Island Packet Verizon Heritage 2008 Coverage | Harbour Town, Sea Pines Resort, Hilton Head Island, SC

David Lauderdale
dlauderdale@islandpacket.com
843-706-8115

Nobody ever accused Robert Frost of being a golf writer.

But he certainly addressed the unusual way golf changed the course of our local economy, lifestyle and history. The most famous lines in his poem “The Road Not Taken” tell exactly what happened when a swampy Hilton Head Island forest was carved into the Harbour Town Golf Links.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

In our case, the person who took the road less traveled was a former life-insurance peddler named Pete Dye. He was aided by Jack Nicklaus, a young touring pro with minimal design experience. And he was turned loose by Charles Fraser, the dreaming Sea Pines developer who knew so little about golf that Dye said Fraser was out pulling up red hazard stakes on the brand new course because he thought they were ugly.

Few had heard of Dye when he built the Harbour Town course in 1969. His microscopic greens, bone-thin fairways and long waste bunkers broke sharply against the grain. Dye deliberately chose not to lay up in the safety of the norms of the day — long tees, sprawling fairways, sugar-bowl sand traps and greens that could hold a three-bedroom brick ranch house.

Real golf writers noticed immediately, and it wasn’t all poetic. Furman Bisher of The Atlanta Journal called it “purgatory with 18 holes.” He wrote: “When Dye says rough, he means rough. When you are in trouble here, you may be in need of last rites.”

Dan Jenkins wrote in Sports Illustrated: “What Dye and Nicklaus have rendered at Hilton Head is a sort of Pine Valley in a swamp, a St. Andrews with Spanish moss, a Pebble Beach with chitlins.”

As the $5.5 million Verizon Heritage brings the PGA Tour to Harbour Town for the 40th time this week, we can look back and see how taking the road less traveled made all the difference — not just to the tournament, but to the island upon which it is played.

Since Harbour Town’s opening, which coincided with the first Heritage, the Lowcountry has prospered, with the course that dared to be different and its nationally-televised tournament always cited among the first reasons. Harbour Town remains a favorite of the world’s best golfers, and hordes of sun-burned chili-dippers from every state in the union. The Heritage Classic Foundation, which sponsors the tournament, has given almost $17 million to charity since 1987, and the tournament pumps millions into the local economy each spring. Along the way, the community gained a reputation as a mecca for quality golf, pulling in retirees and second-home buyers who plunk down big bucks for lots along the 30-some courses in southern Beaufort County.

Dye’s name is linked to six of them.

At 82, the soft-spoken Midwesterner is still at it, and still taking the road less traveled. But he’s not nearly as lonely. He’s a household name in a golf world that now promotes course designers like they were rock stars. Dye is considered one of the best of the last half century. He says eight majors have been played over the 80 courses he and his wife, Alice O’Neal Dye, have built virtually by hand since 1959.

Arnold Palmer won the first Heritage after a no-name competitor’s ball lost a battle with the wind and plugged in the left bunker on No. 17 — and the story of both Dye and Hilton Head sailed in a new direction.
“It made us both,” Dye said.

‘I sort of fibbed’

You’d think it was all part of a carefully laid plan.

Not exactly.

Dye says the signature hole, the windy sweep down the shores of Calibogue Sound to the 18th hole, happened by accident. He says he got a letter from the governor giving him permission to use the dirt being dug nearby to create the Harbour Town Yacht Basin. It ended up forming the 17th green and 18th fairway.

“I asked him if I could build a par-3 out there,” Dye recalls. The original course sketch by George Cobb had the 18th running along the 10th fairway to the clubhouse. The par-3 idea died as more and more dirt kept coming out of the marina, spilling into the marsh and forming the odd-shaped fairway — the widest on the PGA Tour — that has framed a billion photographs of the Harbour Town Lighthouse.

The 13th hole — the one with the heart-shaped green on top of cypress boards in a sea of sand — was built by Alice while Dye was fussing around with his ornery pot bunker on No. 14.

And when the first group came through for the first Heritage round on Nov. 27, 1969 — the first tour event on a Dye course — the great designer was still stamping down the sand on “Alice’s hole.”

He remembers the head of the PGA Tour telling him, “Be sure the sand is in the bunkers two months before the tournament. That was in February. We didn’t even have grass yet. I sort of fibbed.”

Alice — who like her husband is an accomplished amateur golfer — ordered the cypress boards for No. 13, not the railroad ties used everywhere else.

“I thought it was a mistake,” Dye said. “But you know all those railroad ties rotted but the cypress planks are still there.”

Just ask a few of the golfers who’ve banged off them enough times to ruin a round ... or lose a tournament.

Dye says today that he was so displeased that no golfers hit into his famous waste bunker on No. 16 on the first round of the Heritage that he broke all rules. He says he went out that evening and cut down a yellow pine so the pros were more tempted to hit through and land in his trap.
Dye says he added an old boat in the marsh along the 18th fairway because Charles Price, one of the writers who helped put the course on the map, kept asking for it.

“I did it to shut him up,” Dye said. The boat melted away years ago, and a replacement is hidden by the marsh grass.

‘A little idea’

One thing that was clearly no accident was Dye’s drive to be different. He says he meant no disrespect to other designers, but he knew this was the way to establish his own identity.

He’d been around golf all his life. His father sculpted a course in his spare time in their hometown of Urbana, Ohio. He was influenced by what he saw in Scotland. And by the time he turned his hobby of course design into a career and built the Golf Club in New Albany, Ohio, he impressed young Nicklaus enough for him to tell Fraser to call Dye.

It’s typical that Dye spreads the credit for Harbour Town, which he says is a success because “it created its own identity and has kept it. It’s kept its identity over the years.”

Between Pete and Alice Dye, Nicklaus, Cobb and Price came a short, shot-maker’s course that rewards good shots, penalizes bad ones, makes you work around the greens and demands accuracy.

When the first pros to play it came off grumbling that it was unfair, Dye was quoted by Ron Coffman in Golf World magazine saying, “The problem is that you have to think on this course, and some of these guys haven’t had to think all year.”

But what was Fraser thinking by betting the farm on a course Dye called “radical?”

“He didn’t know,” Dye says today. “He had no idea what was going on.”
Cary Corbitt, the Sea Pines director of sports and golf operations who’s been there since 1977, says Fraser trusted Nicklaus and Nicklaus trusted Dye.

Did Dye know what he was doing?

“I had a little idea,” he said.

Actually, he had the full history of golf in his mind. He knew he was veering from current trend, but sticking to the ancient game he knows inside and out. He knew that the grand old courses in America — like Oakmont and Oakland Hills — were on the best land (“the ground was a golf course before they started”) and that after World War II, the land for golf courses tended toward the swamps and the dumps.

Dye’s minimalist, less intrusive assault on the grounds of Sea Pines, where he says the elevation doesn’t change two feet from one end of the property to the other, fit right in with Fraser’s approach to development. They tried as much as possible to leave things alone.

When asked what makes the course work, Dye immediately cites the prize of the Lowcountry.

“The live oak trees,” he says. “And you get the image of the golf professional there. Some say it’s their favorite course because it still is different.”

Dye’s influence on the Lowcountry didn’t end with Harbour Town.
He build the private Long Cove Club course on Hilton Head in 1981.

Bob Patton, head golf professional, says that just as Harbour Town helped establish Sea Pines nationally, Long Cove helped set the bar for the private golf communities that define the community.

“In that respect, Pete’s genius impacted Hilton Head,” Patton said. “A large part of the success of Long Cove is the quality of the golf course.”

Dye went on to build a course in Colleton River Plantation on the mainland and at Hampton Hall in Bluffton’s burgeoning Buckwalter tract. He also redesigned Port Royal’s Robbers Row and so thoroughly overhauled Sea Pines’ Sea Marsh Course that they went and renamed it “Heron Point by Pete Dye.”

He and Alice typically move in during construction. One of their dogs, Sunday, is buried by the maintenance shed at Long Cove Club.

Dye gives Alice equal credit for the acclaim he now enjoys.

“She’s the one I listen to,” he says of the woman he married in a snowstorm on Groundhog Day in 1950. “She’s the one who gives me hell.”
They don’t design courses the way most people do.

“I built Harbour Town,” he says. “There wasn’t a contractor. I was there every day, working with Donald O’Quinn. You have to be there to build it. You have to be there to see that everybody comes to work and everything gets ordered and everything gets done.”

He’s known as a tireless worker, maybe a bit crotchety sometimes. He doesn’t use many drawings, and here’s what he says about a computer: “I don’t even know what that is.” He sculpts and re-sculpts on the ground, as he goes.

Dye views business meetings like a three-putt. If he comes, he’s always got Sixty with him. That’s his German shepherd.

“Actually, it’s Sixty-three,” he says. He’s on his fourth shepherd. The first one was named Sixty because Dye paid a lady $20 for it, then $20 more for a collar and $20 more a leash. He names them all Sixty.

Dye says in his book, “Bury Me In A Pot Bunker”: “Donald Ross once wrote, ‘My work will tell my story,’ and that is how I hope to be remembered. My designs reflect a traditionalist philosophy about the game, and we must never forget that golf is played best when done so in the purest form.”
Fraser, who died five years ago and is buried beneath the Liberty Oak at Harbour Town, spent more time worrying about the history of golf than the fade shot it would take to get around an overhanging limb. Like Dye, he took the road less traveled.

“I run further behind than anyone on earth,” Dye said last week when he remembered he was supposed to write something for Fraser’s induction next month into the S.C. Business Hall of Fame.