Paul (“Pete”) Dye’s father designed and built a nine-hole golf course on his mother’s farm in Urbana, Ohio, and Pete grew up playing and working on this course. Pete won the Ohio State High School Championship, was medalist in the Ohio State Amateur, and won the 1958 Indiana State Amateur Championship, and played in the 1957 United States Open where he finished ahead of both Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus.
Alice Dye won fifty amateur championships, including nine state championships in Indiana, three state championships in Florida, the Women’s North and South, and the Eastern. She was a member of the 1970 Curtis Cup Team. She was the first female president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects.
As architects, Alice and Pete designed and constructed their first course, El Dorado, now called Royal Oak Country Club, in Indianapolis. They also co-designed such famous Dye courses as PGA West in La Quinta, California, and South Carolina tracks such as The Ocean Course at Kiawah Island Resort in Kiawah and Harbour Town Golf Links and Long Cove Club on Hilton Head Island. Pete and Alice also collaborated on Crooked Stick Golf Club in Carmel, Indiana; Teeth of the Dog in La Romana, Dominican Republic; and the Tournament Players Club at Sawgrass, the home of the PGA Tour, in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.
People often as us how we got started.
Pete and I were members of the Country Club of Indianapolis and, as greens chairman, Pete finally killed most of the fairway grasses. He decided what he really wanted to do was build golf courses.
After unsuccessfully pursuing a job with Robert Trent Jones Sr., a local Indianapolis farmer-turned-developer gave us a job to build nine holes.
We tried to build a championship course with all the ideas we had from our national tournament experiences. Our carefully drawn routing crossed the creek thirteen times and included trees, bunkers, and small, severely contoured greens.
We were not hired to build the second nine.