Paul Dye, Jr.

Born in Urbana, Ohio, Dye was taught golf at an early age from his father, Paul Dye, Sr., an amateur golf course designer. The younger Dye enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II and trained as a paratrooper. But having joined shortly before the end of the war, Dye spent much of his time serving as the greenskeeper for the Fort Bragg golf course in North Carolina. After being discharged, he attended Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, where he met his future wife and business partner, Alice O’Neal. The couple married in 1950, following Alice’s graduation, and settled in Indianapolis, where they both worked as insurance salesmen for Connecticut Mutual Life. In the late 1950s Dye left this position to open Dye Designs, a golf course architecture firm. His first commission was the nine-hole El Dorado golf course (now Dye’s Walk Country Club), south of Indianapolis, which he designed with Alice, with the counsel of golf course architect Bill Diddel. In 1963 both Paul and Alice traveled to Scotland to study classic golf course designs, visiting such famous courses as St. Andrew, Muirfield, and Prestwick. These courses’ heavy use of pot bunkers, wooden bulkheads, and small greens were the inspiration for much of Paul Dye’s subsequent design work. Upon returning to the United States, the Dyes created one of their most famous courses, the Crooked Stick golf course in Carmel, Indiana. Developed between 1965 and 1967, the eighteen-hole course incorporated Scottish design elements that were as yet unfamiliar to most American players. The Dyes went on to design more than 100 golf courses worldwide, including the Tournament Players Club (TPC) Sawgrass in Ponte Verde Beach, Florida, and PGA West in La Quinta, California. Dye was a recipient of the PGA Tour Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005 and was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2008. He died in the Dominican Republic at the age of 94.