You can have all the Fazios, even Tom, and all the Jones, even Rees and Robert Trent Sr. You can take Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player and Arthur Hills.

Take them all, I don’t care.

Just leave me Pete Dye.

Play this game for a while and you can play a course and, after a few holes, give a good guess at who the architect is.

Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s hard. But, with a few exceptions, it’s usually easy to pick out a Pete Dye course.

Dye is my favorite golf architect. In a world of mostly blandness, Dye is a Salvador Dali. He has more imagination than any of the others. He’s the one others follow. He’s fearless.

What got me to thinking about this, was someone asked me what my top three favorite courses are. I started thinking about the Stadium course at the Sawgrass TPC, the Ocean course at Kiawah and the Wolf course at Paiute, out near Las Vegas. Now, those were not my ultimate three picks, but it got me thinking about all the great courses I’ve played that were designed by Dye.

True, he’s beat me up more than any other architect, but I’ve had more fun on his courses than all the others combined. I play a lot of golf courses, many of them designed by the top names in the business.

But, it’s almost always a treat when I run into a Dye design. You know it’s going to be different, you know it’s going to be interesting, you know you’re going to see stuff you don’t see on other courses and you know you’ll have to play very well to shoot a decent score.

Most of all, you’re going to have fun.