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If you hear about a golf course being restored, certain assumptions come along. Old, sometimes decrepit things get restored. Centuries-old furniture. Paintings forgotten in warehouses for decades. Grand, decaying estates.
Overwhelmingly, golf courses considered candidates for restoration come from the black-and-white, pre-golf-cart era. Ever since pre-World War II golf design came back into prominence, virtually the entire golf course restoration movement has focused on layouts from the 1940s and before. Everything postwar is "modern," and therefore seen as still serviceable, safe for now from the ravages of time that cause older things to slide into antiquehood.
But what was once modern is now turning classic, including the work of the most influential postwar golf course architect, Pete Dye. Dye's groundbreaking style, backed by a deep understanding of the game's origins in Scotland and an adventurous take on the ways holes could be adapted into both the American landscape and tantalizing international locales, made him one of his era's most recognizable names. He introduced the concept of stadium golf courses, exciting playing fields for the world's best where spectators were prioritized as much as players. He also imported new textures to American golf in the form of wooden railroad ties and tiny pot bunkers juxtaposed with huge sandy expanses.
But Dye also revived the old days in important ways. He leaned on design-build methods familiar to his forebears, making most design decisions in the field, rather than on a drafting table. And he cultivated a vast network of associates, shapers, advisers and acolytes, growing a tree of influence unmatched in modern golf course architecture. He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2008.
Such is the golf world's reverence for Pete Dye that he has become the first major modern golf course architect whose courses have come to be seen as treasured time capsules. Many of Dye's contemporaries' courses have been targeted for transformative renovations by latter-day architects who have left their own marks on them.
Dye, who passed away in January of 2020, would have turned 100 last December 29. "None of us will be around in a hundred years," writes Golf Digest's Ron Whitten in his essential 2018 article 'Pete Dye's Final Chapter,' "but I'm certain that Pete Dye's architecture will still be here, studied by students of the game, cherished by historians and preserved by proud club members as classic golf courses."
Whitten was entirely correct. Pete Dye's golf courses now qualify as classics, with more than enough history to earn them the right to be restored, not redesigned. And the group of architects charged with safeguarding those courses is hard at work.
Restoring Pete Dye great championship golf courses
One third of Davis Love III's 21 career PGA Tour wins - five at Harbour Town Golf Links in Hilton Head, S.C.; two at TPC Sawgrass - came at Pete Dye-designed courses in whose futures he and his Love Golf Design firm are now directly involved. Love could not have conquered those courses without a deep understanding of how Dye's designs work.
Love was one of the longest hitters of his generation, but in the pre-bomb-and-gouge era, he deployed his power sparingly and sensibly, thanks in part to the wisdom of caddie Herman Mitchell, Lee Trevino's former bagman, who looped Love to his first Harbour Town victory by occasionally flat-out forbidding him to hit driver on certain holes.
Mitchell's guidance helped Love unlock the right way to approach Harbour Town. “The more you play Pete's courses, the more you [realize] ‘Okay, if I hit it close to the water or close to the bunker at the right distance, then the green will open up for me,’" Love said. "So you learn those little tricks.”
Love speaks with admiration about the variety of challenges Harbour Town and other Dye courses present. “He wanted you to curve it off the tee, he wanted you to bank it into hills on the green, cut it into this green and draw it into that green," he said.
Love Golf Design presided over a six-month restoration project at Harbour Town in 2025. The course's near-universal popularity among PGA Tour pros might have put intense pressure on Love, brother Mark and longtime associate Scot Sherman, who cut his teeth working for Pete and Alice Dye. But the strength of the foundation made the process smooth. "For me it’s easy, especially at Harbour Town," Love said, "because they’ve done a really good job of keeping it pure.”
As with any good golf course restoration, the vast majority of the work performed lies beneath the surface. Infrastructure changes like the rerouting of cart paths, replacement of bulkheads and optimization of irrigation and drainage have made as big a difference as anything.
Perhaps the most visible evidence of Love's work at Harbour Town is in the form of 11 bunkers with stacked synthetic sod faces, seen on property for the first time in decades. Pete Dye originally had several sod-walled bunkers - a nod to links golf overseas - but they were eventually abandoned because Southern soil, weather and growing conditions caused them to deteriorate. But now, the synthetic construction of these bunkers revives Dye's original ambition in a sustainable way. The two pots beside the green of the par-3 14th are particularly nasty.
Harbour Town reopened in November 2025, giving it more than five months to begin maturing ahead of its debut to the PGA Tour's best at the 2026 RBC Heritage.
With Harbour Town squared away, Love and his team are able to focus on planning and executing some changes at another Pete Dye masterpiece and the PGA Tour's flagship property, TPC Sawgrass' Players Stadium course.
Love has a clear vision for what needs to change in order to recapture some of the teeth that the course bared from 1982, when it first hosted the Players Championship. “I think the greens have gotten too flat at TPC Sawgrass," Love said. "They’ve taken some of Pete’s quirkiness out of them because of green speeds. He even said one time, ‘I should’ve made them steeper, rather than flatter, because then [the Tour] just wouldn’t have been able to mow them.’”
The convexity of the Stadium's original greens is something Love is eager to restore, though he acknowledges it will be important to temper them slightly to fit contemporary conditioning. But he is adamant about the need to restore sterner shot values in keeping with Dye's original vision. "They've gotten softer," Love said, "and they've gotten a little bowled on the corners. It's just too wet and [the pros] can shoot right at it."
With the PGA Tour eager for fans and players to regard the Players as equivalent to golf's four major championships, refining TPC Sawgrass' Players' Stadium course, perhaps third behind only Augusta National and Pebble Beach in hole-to-hole familiarity among American courses, is worth getting right.
Meanwhile, the man who won that first Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass, tossing Pete Dye and Deane Beman into the pond in the process, is in charge of stewarding one of Dye's greatest golf courses outside of the United States.
Jerry Pate, winner of the 1976 U.S. Open and 1982 Players, recently unveiled his and design partner Steve Dana's restoration of the Teeth of the Dog at Casa De Campo in the Dominican Republic. Closed for nearly all of 2025, the course received a similar-scale restoration to Harbour Town's, if not even more comprehensive. Pate led Team USA to victory in the 1974 World Amateur Team Championship, first encountering Pete Dye that week and remaining friends with him until Dye's passing in 2020.
Clinging to the Caribbean Sea coast on the southern edge of the island, Teeth of the Dog has as memorable a run of sea-sprayed golf as anywhere in the world. Pate and Dana's task included not just restoring the design features decades of waves had eroded away, but finding ways to safeguard the course's seven coastal holes for the coming years. They arranged wave-breaks beside several greens and tees: arrays of coral rocks spread out from the shore that would mitigate the biggest breakers. They also established saltwater-tolerant Paspalum turf across the whole course, turning it over to head agronomist Damon Di Giorgio and staff to keep firm and fast, as Dye intended.
The bunkers at Teeth of the Dog received special attention, too. Especially early in his career, Dye was heavily influenced both by the links courses of Scotland and the stateside work of C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor. Early Dye bunkers are supposed to have flat bottoms and sharp lips, and years of natural evolution had caused Teeth of the Dog's sandy areas to soften and bowl. By restoring them, Pate and Dana reinvigorated several holes immediately. Now, the jaggedness of the coral coast creates an appealing contrast with the round shapes and clean edges of the bunkers. The work is worthy of the Caribbean's greatest championship course, which is set to host the Latin America Amateur Championship for a record fourth time in 2028.
"Preserving the essence of Pete Dye guided us every step of the way," Pate said.
Pete Dye restoration movement goes beyond championship tests
Although Pete Dye is closely associated with competitive golf at the highest levels, only a fraction of his courses will ever host elite championships. The Harbor course at Grand Harbor Golf & Beach Club in Vero Beach, Fla. is far from a household name among Pete Dye golf courses, measuring barely 6,400 yards, par 70, from the back tees. Even though it will never be world-famous, it is a wonderful members' golf course, with stirring variety and a pair of dynamite back-to-back short par 4s that kick off the back nine. There is only one forced-carry approach over water on the entire golf course, an example of restraint that is sorely lacking in modern Florida golf course design.
Grand Harbor is endlessly replayable and enjoyable across generations thanks in part to a 2021 restoration effort by Chris Lutzke, who worked alongside Dye for more than 30 years and had a front-row seat to the experience of building Blackwolf Run, The Ocean Course at Kiawah Island and several other Dye courses.
The high-quality of even the lesser-known courses of Dye's peak years speaks to his combination of singular vision and a talent for wringing the most out of the people around him. He gave associates like Lutzke freedom to create starting points for the shaping and features of holes before embellishing and editing them so that the whole entity would work.
“He wasn’t normal by any stretch of the imagination,” Lutzke said. “The time he spent on a construction site was phenomenal. All his guys, who stayed with him all those years, couldn’t wait to get to work and didn’t ever want to go home.”
Dye was a master editor of those associates' ideas, Lutzke said. "It was our job to give him something to look at and get on first base. Then he’d take it from there and hit a home run.”
In addition to Grand Harbor, Lutzke has consulted at other Dye courses in Florida like Old Marsh Golf Club in Palm Beach Gardens and The Dye Preserve Golf Club in Jupiter.
Although Dye passed away in 2020, Lutzke and other acolytes often speak of their mentor's work in the present tense - a testament to Dye's enduring memory and the enduring liveliness of the courses he built. "Without having forced carries and being able to run [the ball] into the green, yet still create a challenge with risk-reward," Lutzke said, "he’s just a genius.”
Other notable recent Pete Dye golf course restorations
Crooked Stick Golf Club - Carmel, Ind.
Opened: 1966
Restoration in 2025: Tom Doak
Delray Dunes Golf & Country Club - Boynton Beach, Fla.
Opened: 1969
Restoration in 2024: Scot Sherman
Long Cove Club - Hilton Head Island, S.C.
Opened: 1981
Restoration in 2019: Bobby Weed
Glenmoor Country Club - Englewood, Colo.
Opened: 1985
Restoration in 2023: Scot Sherman
Country Club of Landfall (Dye) - Wilmington, N.C.
Opened: 1987
Restoration in 2025: Chris Lutzke
PGA WEST (Stadium) - La Quinta, Calif.
Opened: 1987
Restoration in 2024: Tim Liddy
The Farms Golf Club - Rancho Santa Fe, Calif.
Opened: 1988
Restoration in 2026: Tim Liddy
Pete Dye Golf Club - Bridgeport, W.Va.
Opened: 1994
Restoration upcoming: Nagle Golf Works
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