Pete Dye was born on this day in 1925. Dye is a world-renowned golf course designer and a member of a famous family of course designers. He is married to fellow designer and former amateur champion Alice Dye.
A few years before Pete’s birth, his father, “Pink” Dye, got hooked on golf and built a nine-hole course on family land in Champaign County. Pete worked and played that course while growing up.
His first well-known course was Crooked Stick Golf Club in Carmel, Indiana, begun in 1964. It later hosted the 1991 PGA Championship, won by John Daly.
In 1967, he designed The Golf Club near Columbus, Ohio, where he solicited input from a young Jack Nicklaus, a Columbus resident. The two would work together to design the acclaimed Harbour Town Golf Links, opened in 1969, the site of an annual PGA Tour event ever since. Nicklaus credits Dye with significant influence on his own approach to golf course design.