Separate Genius: Why It Makes No Sense for Alice Dye to Exist in Her Husband’s Shadow
Alice Dye straight up moving earth
Alice Dye is kind of like the Easter Bunny. Her name gets dropped once every spring, then collects dust in people’s heads for the following ∼360 days. It happens during The Players. Commentators and fans love to mention—with a strong undertone of “See, I care about women’s golf!”—the fact that it was her idea to make the iconic 17th hole a par-3 with an island green, then proceed to call all courses designed by the couple “Pete Dye courses.” Why is this indicative of a need for a paradigm shift? Let us begin.
Between Alice and Pete, Alice was the better golfer. Born in Indianapolis in 1927, she took up the sport at age 11 after receiving a set of hickories from her mother. A passionate gardener and fly fisherperson, Alice’s mother likely instilled in her daughter a love and respect for both nature and sport, despite the fact that she allowed notions of what was “ladylike” to dictate her life. According to Alice’s 2004 memoir, her mother considered golf “a game for men,” and spent most of her time horseback riding (..?). This sentiment was reinforced by the culture at her school—there was no girl’s golf team and many young women opted out of gym class*. In spite of all this, and in an effort to escape the loneliness of rural living, Alice spent most of her childhood practicing golf at Woodstock Country Club. And it paid off: she ended up winning around fifty amateur events throughout the Midwest in the following decades.
Once Alice and Pete had met while attending Rollins College in Florida, married, sold insurance for several years, and quit to pursue golf course design, it was Alice who proved to be more skilled when it came to communicating with club owners and satisfying regulatory committees, while the more timid Pete cooped himself up in his office. Her years as a pre-med student, her degree in zoology, and her time playing both college golf and basketball undoubtedly contributed to her well-roundedness in the office and on course sites.
Alice also recognized her background in science and nature as a source of inspiration for her designs. She dotted courses with her signature amoeba-shaped greens, and she felt so strongly about players being able to not only hear the ocean but also see it on a round at Kiawah that she had its beachside fairways elevated six feet.
In addition to becoming a businesswoman and an architect, Alice served as a teacher, instructing Pete in reading contour maps and editing his work. She adjusted his plans to be more practical, reining him in when he got so creative that he was bound to piss off whatever club owner and membership they were working for. She made sure that every Dye course remained manageable enough for the average person yet challenging enough for a professional.
But designing courses solely in accordance with men’s play wasn’t about to be Alice’s legacy. She came up with the idea that there should be at least two sets of forward tees—one for longer hitters and one for shorter hitters—earning her the nickname “Patron Saint of Forward Tees” (which is a lot better than her more common and eye roll-inducing nickname: “First Lady of Golf Architecture”). To Alice, expecting all forward tee users to play a single set of forward tees is akin to assuming that they “all wear the same dress size.” Ironically, many women, particularly those who hit longer and enjoyed winning every ladies’ club championship at their home courses, resisted the idea, and many courses still haven’t adopted them.
Luckily, Alice Dye’s accomplishments in golf course architecture were acknowledged by the golf world while she was still alive, unlike her predecessors Ida Dixon, Marion Hollins, Molly Gourlay, and May Dunn. In 1983, Alice was accepted as the first female member of the American Society of Golf Course Architects, contrary to the wishes of longtime members of the misogynist persuasion. She was elected the first female president of the organization in 1997 (only after Pete had occupied the position, of course).
Upon accepting the presidency, course architect and Golf Digest writer Ron Whitten remembers Alice Dye leaving the crowd with this story, although the exact intention behind it remains murky: “Imagine the best day of travel you’ve ever experienced. You get to the airport in plenty of time, find a parking place right up front, a skycap takes your bags without asking, your plane is leaving from the closest gate and the flight is on time. You get to your seat and find no one seated next to you. The flight attendant offers you a free drink and plenty of magazines. The weather is clear. The plane taxis out to the runway, the captain’s voice comes on the intercom … and it’s a woman.” Hopefully the laughs she received were produced out of mock fear, but let’s be real, it was the golf world in the 90’s. She would later call the process of being accepted as president “a struggle.”
In 1999, Alice Dye was named the first woman member of the PGA of America Board of Directors, citing CEO Jim Awtrey’s acknowledgement of women’s golf and its growth as what made her feel comfortable enough to accept.
It’s a little frustrating for advocates of women’s golf (and… women…) that Pete Dye was aware of the fact that Alice did not receive a fitting amount of attention for her accomplishments, yet did nothing to really change that. Alice was known for her humility, but, if you ask me, partners have a duty to hype each other, regardless of whether or not the other asks for the hyping. In his 1995 memoir, he writes: “She may have taken a back seat to whatever publicity I’ve had over the last thirty years, but everyone in the golf industry knows how important her contributions have been, since she has such an intuition for what makes a golf course challenging but playable.” Well Pete, they don’t, and you should have told them more often and more loudly.
Whitten, a personal family friend of the Dyes, has noted that Alice Dye was “always in charge, from the day she told Pete it was time to get married to the many times she walked a construction site with Pete and told him he was doing it all wrong. Alice was in charge of their family, of their business, of their image, their reputation and massive influence on the game of golf,” and that “if one considers Pete Dye a genius, then Alice Dye was the genius behind the genius.”
Considering Pete and Alice are two separate people and Alice contributed an equal amount of skill to the partnership and accomplished equally amazing feats both on and off the golf course, let’s go ahead recognize her as a separate genius entirely.
*One of my favorite bits from Alice’s 2004 memoir is this: “I often see women today trying to play golf who were ‘gym passers.’ They have a difficult time because they chose not to play sports in school. Every girl should have the opportunity and be encouraged to play some kind of team or individual sport.”
Photo used with permission from Florida State Golf Association