And with very few trees.
“Mr. Kohler’s vision was to
make it look wild and
unkempt, with bunkers that
seemed as if they had been
formed over hundreds of years
by the wind and weather,” says
Steve Friedlander, who served
as PGA director of golf at
Whistling Straits until 2006.
Top: The slated-rough and
stone exterior of Whistling
Straits’ clubhouse adds to the
authentic links feel of the
facility. Above: Pete Dye (left)
with Kohler Co. Chairman and
CEO Herb Kohler.
In the Beginning
Dye got started by moving a lot of earth to
give the unvarying property the ethos and
undulations of an Irish links. That meant
bringing in some
13,000 truckloads of sand
from a pit
10 miles away and using it to
construct more than 500 bunkers and form
the towering dunes and devilish
depressions Kohler wanted. “There was a
lot of dirt moved,” says architect Tim Liddy,
who helped Dye lay out the new course.
“And that made the project pretty complex,
because there is so much work involved in
that type of construction. You just are
doing so much to the land, working it and
working it until you get it right.”
Liddy recalls how the routing for the
Straits course took shape as the bunkers
and dunes were being built. “Pete took a
scorecard from one of the Blackwolf Run
courses and then laid out a potential
routing for the new layout on the back of
that,” he says. “He was looking at how
many holes would be on the water, how
much variety there would be between shots
requiring draws and cuts. Then I’d make
plans from those, recording Pete’s thoughts
as if I was a draftsman.”
And Dye’s thoughts were fairly cut and
62 THE OFFICIAL PROGRAM OF THE 2010 PGA CHAMPIONSHIP
dry. “I was looking to create a good balance
of golf,” the Hall of Fame designer says.
“Balance between the par 4s and par 5s,
balance between the way different holes
looked and played off the tees, playing shots
in different directions and taking good
advantage of the conditions that lakeside
land gave us.”
Create is a good word to use in this case,
because that truly is what Pete Dye did
with Whistling Straits. “He took nothing
and turned it into something very, very
special,” says Friedlander.
The finished product opened for play on
July
6, 1998, the day of the 18-hole playoff
for the U.S. Women’s Open at Blackwolf
Run just down the road. Players that day
included former President George H. W.
Bush, singer Amy Grant and PGA Tour
commissioner Tim Finchem. The par-
72
course that measured more than
7,300
yards from the tips had just the linksy feel
Kohler wanted.
Bringing Coastal Ireland to
Wisconsin
And the sense of being in Ireland was
further enhanced by the slate-roofed
clubhouse he had built there, with the
rubble stones used for the exterior turned
around so the rougher parts were showing
on the outside, giving it a more authentic,
aged look. The fescue fairways and rough
also harkened to golf in that ancient land, as
did a walking-only policy and the
introduction of a herd of black-faced sheep
that roamed the property.
Golfers could admire seemingly endless
expanses of Lake Michigan from every hole,
with eight of them actually hugging the
shoreline and offering views as compelling
as the course design. Wind frequently
buffeted the layout, providing plenty of
shot-making challenges for players as well
as untold variety in the way it played, and
temperatures ranged as much as
20 degrees
on any given day. In fact, adverse weather
conditions were such a signature feature
that it induced Kohler to give the track its
name – Whistling Straits – after he was
walking among the bluffs and dunes there
one particularly blustery day.
The Straits course received rave reviews
from the very beginning, and understandably
so. For one thing, it boasts what may well
be the finest collection of par 3s ever
assembled on a single track. It’s beautiful,
too, with dramatically sculpted dunes and
KOHLER CO.
