With responsibility for a restoration project for the Stadium Course at PGA West in La Quinta, architect Pete Dye’s masterpiece of golf mayhem, Tim Liddy relies on the close 28-year professional and personal relationship he had with Dye to maintain the project underway. .
“He was like a second father to me,” Liddy said. “So when I’m outside, I can hear him talking to me. I can hear him yelling at me just walking around.”
Liddy is hearing a lot of Dye’s comments these days, as PGA West embarks on a two-year renovation of the Stadium Course, the host course for The American Express PGA Tour tournament each January.
The first year of the restoration features landscaping, removal of trees from the layout, and work to restore the ground cover and shrubs that were part of the course’s appearance in the mid-1980s. In the summer of 2023, the work will be completed. will focus on an aging irrigation system as well as returning bunkers and greens to their original sizes and shapes.
Although Liddy has been a director of his own design firm, Liddy and Associates, since 1993, he worked closely with Dye on many projects. Dye, who died in 2020, became famous in the 1980s for his designs like the Stadium Course at PGA West and the TPC Stadium Course at Sawgrass, home of The Players Championship in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.
Dye’s designs were radical for the time, with deep bunkering, mounds throughout the course, forced carries over huge lakes, rolling greens, and many of his trademark railroad ties.
A large bunker between the 14th and 15th holes is seen free of brush and other obstacles on PGA West’s Stadium Course in La Quinta, Calif., on Thursday, July 7, 2022. (Andy Abeyta/The Desert Sun)
The PGA West course became infamous for hosting six Skins Games on national television beginning in 1986 and for the negative reactions from professionals when the course was played at the 1987 American Express, then called the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic. The tournament left the Stadium Course after just one year and did not return to the event rotation until 2016.
Liddy says she just wants to restore the field, not check it out.
“We’re not going to change the golf course, obviously,” Liddy said. “That would be sacrilege. So the golf course is 37 years old, what should we do? Well, it’s infrastructure. The greens have shrunk, which is common. The bunkers have lost their shape as they do with age and maintenance and guys scooping sand out of them. Therefore, the bunkers must be placed back as they were. Irrigation is 30 years old, or 37 years old. They are designed to last 20”.
This summer’s work is being done in stages, with the last nine holes of the Stadium Course already completed and the first nine holes completed. The field will be open as usual after the fall reseeding and will be used again at The American Express for the eighth consecutive year next January before restoration work continues next summer.
While next summer’s work will be just as important to the field as this year’s work, The American Express players will see dramatic changes to the field in January due to the removal of the trees. Chris May, director of agronomy for PGA West, said that while original plans called for 600 trees to be removed, the actual number will be closer to 200 trees, with around 1,200 remaining in the field.
Removing the trees changes the appearance of the course from a layout where trees narrowed the aisles in the holes or provided vantage points for players to a layout with Dye’s original sparse look that was often described as landscape. moon in the early days of the field. Archive photos also reveal where trees have been added to the field over the years.
Best for lawns, tees and greens
As well as going back to the course’s original layout, May said the trees were becoming a problem because many were too big and rotting from the inside. More than three decades of growth also meant that the trees were causing problems in the lawn that didn’t occur when the field was young and the trees were newly planted.
“We have new owners and they don’t like to see grass problems or brown spots,” May said. “That was part of the mandate. Some of the brown spots were from trees clogging the sprinkler heads. We need to have everything green and full. Most jerseys are affected by that.”
While Liddy said he believes the trees had become a distraction from Dye’s original vision for the course, he understands some of the negative feedback PGA West has already received from owners about tree removal.
“Trees are an emotional subject. They always are,” Liddy said. She added that some of the trees to be removed will be replaced with younger, smaller trees.
Liddy said he has been talking with architect Lee Schmidt, who worked for Dye on a daily basis on projects including the Stadium Course, about other issues, including vegetation that grew between the holes but has since been removed from the course. That vegetation was intended to add to the Scottish aspect of the field.
“Lee said you knew Pete’s original concept was to make it look like Scotland, so we went to the nursery and looked for plants that represented gorse (a bushy, prickly bush seen in many Scottish fields) and heather,” Liddy said. . “And I said, well, we don’t have that now.”
Next summer, Liddy hopes to flatten the bunker bottoms, remove sand from the bunker faces and return the greens to their original size. It’s all so he can help maintain Dye’s original and radical design intent.
“I’ve built hundreds of greens with Mr. Dye,” Liddy said. “I don’t know what to say other than that they will be restored to where I think they were.”
Larry Bohannan is the golf writer for The Desert Sun. He can be reached at [email protected] or (760) 778-4633. Follow him on Facebook or on Twitter at @larry_bohannan. Support local journalism. Subscribe to The Sun of the Desert.