Gotchu fam.
Working with Herb was fascinating, but we almost ended our relationship. Herb’s love for trees is well-known, but his reaction to a decision I made for the par three 17th hole almost finished the friendship.
The center of the dispute was a group of cottonwood trees along the bank of the Sheboygan River between where I intended to place the tee and the green. For months Herb and I battled back and forth, since Herb wanted to place the tee back in a clearing that would have saved the trees but would have required a 100-yard walk from the 16th green to the 17th tee.
I built all of the other holes on the course before asking Herb to make up his mind about the tee location. Trees-best-friend finally told me he would meet me on 17 at high noon and a decision would be made so we could complete the golf course.
Noon came and went, and so did another proposed meeting Herb set up for five o’clock. He finally dragged himself out of one of those long corporate meetings by 7:30 p.m. and madly drove his Jaguar toward the 17th hole.
“When I walked over the hill,” Herb remembered, “I saw a silver bellow of smoke tarnishing the evening sunset. The closer I got the more smoke I saw, but there was no one around.”
There was no one around because my construction crew and I had quickly left the premises. Except for a security guard, Herb was all by himself. “When I got a bit closer I saw the blazing fire, but there was no danger because while I saw that the logs and brush were burning brightly, huge piles of earth surrounded the inferno,” Herb recalls. “I asked the security guard where Pete Dye was, and if he knew he didn’t tell me.”
A clerk at the American Club informed Herb that I was gone, bag and baggage. I knew he would be steaming since I cut down those trees and burned them, but it was three hours before he could blast me on the telephone.
I tried to explain what I had done, and how I had carved out a green and so forth, but he would no listen. He demanded that I return to Kohler for an “eye-to-eye” as he called it, and I did two days later. Herb had a chance to vent his anger at me, and friendship was restored.
Pete Dye was a certified psychopath.
Edit - I understand this original 17th hole is the current 17th n the River. Which means Kohler must have wanted to the tee back up in the clearing between where 16 green and the corridor for 18 is? Yeesh, I get why Pete was fighting him on this.
Anyway, in the same chapter he talks about a few specific holes, including Cathedral Spires, which he misidentifies as the 10th but I believe is actually the 9th on the River (but is a hole along the river with trees very much in play), the 16th on the River, and 15 on the Meadow Valley. No discussion of River 13.
