Pete Dye and his wife Alice Dye met in the late 1940s when they were both studying at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. They then married and moved to Indianapolis, Alice’s home city, where their two sons, Perry Dye and Paul Burke (PB as he’s known), were born.
Pete eventually left a very profitable job in insurance to pursue his vocation in golf course design and Alice followed him into their chosen profession as soon as the children became older. It wasn’t too long before both sons also became involved in what then became a family business.
Geoff Cornish and Ron Whitten in The Golf Course wrote the following about PB:
“P.B. Dye attended the University of Tampa (Fla.) for several years, but his career choice was always golf course design. As the younger son of golf architect Pete and Alice Dye, he learned more about the subject at home and working on various family projects than he did at any school.
Resembling his father in voice and mannerisms and his mother in physical appearance, P.B. Dye developed a golf game, and creativity in course design, that rivalled both of them.
Some of his earliest collaborations with his father attracted immediate national attention. Long Cove Club on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina was named one of America’s 100 Greatest Courses only two years after it opened. Their creation of The Honors course, near Chattanooga, Tennessee was named the Best New Private course of 1984.”
All told, PB was involved in fourteen projects in eight American states during the 1980s and all of these – except for the private layout at The Links on Fisher Island in Florida in 1989 – were co-designed with his father Pete Dye.
During the following decade, he extended his design reach into Illinois, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin, completing a total of twenty-one commissions across the country, only four of which were built in partnership with his father.
Into the new millennium and PB’s work in the domestic market all but came to a halt. He fashioned courses at Iron Valley in Lebanon, Pennsylvania and Button Hole Golf & Learning Center in Providence, Rhode Island in 2000 then he created the layout at Harbour Links in Liberty, Indiana the following year, but that was about it.
Instead, PB ventured outside the United States for the first time since the late 1980s – when he had set out the Barbaroux course with his father in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region of France – and he headed off to Europe again, this time setting out an 18-hole course at the Parco di Roma Golf & Country Club in the Italian capital in the year 2000.
He also created the La Cana layout at Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic the same year, and he would return to that Caribbean country another three times between 2008 and 2010 to work on other projects.
PB’s also produced one-off designs in Mexico (at the Playa Paraiso Golf Club near Cancun in 2005), Brazil (at the Iberostar Praia do Forte Resort and Golf, Mata de Sao in 2008) and Curacao (with the Old Quarry course at the Santa Barbara Plantation in 2010).
In 2018, PB worked for the last time with his father, who now suffered from poor health. The Links at Perry Cabin in St Michael’s, Maryland was a total rebuild of an old course that Pete had originally designed with his brother Roy back in the 1960s and it’s rather fitting that PB should play a part in the final layout of a man who enjoyed a remarkable career in golf.
Extracts:
Courtesy of the American Society of Golf Course Architects:
“A free spirit who does not wear wrist watches or look at calendars... Following his family's example, P.B. has been ‘moving dirt’ for as long as he can remember. He was atop a bulldozer at age 9 learning the art of shaping golf courses at Crooked Stick in Carmel, Indiana, and at age 16, P.B. helped his dad at Teeth of the Dog in Dominican Republic.
P.B. embraces ‘The Dye Way’ – a personal commitment to ‘roll up your sleeves’ hard work and quality. He has no office, staff, or overhead, and he often lives on job sites, designing and building courses himself.
A survivor of both colon and rectal cancer, P.B.'s acclaimed designs include the P.B. Dye Golf Club in Maryland, The Honors Course in Tennessee, Fisher Island in Florida, and the Legends Club Moorland Course in South Carolina.”
From the pbdye.com website:
“PB Dye took his first golf lesson and fell in love with the game about the same time most kids were barely out of rubber pants. That was back in 1959 when PB was four years old.
PB has an identity all his own, but like his father’s creations, his courses often include railroad ties, pot bunkers, and island greens. Like his dad, PB is a hands on designer, leaving his imprint on every blade of grass on a course. What separates PB from other architects is his ability to climb on a bulldozer and shape a golf hole from tee to green.
PB’s personal favorite course is the Urbana Country Club. His grandfather, ‘Pink’ Dye, started the original nine in 1922 on farm ground owned by his wife’s family. PB’s grandmother, ‘Ma’ Dye, asked him to build the second nine, seventy years later. At that point, it became a personal mission, a real grass roots project.”
From Pete Dye in Bury Me in A Pot Bunker:
“When my younger son P.B. was in his early twenties, he was just a step away from being good enough to compete on the professional golf tour. P.B. was swinging a club when he was five, outdriving me by the time he was fifteen.
P.B. was for all practical purposes born on a bulldozer, and he might be the most innovative operator of a small dozer I’ve ever seen. His ability to sculpt three-dimensional shapes is exceptional, and his work at Long Cove produced some of the finest mounding ever created.
Being a good player and having visited Scotland and played in The Amateur gave P.B. many visual ideas. Shot values are crucial to him and my second-born is a hands-on designer whose favourite pastime is sitting square on a bulldozer and moving earth.
P.B. has done fine work on his own since he formed his own company P.B. Dye Inc. in the mid-1980s. His designs at Loblolly Pines, Palm Beach Polo Club, Harbour Ridge and the exquisite nine holes on Fisher’s Island where they played the Merrill Lynch Senior Shoot-Out in 1993, are very innovative Florida courses.
Debordieu, Prestwick and The Legends are as good as anything that can be found in South Carolina, and P.B.s’ series of Gauntlet public courses along the Eastern Seaboard are first rate. In 1993, P.B. added nine holes to my dad’s initial nine at the Urbana Country Club (and will) blend in perfectly with my father’s work.
We never dreamed our sons would become golf course architects, even though they had been exposed to construction from their youth. When both showed interest, we divided the country: P.B. could design courses east of the Mississippi and Perry took the western half.”
