Indy Star Profile Of Pete And Alice Dye

With the BMW landing at Crooked Stick, naturally the Playoff(C) focus this week turns to...Pete Dye. And of course, the thrill of watching algorithms turn.

Dana Hunsinger Benbow of the Indianapolis Star profiles the Dyes in a front page Sunday story, and I learned some new things about them, including this reminder of what random ways people get into the game.

If not for a broken-down car, Pete may never have even picked up a golf club.

It was the early 1920s, several years before Pete was born. His parents, Paul and Elizabeth Dye, were headed back from a trip to Washington, D.C. when their car broke down in Pennsylvania.

There were no quick-fix car shops back then, so the Dyes and the couple with them booked a room at the nearby Summit Inn. Everyone went to rest except Paul Dye. He wasn't tired. He was restless. As he walked around the area, he found some little bags of golf balls lying about.

Paul Dye had never hit a golf ball in his life, but he was bored. So he asked the guy working at the driving range to show him how.

"He hit this bag of golf balls for the first time," said Alice. "And he was entranced."

When the car was repaired and Paul Dye was back home in Urbana, Ohio, he got some land from Elizabeth's family, built nine holes and called it the Urbana Country Club.

It's also fun to remember that Indiana has had, since 2011, a Pete Dye Golf Trail, as Adam Schupak writes in this updated story that first appeared at Golfweek.com three years ago.

We’ll get back to that later. Consider this one of many reasons that Mitch Daniels, the former Indiana governor, in 2011 supported the creation of the Pete Dye Golf Trail, a collection of seven public courses designed by the architect, including four that are ranked in the top 10 on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list in Indiana. (Dye has built nine more courses in the state, including Crooked Stick, a private club, which has hosted a PGA Championship and U.S. Women’s Open.)

The Trail, spanning 224 miles from Culver in the north to French Lick in the south, features the trappings we’ve come to expect in Dye courses: small greens and subtle breaks, large greens and outrageous contours, split fairways, railroad ties and pot bunkers. Lots of pot bunkers.