It’s been 24 years since Pete Dye built his last course in Palm Springs, 17 years since he was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame for Lifetime Achievement in golf course architecture, and five years since he died at age 94. However, his spirit has been revived at two La Quinta courses thanks to recent restoration projects at The Hideaway Golf Club and PGA WEST.
Leading the effort at both locations was Tim Liddy, a golf course architect who worked closely with Dye, a fellow Indiana native, for 28 years. He was joined by shaper Michael O’Connor, who worked with Dye for 30 years. “The projects brought Pete back to us on a daily basis,” Liddy says. “We would be working on something and then remember a story about him yelling at us. He was always kidding and good natured. Mike and I would laugh about those memories. These became very personal projects for us.”
They completed the first phase of the Hideaway restoration project last summer, with work focused on the greens and greenside bunkers. Further upgrades involving the fairways, tees, and fairway bunkers are planned for the future. “The course had been touched by a few architects since it was built in 2001, so it didn’t have a lot of Dye character left,” Liddy shares. “We put all of that back in at the green complexes. It’s such a beautiful place. It’s gorgeous.”
Hole 18 at The Hideaway incorporates Dye’s signature railroad ties.
PHOTO BY BRANDON HARMAN
Dye was all about “angles, angles, angles,” he continues. “You’d have one angle off the tee and probably a different angle into the green,” he says. “There’d be some blindness in an approach or two. I put back some blindness in the bailout area on the par-3 12th by placing a high bunker that blocks the view to the right side of the green. I also put back in flat sand bunkers with steep grass faces.”
“It’s night and day from what was there previously,” says Gerad Nelson, director of agronomy at The Hideaway. “Tim really introduced some unique bunker styles. Plus, the green contouring was a big part of the design that had not been there. We also gained some hole locations after the greens were brought back to their previous sizes.”
Reintroducing design elements that had faded away over the years was also the goal at PGA WEST’s Stadium Course, famously one of Dye’s most difficult layouts. Opened in 1986, it will serve as the host venue for the PGA Tour’s The American Express tournament Jan. 16–19.
“We had the opportunity to take it back to the way it originally was,” says Ben Dobbs, executive director of PGA WEST. “That’s why it was important for us to call this a ‘restoration’ and not a ‘renovation,’ because we just focused on putting the golf course back exactly the way Pete designed it, with sharp edges, lots of contrasts, and difficult bunkers with the grass faces. I will tell you that the reaction from members and guests, and from the PGA Tour, has been fantastic. Everybody has loved the changes.”
Dobbs points to the bunkering (where Dye’s greenside efforts are often lined by infamous railroad ties) as the legend’s most recognizable imprint on the Stadium Course. “Pete spent a lot of time thinking about visually intimidating the golfers,” he says. “I think the bunkering, with the grass faces and the raised top edges, really become visually intimidating again. I know that’s what Pete was trying to do, and we brought that element back.”
The menacing water view of Stadium’s 17th.
PHOTO COURTESY PGA WEST
“When you look at his work at the Stadium Course, you learn that you don’t need to shy away from the hand of man,” Liddy says. “I think of Harry Wolf’s quote on the great landscape architect Dan Kiley that applies well to Pete Dye: ‘In all of Dan’s work, one sees and learns that one need not shy away from the hand of man, that the vibrancy occurs when man’s mark intersects with nature and that the clearer the mark the more powerful the result. One learns that Naturalism is void of power like any counterfeit.’ So the harder those edges against natural, soft edges are juxtaposed, the better. The eye loves contrast. I think the Stadium Course is such a seminal golf course. It puts Pete in the realm of architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry. It really does. He turned the direction of golf course architecture with that course.”
Liddy absorbed plenty of important lessons while working with Dye, including the value of being on-site almost every day during each project. “Clients still find that very unusual, but that’s what I learned from him,” he says. “When you’re doing vertical sculpture, so to speak, a couple of inches here or there can make a big difference in whether I see something or not beyond that. That and feeling in control. If you’re not there building the course, then some other guy is making decisions that clients are paying you to make. So that’s an important aspect that sticks with me today. I lived in the desert for three months last summer while we did The Hideaway and Stadium.”
Dye’s desert portfolio also includes the Mountain, Dunes, and Citrus courses at PGA WEST, and courses at The Westin Rancho Mirage Golf Resort & Spa and Mission Hills Country Club, both in Rancho Mirage.
“The Stadium Course is seminal. It puts Pete in the in the realm of architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry.”
Tim Liddy, golf course architect
“I think his public courses are some of his best,” Liddy says. “He would take something that was very flat, a very uninteresting piece of ground, and he would layer it by putting a plane of water, a plane of a bunker, a plane of a fairway, a plane of a green. He would take those four or five different planes and make sure you could see all of them, which would give your eye a lot of excitement and a lot of beauty in a man-made way.”
When he was director of golf at Mission Hills, Dobbs spent one afternoon driving Dye around his course. “He would meet a group of golfers and say, ‘Hi, I’m Pete Dye. Do you love me or hate me?’ ” Dobbs recalls. “He said that to about every group he met that day.”
Dobbs is confident of what Dye would say if he saw the recent work done at the Stadium Course. “I think he’d say, ‘This is how I designed it. You got this right.’ ”
