As the world's best players step onto the 17th tee at TPC Sawgrass this week, they'll face the most psychologically brutal 137 yards in golf. The island green. No bailout, no safe miss, just water and a tiny sliver of putting surface. It's the hole that defines The Players Championship, the hole that has spawned over a hundred imitators worldwide, and the hole that almost didn't exist.
The island green wasn't Pete Dye's idea. It was Alice's.
A Hole Born from a Construction Problem
The story of the 17th starts with mud and money — or rather, the lack of it.
When the PGA Tour tapped Pete Dye to build TPC Sawgrass in 1980, the assignment was unprecedented: design a "stadium course" on 415 acres of North Florida swampland that the Tour had acquired for the princely sum of one dollar. The course needed to accommodate tens of thousands of spectators, with mounding and elevation changes that would let fans actually see the golf. The problem was that the property was flat, soggy, and seemingly useless.
But beneath the muck, Dye's crew discovered a layer of pure white sugar sand — exactly the material they needed to build a proper golf course. So they devised an ambitious plan: dig up all the muck, set it aside, excavate the sand underneath, then relay both layers with the sand on top. It was an enormous undertaking, and it created an enormous hole in the ground.
The cavity around what would become the 17th grew deeper and wider as construction progressed. Compounding the problem, Tour Commissioner Deane Beman wanted massive spectator mounds lining the final three holes. Most of the excavated muck went into building those mounds. By the time the crew reached the 17th, there was nothing left to fill the crater.
Pete's original design called for a straightforward par-3 with a green partially surrounded by water. But now the water surrounded everything. He was stuck.
Alice looked at the situation and made a suggestion that would change golf forever: keep the green where it is and make it an island.
Pete wasn't thrilled. But he did it anyway.
More Than One Good Idea
It's tempting to reduce Alice Dye's legacy to that single moment — a wife offering a clever suggestion to her famous husband. That framing misses the point entirely.
Alice Dye was a championship-caliber golfer in her own right. She won more than 50 amateur titles, including nine Indiana State Championships, three Florida State Championships, and 11 Indianapolis City Championships. She captured back-to-back USGA Senior Amateur titles in 1978 and 1979. She won the 1968 North and South Women's Amateur. She represented her country on the 1970 Curtis Cup team.
She didn't just understand golf course design in the abstract. She understood it from inside the ropes, from the perspective of someone who competed at the highest amateur level for decades. That experience informed everything she contributed to Dye Designs, the firm she and Pete built together, which produced over 100 courses worldwide.
The Forward Tee Revolution
If the island green is Alice's most famous contribution, her most important one was far less glamorous: forward tees.
In the 1970s and 1980s, most golf courses offered two sets of tees — the "regular" tees and the "championship" tees. Women, seniors, and beginners were expected to play from the regular tees, which were often still far too long for anyone who didn't hit the ball 230 yards off the tee.
Alice championed what she called the "Two Tee System for Women," pushing clubs and designers to add a genuine forward set of tees with yardages that made courses playable for golfers of all abilities. It sounds obvious now. It wasn't then. The golf establishment resisted the idea, viewing additional tees as unnecessary expense or, worse, a concession that weakened the course.
Alice understood something that many course designers of her era didn't: a hole that's unplayable for half your potential customers isn't a well-designed hole. It's a failure of imagination. Her advocacy directly contributed to the multi-tee system that's now standard on virtually every course in the world.
Breaking the Architectural Glass Ceiling
In 1983, Alice Dye became a member of the American Society of Golf Course Architects. She was the first woman admitted. In 1997, she became the organization's president — again, the first woman to hold the position. In 2004, she achieved ASGCA Fellow status, the society's highest honor.
She also served as the first woman independent director of the PGA of America.
These weren't honorary titles. Alice was involved in the design and construction of Dye courses for decades, from Crooked Stick to Teeth of the Dog to Whistling Straits. Pete himself was blunt about her role. He didn't treat her as a silent partner — she was on-site, making decisions, shaping holes. The collaborative nature of their partnership was an open secret in the architecture world, even if the broader golf public tended to credit Pete alone.
Why This Matters During Players Week
Every year, the 17th hole at TPC Sawgrass produces high drama. Balls splash into the water. Careers are made and broken on a 9-iron. Television cameras capture the anguish and ecstasy in excruciating detail. The scoring average on the hole over the past two decades is 3.12 — the highest for any par-3 under 150 yards on the PGA Tour.
And every year, the story gets told the same way: Pete Dye built this incredible hole. Pete Dye's diabolical design. Pete Dye's vision.
Pete was a genius. That's not in dispute. But the most iconic feature of the most important non-major in golf exists because his wife looked at a construction problem and saw an opportunity that he didn't. That's not a footnote. That's the story.
Alice Dye passed away in February 2019 at the age of 91. Pete followed her less than a year later, in January 2020. Together, they shaped the modern landscape of golf course architecture more than perhaps any other partnership in the game's history.
The next time you watch a player stand over that 137-yard shot, hands shaking, with nothing but water between them and the green, remember: the hole that terrifies the best golfers in the world was a woman's idea. And she had plenty more where that came from.
