Michigan Golf Journal April 2020

Michigan Golf Journal The Legend Pete Dye longer and made a few other recommendations on routing – as well as granting permission to make the 17 th hole an exact replica of the Par 3 island green 17 th at TCP Sawgrass. The entire experience truly impacted Lutzke during the work from 2001-03. “When you put as much contour in the greens like I did at that time, you couldn’t make them 5,000 square feet; they had to be 8,000,” he said about Eagle Eye. “Years after I did Eagle Eye, if I was with Pete at any of the courses we were working on, if I ever made a green too big or designed something too big in the field, he’d put his hands on my shoulders and say, ‘Lutzke, you’re building another Eagle Eye green.’ “I made his greens a lot smaller later in his design career, because he didn’t know how else to stop those good players who are hitting the ball so far. I’ll never forget how he’d say it all the time, that I built another Eagle Eye green,” Lutzke said with a laugh. “It was all good stuff; we had a lot of laughs over all the years.” Dye was an accomplished golfer and competed in the U.S. Amateur several times. While in the Army and stationed at nearby Ft. Bragg, Dye would often make the 30-mile trek to Pinehurst and came to know Donald Ross. “Pete’s relationship with Mr. Ross was one of the things of which he was most proud,” Lutzke said. Plymouth resident Paul Albanese, also a former apprentice of Matthews, teamed up with Lutzke in recent years to form a golf design and construction business that created several award-winning courses and has kept Dye’s latest projects going the past decade or so. “Really, it was the mark for an end of an era, a great era that Pete brought us into,” Albanese said about first hearing of Dye’s death. Eagle Eye, No. 13.