Joel Zuckerman ’83

Anyone in my profession would have jumped at the chance.

It was tremendous good fortune to be chosen by Pete Dye’s family to write the authorized celebration of the patriarch’s remarkable half-century career. My fifth book, due out in September, is Pete Dye: Golf Courses—50 Years of Visionary Design.

The golf courses that Pete has created are a de facto honor roll of the most celebrated venues in the modern game. A “Who’s Who” list includes Harbour Town, the Ocean Course, TPC Sawgrass, Whistling Straits, and Teeth of the Dog. There are over 100 more. Add in the work of his two sons, Perry and P.B., and his nephews and niece, and the list of Dye designs swells to more than 250 courses, in all corners of the globe.

I covered as much ground as possible during my grueling, yearlong “Dye-tinerary,” though I eschewed last-minute entreaties to wander off to China and Guatemala, among other exotic locales. The peripatetic Dye family visits other continents like the rest of us visit the grocery store—casually, and with little forethought, though I’m not wired the same way.

Being chosen by the Dyes themselves from among nearly 1,000 potential candidates (the total membership of the Golf Writers Association of America) to execute this 300-plus-page, full-color celebration of Pete’s career is the unquestioned highlight of my writing life, and can best be described as a metallurgical medley—a golden opportunity, platinum frequent-flyer status, and an iron game that disappointed me from coast to coast and beyond.

For me, 2007 was all-Dye, all-day, and has been the culmination, at least to this point, of a call to writing that began when I answered a classified ad in the Savannah Morning News in the autumn of 1997. The seven words that pin-balled me in a different direction: “Wanted—golf writer for Hilton Head newspaper.”

For some 15 post-college years I tried and ultimately rejected various careers like so many ill-fitting suits. First it was selling office machinery, then magazine advertising. I spent a number of years in the commodities markets, located in the shadow of the twin towers in lower Manhattan. Eventually I returned to Western Massachusetts and started a small vending company, dispensing junk food for coinage in blue-collar outposts from greater Hartford to Northampton. Like the aforementioned suits, it wasn’t that these occupational gambits weren’t comfortable; they just didn’t feel quite right.

My regular newspaper column eventually led to a few regional magazine pieces. Then I got a toehold in the door at Sports Illustrated, which led to assignments in many major golf and airline publications. The first book debuted in 2003, the encore in 2005, and then two more were published in ’05 and ’06. Like an acting hopeful who begins in regional theater, I went from publishing in the sticks of South Carolina, then to Kansas City, Ann Arbor, and finally, with this latest effort, New York.

Pete Dye is a genius, a workaholic, a visionary, an octogenarian giant and a brand new member of golf’s Hall of Fame. It was fortuitous to be given the opportunity to chronicle his collected body of work,
and I will always be indebted to Pete and the Dye family.