Golf Course Information

Description

PETE DYE SPENT part of his youth at Pinehurst where he became a lifelong admirer of Donald Ross, and Pinehurst was clearly on his mind when he set out to design this golf course. "We aimed at making a different kind of golf course down here," he said. What he built was in effect a non-Floridian golf course in Florida, a task inspired and helped by the quality of the soil, the grasses and the trees.

"I tried to give the course a clean, well-defined look using the natural features and materials," the designer explained. "South Florida is dead flat so the golfer needs some help to see the shape of every hole from the tee. The rough is St. Augustine grass, which Donald Ross used on the old Gulfstream course in 1923, and gives the fairways great definition and a kind of Northern feel. The fairways themselves are Bermuda, and the greens Tifeagle. The tees are paspalum, which is a salt-water resistant grass. The bunkers have grass faces that help define them, and there is mulch under the trees that gives color and makes it easier to find your ball. You've got to work on it to lose your ball out here."

Pete Dye's reputation for building punishing golf courses still occasionally haunts him like the albatross in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

But he may have laid it to rest at the Dye. If there is one word to describe Pete Dye's creation, it is "playable." There is plenty of room to drive the ball, there are no forced carries, the green speed is consistent and the course is always in perfect condition.

It is a golf course that requires strategy: It doesn't wear the golfer out, yet it doesn't yield par easily. There is room for error. Poor-as opposed to bad-shots are not savagely penalized, while good shots are rewarded. The golf course is both competitive and fun to play. In the opinion of many golfers, it has a definite "Pinehurst" quality.

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