52 BILL COORE found out later I was just one of many people who called him – but I ended up driving to Delray Beach, Florida, to meet him, having made up a story that I was coming for a different reason.” Bill’s first encounter with Dye was memorable, though perhaps not for the right reasons. “I called him to tell him I was in town, and he’d forgotten me completely,” he says. “I was feeling pretty awkward, but he said, ‘Where are you staying?’, and came to meet me. I didn’t know what he looked like – I’d never met him or seen a photo. “Finally, this man walks in, looks around the lobby, and says to me, ‘You must be the guy’. I chitchatted with him in the lobby; he looked at me and said, ‘Do you have a TV in your room, I want to watch the football game’. He was a huge Miami Dolphins fan. ‘I’ve got too many people at my house who don’t want to watch the ball game’. He propped himself up on the bed, I turned the TV on, and he started watching the football, while I’m trying to ask him about golf course design. At half time, we did have some conversation about golf. He said, ‘Well, the odds on getting in the golf course design business are about the same as being struck by lightning’. The Dolphins won, so he was happy, and said, ‘I’m about to start a new course in North Carolina – the Cardinal – come on out there, and we’ll talk’. I took that to mean I’d have a job; Pete took it that we’d never meet again. “I saw something about the course on the local TV news one evening, so I drove out there, and found him. He’d pretty much forgotten me again, but he was talking to the project manager and said, ‘This guy keeps showing up, find something for him to do’. I started as a labourer; my first job was cutting trees with a chainsaw in a swamp, wearing thigh-high rubber boots. They then let me run some equipment – which I was totally inept at. For years, Pete referred to me as ‘the guy who can’t start a tractor’.” Over a period of time, the golf architecture and construction business provided Coore with a (rather hit and miss) living, before the project that would give him his real start as an architect appeared. “I had worked with Pete for about three years, and he sent me to work with his brother Roy, first at the Country Club of Montreal, and then at Waterwood National in east Texas. It was advertised as a Pete Dye design, but Roy did all the work,” he says. “Then the golf course business went totally quiet: it was 1974, and the Middle Eastern oil embargo hit hard. Almost everything in the US golf business came to a halt. I was at Waterwood, helping to get the course open, and then I became assistant superintendent to Gary Grandstaff. I didn’t know anything about agronomy! “Roy and Gary went down to do a golf course in Mexico – this would be Photo: Coore & Crenshaw Coore with his long-time partner Ben Crenshaw on site at Colorado Golf Club, which opened in 2007
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