Michigan Golf Journal April 2020

Pete Dye’s Legacy and Impact on Michigan Golf By Tom Lang Michigan Golf Journal The Legend Pete Dye The late Pete Dye’s impact on golf course design is well documented worldwide. Dye, who passed away in January at age 94, also impacted golf in Michigan in a handful of ways, but probably not more than his influence on his disciple Chris Lutzke, a graduate of Michigan State University. Lutzke is a rural, small- town Wisconsin native that first met Dye in the 1980s as a teenager working a bulldozer at Blackwolf Run (host of U.S. Women’s Open, 1998 and 2012) for his family’s landscape construction company. Lutzke never stopped working for Dye, and to this day is finishing a handful of projects Dye started, including adjustments to Whistling Straights for the upcoming Ryder Cup in September (we all hope). Within the first few years, Dye told Lutzke he should figure out where he was going to college. “Of course, I wanted to go somewhere warm, and I got into Lake City College in Florida,” Lutzke said during a conversation with me in February. “And I told him. And Pete just looked down at the ground and shook his head, and he said, ‘Chris, if you’re going to school for agronomy, you’ve got to go to Michigan State.’” Lutzke told Dye he looked at MSU but couldn’t get in because there was a two- year waiting list. “But low and behold,” Lutzke said with a chuckle, “my phone rings about two weeks later and it’s Trey Rogers (at MSU) telling me that if I can get there in the next week or so, I could be in his very first class at MSU. So, I went there and found 40,000 students and about 6,000 faculty and I about came out of my shoes, I was so scared to death. But it all worked out.”