I recently had the distinct pleasure of spending some 24 hours at the only golf club officially named for the world’s foremost architect. The Pete Dye Golf Club, like its namesake, is quirky, unforgettable, and pure genius.
There are three things to note about this magnificent walk through West Virginia woodlands. The first is that the construction dragged on for a full 16 years—longer than it took to build the Brooklyn Bridge, about as long as it took to construct India’s famous Taj Mahal. One of the principal reasons it took forever to produce is because of the scarred landscape on which the architect and owners were working. The second notable point is that the course is located in the heart of coal country, and built on what was once a strip mine. Before the extreme makeover engineered by Dye and the ownership group, the acreage was a desolate, earthen abscess. It was filled with mining detritus, coal gobs, carbonaceous waste, abandoned equipment, and all matter of unpleasantness. Picture in your mind’s eye the most foul construction site you can imagine. Now multiply that image by a factor of ten. That’s where Dye and Company began. Perhaps nowhere in the golf world has something so wonderful come from something so terrible.
The third factor: To pay homage to its mining roots, there are touches throughout the acreage. There’s a series of coal cars to the left of the tenth fairway. There’s a ventilation shaft to the right of the first green. And most memorably, there’s an honest-to-goodness mine tunnel that connects the sixth green to the seventh tee. The fact that the temperature drops 15 degrees in the murky, hundred-yard walk from green to tee is just one of the reasons that this mine tunnel is, hands down, the coolest accoutrement in golf.