that breaks down along familiar lines. If you're a
Speaker 5: competitive or score oriented golfer, if you prize fairness and
Speaker 5: course design whatever that means, you'll likely see the changes
Speaker 5: as positive, even necessary. Others may argue that fairness is
Speaker 5: an irrelevant concern, especially when everyone is competing on the
Speaker 5: same course. These people may wish that more of the
Speaker 5: rugged quirk of dies original design had been preserved. Tom
Speaker 5: Doak takes a fairly diplomatic view.
Speaker 1: I don't know if he can say the changes made
Speaker 1: the course better or worse. You know, it's all it's
Speaker 1: all a matter of opinion, and it's all your perspective
Speaker 1: on what the objective of the course should try to be.
Speaker 1: To me, it just made it different than the original intention,
Speaker 1: you know, in terms of how much pressure it put
Speaker 1: on the players to hit good shots consistently through the
Speaker 1: golf course. But you know, the bottom line is, you know,
Speaker 1: pros don't like shooting seventy five when they have an
Speaker 1: average to poor day. You know, they don't mind not
Speaker 1: shooting sixty seven all the time, but they don't. They
Speaker 1: don't want the numbers to get up there and the
Speaker 1: TPC when you're having a bad day. Darnwell reflected it
Speaker 1: on the scorecard.
Speaker 5: In a sense, Alice Stye's prediction had come true. But
Speaker 5: it wasn't Dean Beeman specifically who came into conflict with
Speaker 5: her husband. It was the players and they had the
Speaker 5: last word at some point, perhaps during that walk around
Speaker 5: TPC Sawgrass with the committee in nineteen eighty three, he
Speaker 5: must have recognized that fact. After his triumph at the
Speaker 5: eighty two Players, Jerry Pate was living large.
Speaker 2: And I had a ten year exemption. It was a
Speaker 2: big deal, the most money anybody had ever won, ninety
Speaker 2: thousand dollars, a lot of endorsements. You know, life was great.
Speaker 2: To have my own private plane. Jack and Arnold and
Speaker 2: I were the only three players had a private plane
Speaker 2: on the tour at that time. And I was twenty eight,
Speaker 2: you know, in pretty big tall cotton, I guess you
Speaker 2: could say for a Southern boy. And then in one
Speaker 2: swing in the first of June that was kind of
Speaker 2: into my golfing competitive career.
Speaker 5: He was on the driving range at Pensacola preparing for
Speaker 5: the Open by practicing one iron stingers into the wind
Speaker 5: off of hard ground. On one swing, he felt his
Speaker 5: left shoulder pop, and that injury turned Jerry Pate into
Speaker 5: one of golf's great what if stories. He never won
Speaker 5: again on the PGA Tour, but he stayed in the
Speaker 5: golf business, eventually starting a course design firm of his own.
Speaker 5: Over the years, he became close with Pete and Alice Dye.
Speaker 5: Their friendship had begun in nineteen seventy four when a
Speaker 5: twenty one year old Pate played the World amateur at
Speaker 5: Teeth of the Dog. Today, his firm looks after Teeth
Speaker 5: of the Dog and the other die courses at Cosa
Speaker 5: de Compo, as.
Speaker 2: We've sort of taken on the role to keep the
Speaker 2: integrity of the aesthetics of the architecture and agronomics there.
Speaker 2: I go to Kastada Kamp, I'm going next week down there.
Speaker 2: In fact, I go down.
Speaker 7: There a lot.
Speaker 2: And so it's a great honor to have met Pete
Speaker 2: Dye as a twenty one year old kid, and now
Speaker 2: I'm sort of stepped in his place at one of
Speaker 2: his favorite places, and that's where he died.
Speaker 5: If you listen to the Frida Egg podcast, you already
Speaker 5: know that Pete and Alice Die are no longer with us.
Speaker 5: Pete passed away in January at the age of ninety
Speaker 5: five after a battle with Alzheimer's. Alice was ninety one
Speaker 5: when she died in February of last year. They're longtime friends.
Speaker 5: Like Dean Beaman, Vernon Kelly, and Jerry Pate tend to
Speaker 5: speak about Pete and Alice in terms of both personal
Speaker 5: and historical. Their generosity, their accomplishments, their eccentric nomadic lifestyle,
Speaker 5: their influence on a generation of architects, their commitment to
Speaker 5: the game and to the craft.
Speaker 2: They didn't build golf courses for the money they gave.
Speaker 2: They built golf course because because Alice was a great
Speaker 2: amateur player in her own right, her husband was really
Speaker 2: a fine amateur player, and they gave so much to
Speaker 2: the game. I guess Alice was the first woman to
Speaker 2: sit on the PGA of America board that I remember,
Speaker 2: and I know she was head of the Architects Society.
Speaker 2: I mean, they were, you know, for a woman. She
Speaker 2: did on incredible things in a man's world. And of
Speaker 2: course Pete was a legend. Oh my god. You know
Speaker 2: the stories Pete used to tell me about how he
Speaker 2: got fired by Augie Bush or fired by Herb Kohler,
Speaker 2: and then they'd hire him back. And I'm sure Dean
Speaker 2: wanted to fire me. He was quite a character, you know.
Speaker 2: And you couldn't help the low Pete Dye and Alice
Speaker 2: was just gosh, she was the salt of the earth.
Speaker 2: She was like a mother to me, I'll tell you.
Speaker 2: And so I dearly miss him both. I dearly miss
Speaker 2: them both.
Speaker 5: This was the fourth episode of Frida Egg Stories. It
Speaker 5: was created and hosted by me Garrett Morrison, with mixing
Speaker 5: and engineering from Jay Eric. Our executive producer is Andy Johnson.
Speaker 5: Thanks for listening.