- The World’s Most Controversial Hole:  Perhaps the only Players Championship week discussion more predictable than the silly “Fifth Major” stuff is the never-ending debate over the TPC Sawgrass’s legendary 17th, likely the single most recognized golf hole on earth.  Certainly there has never been a more all-or-nothing test, because with the exception of the small semi-pot bunker that cuts into the green’s front-right edge, there is simply no place to miss; one either hits the putting surface or marches off to the drop area to reload.  Pete Dye has explained that the hole was not initially intended to have any island green, least of all this one.  But as more and more dirt was excavated from the area surrounding his planned green complex (to build nearby stadium mounding) he and wife Alice just sort of...discovered it.  For my part, I love the hole.  It seldom requires more than a 9 iron, and the green is by no means small.  Indeed, for any professional or top amateur, the challenge here is mostly psychological, because finding a target that size with a 9 iron should not be terribly difficult.  True, under certain odd wind conditions, things can get really tough – but it’s not as though the 17th is the only hole in the world about which we can make that observation.  The key, I believe, is context.  As the penultimate hole in a top-shelf, non-Major (sorry) professional event, it represents  a test that is singularly dramatic in nature.  On the other hand, as the legendary 66 recorded here by one Angelo Spagnolo during Golf Digest’s Worst Avid Golfer contest illustrates, the less-skilled hold the potential to literally empty their bag.  But remember: Deane Beman and Pete Dye built this golf course with the Players Championship first and foremost in mind.  Even if it’s only for four days each year, when tournament play is the criterion employed, the 17th is, in my opinion at least, an absolutely heroic golf hole.
 
- Long Overdue:  Though a traditionalist through and through, I have always been greatly admired the talent - no, the genius- of Pete Dye.  Like any course designer successful enough to build dozens and dozens of courses, his work has at times seemed formulaic or vaguely repetitive.  Yet it is my firm conviction that Dye single-handedly altered the direction of modern architecture away from the long, tough, character-free work of Robert Trent Jones (and his various imitators), leading the medium back to shorter, more strategic, and infinitely more interesting creations.  With that in mind, his recent selection to the World Golf Hall of Fame seems long overdue – particularly given that Trent Jones is enshrined there already.  In any event, several years ago, I was present as an annual meeting of the American Society of Golf Course Architects broke up, and I pointed out Dye to a friend as he sat in a corner, fairly well removed from the sea of plaid jackets.  My friend asked me how I viewed Dye relative to his assembled brethren and I replied, without hesitation: “There are 150 people in this room who’ve made their livings out of following that man’s lead.”  A bit of hyperbole to be sure...but perhaps not so very much.  Anyway, to save time  (and to present something that’s actually been edited), here, as a modest career retrospective, is Dye’s entry from my ever-handy (to this website) Book of Golfers:
 
  Old Tom Morris was among the first to codify it, Willie Park, Jr. and H.S. Colt advanced it greatly, C.B. Macdonald gave it Golden Age definition and Robert Trent Jones modernized it worldwide.  Yet for all the impact that these men had on golf course design, a strong argument can be made that no one has influenced it more than an insurance broker from rural Urbana, OH, one Paul “Pete” Dye.
  A fine amateur who competed in one British and five U.S. Amateurs, Dye (b.12/29/1925) played at Florida’s Rollins College where he met and married Alice O’Neal before returning North to sell insurance.  In 1959, Dye left the business world to begin designing golf courses, initially creating a several low-budget Midwestern layouts hardly demanding of the world’s attention.  But in 1963, Pete and Alice took a month-long trip to Scotland, where they discovered pot bunkers, unmanicured rough, railroad sleepers shoring up hazards and a far less power-oriented approach to game.  The impact of these things upon the Dyes was immense, and once back in the States Pete blended them into a somewhat modernized hybrid that would soon become the most copied style in the business.
  Crooked Stick, a local Indianapolis club completed in 1966, was the first layout to reflect this old/new look, with The Golf Club, a 1967 project in New Albany, OH, spreading the word a bit farther.  But only in 1969, when Dye teamed with Jack Nicklaus to build Hilton Head Island’s Harbour Town Golf Links, was the Dye style widely introduced to the world stage.  Initially measuring little more than 6,600 yards, the tight, strategic Harbor Town hosted the PGA Tour’s first Heritage Classic in 1969, yielding the highest 36-hole cut of the season with rounds in the 80s outnumbering sub-par scores roughly 2 to 1.
  In 1981, Dye would again change the face of architecture with his TPC at Sawgrass, a longer, tougher track built to serve as permanent host of the PGA Tour’s Players Championship.  With its much-imitated 132-yard 17th elevating the concept of the island green to an entirely new level, the TPC’s creative use of waste areas and greens contoured to repel inferior approaches once again captured the design world’s attention.  Several years later, as advances in equipment began to presage changes in the game’s fundamental balance, Dye stepped things up even further, first with the Stadium course at PGA West (1986), then, in 1990, with the windswept Ocean course at Kiawah Island. 
  It is interesting to note that for most of his career, Pete Dye has charged considerably less for his services than many other big-name architects, and, occasionally, has worked essentially for free.  Further, he has long built his courses in the oldest of fashions, seldom using maps or even sketches, always improvising and refining in the field.  Misunderstood by many but widely observed by all, Pete Dye has surely been postwar golf’s most important – and copied – golf course designer.