THE GOOD LIFE
D I R EC T F LI G H T
Flossing the Teeth of The Dog
A brush with a golf superstar, and a nearly broken bar, in Pete Dye’s Dominican dreamscape BY MIKE DOJC
28
CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // APRIL 2020
The course is a jewel among the more than 100 designed by Pete Dye, the renowned American course designer and architect who died in January at 94. El Diente opened in 1971 after teams had used oxcarts to move soil and pickaxes, chisels, and other rudimentary hand tools to tame the rugged landscape, which includes jagged seaside rocks that workers thought looked like canine teeth. Starting in the early ’70s, Dye and his wife kept a home at the Casa de Campo resort while Dye developed three other courses on the property. El Diente, ranked 32nd in the world in Golf Digest’s latest biennial ranking, remains the standout, though. Holes 5 through 8 and 15 through 17 unfurl alongside the azure Caribbean, often with just 20 feet of elevation separating the immaculately groomed fairways from the lapping waves below. The course is packed with diabolical par-four holes that force golfers to think deeply about risk and reward before they attack the greens. Dye considered El Diente his best design. “I created 11 holes,” he famously said, “and God created seven.” While travelling golfers tend to fixate on 5, 7, and 16, a trio of water’s-edge par-threes, there’s an extra,
Hole 15 on El Diente de Perro, one of the renowned Pete Dye course’s seaside holes.
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CASA DE CAMPO RESORT & VILLAS
IF YOU NEED CONFIRMATION that you’re playing on one of the planet’s top golf courses, you could ask for few tells more obvious than bumping into Miguel Ángel Jiménez at the bar during a rain delay. Fresh off a PGA Tour Champions victory the week before, the 21-time European Tour winner smokes a cigar and sips what looks to me like whiskey, his graying blond locks pulled into a ponytail behind a Ping cap that shields one of the most recognizable mugs in professional golf. The rain that interrupted his round did the same to me and my golf buddies, and we’re all taking shelter. Jiménez graciously acknowledges every starstruck golfer who approaches. My friends and I, on vacation here in the Dominican Republic, try to play it L.A.-cool for a couple of minutes—like this kind of thing happens every day—before we surrender to our fanboy impulses and dive in for backslaps and selfies. The moment passes, the rain abates, the warm Caribbean sun—even in October—quickly erases all vestiges of the downpour, and we get back to what we came here for. We clamber into our carts and join our forecaddie, Juan, on the back nine of El Diente de Perro—Teeth of the Dog.
