Bury Me In A Pot Bunker – Pete Dye with Mark Shaw, 1995 [Revised 1999] ★★

Golf's Bogeyman Looks Back

Resentment is the price many incur for being forward-thinking. This is true as well when designing golf courses.

When Pete Dye oversaw the opening of his Harbour Town Golf Links in South Carolina in time to host a 1969 PGA Tour event, tournament participants were apoplectic. Greens were much too small. Bunkers were much too large. Trees were everywhere.

In time, golfers got used to Harbour Town. They took to its quirky character until it became a favorite Tour stop. For Dye, the Harbour Town experience defined both his career and his approach:

My overall philosophy is to make the hole appear more difficult than it really is, and great care is used in selecting the type of bunkers. Variety is the key, since I want to inspire golfers to surpass their own talent. Often a good recovery shot will lift the competitors’ spirits and help them play better.

Getting the balance right between aesthetics and challenge is a test for any artist; golf-course designers maybe more so. While not the only designer who thinks of himself as an artist, Dye has done more to raise the profile of his profession in the last 50 years than anyone else. How did he do it? This memoir-cum-career overview offers some insight.

A picturesque lighthouse dominates the finishing holes at Harbour Town, but don't be distracted. According to Dye, "Harbour Town’s bunkers may be its best asset. There are fewer than sixty on the course, but...their strategic placement is the key." Image from https://www.hiltonheadisland.org/golf/golf-courses/sea-pines-resort/harbour-town-golf-links.

Initially published in 1995, Bury Me In A Pot Bunker is limited to Dye designs up the that time. [It has been revised twice; this review is of the 1999 paperback edition.] The book is organized into 18 chapters, each taking on the story behind a specific course or two, and Dye’s philosophy to course design is introduced more as asides than in detail.

Not all the courses are Dye creations. Early attention is given to a pair of famous ones from which Dye took inspiration, the St. Andrews Old Course in Scotland and Pinehurst #2 in North Carolina. One chapter recalls grass and bunker improvements Dye attempted early in his career at an Indianapolis club, whose members “remember me as the man who single-handedly annihilated their golf course.”

That is an outlier in what amounts to a memoir of unparalleled success. Dye and co-author Mark Shaw focus much of the book on Dye’s many important personal relationships with course owners and underlings, until the text often reads like an overlong Oscar speech.

Bury Me In A Pot Bunker will appeal to golf lovers, especially those fascinated by the traditions and structural underpinnings of the game. But while written in a breezy, accessible manner, it won’t be so engaging to those who pick it up for the funny title. Dye’s considerable ego gets in the way, as does a chronic need to mention his wife and sons.

Dye recalls being at first unimpressed by the St. Andrews Old Course, but after four rounds of hitting out of pot bunkers and tricky lies he was in love. He says that this 17th, known as the Road Hole, "may very well be the best par-four in the world." Image from https://thefriedegg.com/road-template-hole/.

Cutting through the chaff, one gets a peppery self-portrait of someone who relentlessly followed his own muse, never mind anyone else.

When one owner stalled on Dye’s demand to be allowed to take down some beloved cottonwoods blocking a prime tee location, Dye burned the trees down and left the owner to cool off before explaining himself.

When executives at another club asked him to rebuild their signature course, originally designed by classic architect Seth Raynor, Dye told them where to go: “I bluntly told them that as far as I could tell, the only thing wrong with Camargo was its membership, and they would be wise to leave Mr. Raynor’s course alone.”

Crooked Stick in Carmel, Indiana was one of the first championship Dye designs, built in 1964. Optical illusion abounds. "Most of the greens are really at ground level, but with so much earth removed in front, they appear elevated in the mind's eye," he notes. Image from http://www.golftripper.com/crooked-stick-golf-club/.

Dye’s friction with tour pros becomes a running sidebar:

While PGA touring professionals have been brought up on manicured courses since junior golf, the foreign contingent have been raised on bad lies and rough weather requiring mental toughness…That’s why the cream rises to the top in major championships played on great golf courses that are not reduced in difficulty. Unfortunately, misplaced loyalty by stubborn governing bodies for the “feelings” of the touring professionals many times prevents a great course from being played at full strength.

Harbour Town was not the last time that attitude earned Dye some flak. When his TPC at Sawgrass course opened in 1982, Dye drew comparisons to Darth Vader for such wayward features as a green that sat in the middle of a pond, daring golfers not to splash their approach. Now Sawgrass hosts what some golf enthusiasts consider the Tour’s “fifth major”; its “island hole” one of the most thrilling venues in sports.

The wettest fairway in golf is the 17th at Sawgrass, which requires golfers to hit this small green, or try again. "If I’m known for one thing when I leave this earth, I hope people will say that Pete Dye knew how to build a set of first-class greens," he writes. Image from https://www.golfchannelacademy.com/griffin-use-yardage-to-play-island-green-17th/. 

Not all his courses have been total successes. His PGA West course in California was a Tour venue until players urged it be dropped. [In 2016 the course was returned to the Tour rota.] Dye gives rare expression to hurt feelings about that decision: “Criticism from the touring professionals is something I’ve learned to live with over the years, but their bombastic comments really hurt this time.”

The one-course-a-chapter format means the book never stays on anything long. Mostly the bosses were all good guys as Dye and Shaw explain it. Stories of one such top-of-the-line rich fellow after another enabling the creation of another showcase track get rote after a while.

Dye course designs have revolutionized the game, introducing greater levels of difficulty but also playability and visual aesthetics. Golf fans will appreciate the tidbits they get about his design philosophy.

He likens greens to faces on a painter’s canvas and notes the importance of choosing the right grasses and taking into account prevailing winds. Natural splendor should be emphasized whenever possible.

While Pete Dye's golf courses have been almost exclusively built in the United States, one notable exception is Teeth Of The Dog, a course in Casa de Campo in the Dominican Republic. Scenic awe and penal play are emphasized. "Pebble Beach may have several holes along the sea, but only Teeth of the Dog has seven holes in the sea," Dye notes. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/462111611745242579/?lp=true.

While Dye clearly relishes the idea of being seen as the bogeyman by golfers of all levels, he insists on a fair design approach:

If I’ve challenged the players with two rugged par-fours and a long and difficult par-three, I’ll spot a short, straightforward par-five next as a bit of a breather. If the golfers played the previous three tough holes well, then the par-five is a chance for them to go under par. Players who are still reeling from a string of bogeys get a chance to recover a shot and gather their wits for the upcoming holes.

Occasionally Dye will light into a subject of larger interest. Environmentalism was then and is more now a controversial subject in the business of golf courses. They are dubbed “green deserts” and blamed for poisoning groundwater and soil alike with excess fertilizer.

Dye doesn’t face up to this unpleasant truth so much as change the subject. Building the island hole at Sawgrass and the finishing holes at Harbour Town required the upheaval of much coastline, but he’s more interested in the aesthetics and the playability.

In 1986 he began the designing and building of Old Marsh, a course in Florida. Wetland concerns there held him up for years. “No one seems to have the big picture in mind,” he says of regulators, meaning of course Dye’s big picture.

The Old Marsh Golf Club course. Image from facebook.com.

But when the course was finally built, Dye notes it was a success not only for golfers but nature as well. The wetlands that were lost were replaced, and in many cases improved:

The main objective should be to improve the aesthetics of the course by establishing vibrant, attractive marshes that enhance the beauty of the land. With a little care, the architect can not only produce clean, clear marshes, but actually attract new species of wildlife that never existed in the area before. At Old Marsh, the wildlife actually preferred the new marshes to the old ones.

Dye also notes a focus on preserving or incorporating historical elements at other courses. The Brickyard at Indianapolis, a course that lies partially within the Indianapolis 500 racing oval, uses stones from an old racetrack crash wall as water bulkheads. The Pete Dye Club in Clarksburg, West Virginia incorporates underground shafts and even a coal tipple from the mining operation that existed there before.

Pete Dye on the left and co-author Mark Shaw on the right bookend Pete's wife Alice, a successful golfer in her own right whom Pete credits for much of his design success. Alice passed away in February 2019. Image from http://www.floridagolfmagazine.com/FGMfall2013/burymeinapotbunker-afterword.html.

My 1999 paperback edition comes with a handful of black-and-white photographs but no other illustrations. Diagrams of the courses would have been useful as complement to the prose, which is drab and utilitarian in the main. As much as I wanted to be, I couldn’t ever quite get excited about playing any of these courses, even on a computer.

Of course, many of these courses are unplayable to peons like me. There is an elitist air about golf, something which Dye pushes back against at times but seems to accept overall. It seems to require of its players a higher level of both income and skill than any other sport. Dye seems quite fine here being on the cutting edge in both departments.