In this exclusive interview, Perry talks about his life and career, design dilemmas and successes, and how it feels to play alongside Freddie Couples...

Perry Dye is the elder son in a family whose contributions have become an integral part of the history and tradition of golf course design and construction. In 1922, Perry’s grandfather designed and constructed a nine hole golf course in Urbana, Ohio. This is where Perry’s father, Pete Dye, grew up and received his early training. This heritage, which began in the Midwestern United States, has been carried from generation to generation and has provided the foundation for the creation of some of the world's finest golf courses.

Interview

Can you tell us a bit of background about yourself and how you ended up designing golf courses?

My father took some time off from working as a very successful insurance salesman to repair a couple of holes his local country club lost in a storm. When he was doing that work somebody came up to him and said they wanted him to design 9 holes in the South part of Indianapolis, Indiana. That was 1959 and I was about 8 or 9 years old, and like any child, you’d be fascinated with tractors and bulldozers. So I learnt how to operate all the equipment at a very young age. By 1962, at 12 or 13 years old, I was doing green shaping and that sort of thing on a golf course called ‘Crookey Stick’ and that’s where John Daly won the PGA. 30 years on and we’ve built 300 golf courses all over the world… the sun never sets on a Dye course.

Now my father is virtually 80 years old. He is still active and plays a lot of golf and still does some design work. My brothers are getting into the business. So when I am asked how I got into the golf course architecture business – I grew up in it. It is a family trade. We weren’t tour players or anything like that, we just grew up building golf courses. The golf course industry has had such a hugely successful growth in the last 10 years that my schedule is very busy, and I have opportunities to work all around the world. We have merging companies in places like Hungary and Vietnam, and they all want to have a Dye course, a Nicklaus course, and so on. So I’m fortunate to have a name that has worldwide attention, and be popular and be healthy enough to do the work. It’s hard to say how lucky I am, but my whole life has been very fortunate to have revolved around golf.


Every once in a while I’ll catch a fish or maybe go skiing, but typically my life’s revolved around golf and trying to make golf resorts. One of the great things about golf courses is we don’t build them in bad places. So I have got to know people around the world and they are all nice people that are involved in golf courses. That’s kind of my life. I’ve got two very successful children now – who are 23 and 26 – and both graduated from college, I’ve been married for 30 years, I’ve survived international travel, and that’s not always easy to do. Right now at age 52 I wouldn’t say I’m more popular, but I’m more in demand than I can remember. One of the great things you get to do is you get to build and design golf courses that are like pieces of art, and people want to pay a premium for them. Of course there’s always your critics and everybody’s got an opinion about you and every golf hole you ever built. Just like anything, if you really ask the people that really enjoy the game, once you’ve played a golf course a couple of times, or won a tournament on it, it becomes their favourite piece of art, and I like to listen to those people a lot more than I do my critics. But I do like critics!