Jerry Pate on Early TPC Sawgrass and His 1982 Players Win

00:00:00
Speaker 1: I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball.

00:00:06
Speaker 2: In a fried egg Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida egg, Fridaygg, Frida Egg Egg, Frida Egg bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hump. Hello, and welcome to the Friday Egg Podcast. I'm Garrett Morrison, and today's guest is Jerry Pate. All Right, so two years ago we put out a documentary podcast about the story behind TPC Sagrass and the first Players Championship that was held there in nineteen eighty two. For that story, I talked to Jerry Pate, who won that tournament and afterwards famously jumped in the lake with architect Pete and tour commissioner Dean Beeman. Now, Jerry Pate and I don't think this is very well appreciated these days. He was one of the most promising young players of his generation. He won the US Open as a rookie in nineteen seventy six, and he seemed to be on his way to superstart him but then he injured his shoulder and the eighty two players ended up being his last win on tour. He still had a great career in the golf industry. He served as a TV analyst for a long time, and he built a very successful landscape and golf course design practice. He even won a couple of times on the Senior tour. Anyway, I had this conversation with Jerry in early twenty twenty, and we used pieces of it in that documentary episode. But recently I listened to the full interview again and I immediately thought to myself, we need to make this its own episode. You know, ninety percent of the tape has not seen the light of day, and Jerry is just such a charming guy and a great storyteller. So I thought, hey, fortieth anniversary of the eighty two plays, might as well put this whole thing out there. So here is Jerry Pate and he starts by talking about the first time he saw TPC Sagrass.

00:02:15
Speaker 1: In October or November of nineteen eighty the golf course Open, and they had a preview of the golf course with the American Golf sponsors, and my dad was one of the tournament committee guys at the Pence Cal Open. He had been he had been the tournament chairman of the Pence Cal Open. I guess, is what I'm trying to say. And so he was invited to come down and play the Grand Opening, and I went down and played. Would actually got and played with Dean Beeman, and he showed me, you know, sort of the tricks of the trade and some of the subtleties of the golf course and where to hit the ball. And he told me, he said, listen, if you'll just follow where I'll tell you to drive it, he said, you're going to do well. You probably in the tournament. So Dean had actually helped me out. And I think I was the only pro on tour that I know of that came and played that Grand Opening. Not many the other guys were very high on the Players Club. I think a lot of guys thought we didn't need to own a golf course, and they didn't understand the significance of owning your own golf course, and especially a stadium golf course, which was a unique idea to give spectators a greater vantage point for viewing golf.

00:03:34
Speaker 2: So tell me a little bit more about what Dean Beeman showed you when he was taking you around the golf course. What kinds of things was he pointing out?

00:03:42
Speaker 1: Well, you know the golf course elevation. Prior to building it, the entire property was somewhere around in elevation six I think above sea level is pretty flat piece of property, and when it rained, it flooded. This was way before the golf course was built, when it was just under construction. So when Pete Died built the golf course, most of the holes were built pretty flat on the ground. He'd make a little cut off the tee where it felt like your t's were elevated, and then he would maybe put a cross bunker out there hazard that sort of optically tricked your vision. So you had to know exactly, almost like Lynx golf, where you had to hit the bottle to the right vantage point to have a proper approach to the green. And I think that the advantage of playing with Dean. I mean I can remember holes like even one. I mean one was sort of a deceptive hole that looked like you wanted to hit it way left, but you could actually go right on one off the tee. Two you wanted to kind of hug the left side down the left side, and four was sort of a weird T shot. It was blinded pretty much where you couldn't see the landing area and you had to figure out where to drive it on four, and the same thing with six. You know, seven, so Dean was in ten was a very tricky little driving hole. Eleven you could hug the left side and have an advantage on the par five. Twelve a little short four. You wanted to keep the ball way right to give yourself a better view of the second shot. So there were certain places to drive the ball. I remember fifteen Dean said, keep it up the left side. It was a better approach into the green. Sixteen you wanted to hug the left side. And of course seventeen, I mean eighteen you just tried to, you know, seventeen hit the green, in eighteen hit it in the fairway. But he was very helpful on where I should hit my T shots, and I think that really was an advantage for me when we came there a year and a half later in March. Really about fifteen sixteen months later we played in March.

00:06:01
Speaker 2: Right, So you're you have become you've done some design work of your own. Could you take me back to when you first saw TPC Sawgrass and I guess you were saying it was a nineteen eighty What were your first impressions of the course? As somebody who is, you know, evidently attuned to factors of design, what were some of your opinions initially on the golf course?

00:06:26
Speaker 1: Well, you know, ironically you mentioned design. Actually, Bobby Whedon I built the tpiece. We designed the TPC Valley course. A lot of people don't know that it's called dys Valley, but Bobby Whedon I Bobby was working for the tour and I was not playing the tour. Was injured in the at the time and spent a tremendous amount of time over there. But as far as a Pete Dye golf course, I was fortunate enough to play in nineteen seventy four, I played the Teeth of the Dog at Casady Compo, so I understood Pete strategies around the greens. I kind of had an idea what bunkers that you couldn't hit it into around the green. And when I came and I played at Harbortown when I was in college, So I played those two golf courses, which were two of his best up to the Stadium golf course, no question. The Teeth of the Dog probably is his best golf course, one of them, if not his best, And that was in nineteen seventy one, and he had built Harbortown prior to that with Jack Nicholas and Desmond Merrhead in about nineteen sixty seven or eight, I guess, and so I kind of understood Pete strategies. I had a feel for how he liked to strategize holes and there were just certain places you couldn't hit the ball. You just if you'd hit it there, you were in trouble. And when I saw the Stadium course for the first time, a lot of people complained about it because the greens were sort of perched up off of the grade, so you had a lot of areas that had I would call them false fronts in the front and the green round off on the left side and the right side, and there were very very small pinnable areas that were little target areas, and if you didn't hit it there, the ball would gather some fifteen to thirty forty feet away from there into a low depression either on the green or off the green. So you had to be extremely accurate with your iron. You had to be a good driver of the ball, which I was, and you had to be a really good iron player, which I was. So his design sort of played right into my hand. And I had won the World Amateur at Costa de Compo in nineteen seventy four, in the fall of seventy four, so I liked his golf courses. I played well at Harvardtown every year, should have won it, got beatn the playoff. I don't remember what year that was. It could have been eighty eighty one. You'd probably have to go back and look at the history books. I think it was before the I think it was before we played the TPC Players Championship. So I liked his golf courses, and so I knew you had to hit the ball in certain play and I liked I was a good iron player, and a whole like seventeen didn't intimidate me at all. In fact, we had a pro am that year on Wednesday, and I made a two on Wednesday, a two on Thursday, a two on Friday, a three on Saturday, and a two on Sunday on the seventeenth hole, So four out of five days I made a two on it. So it needless to say the Diabolical seventeen was sort of played right into my wheelhouse because I was a pretty good iron player. It was an eight or nine iron shot, and I kind of hit a cut eight iron every day. And they're playing an orange golf ball and Wilson Pro staff orange golf ball, and I like to just kind of cut the ball into that green right.

00:09:41
Speaker 2: So it sounds like the dies designs not only suited your skill set well, and not only were you sort of experienced with his architecture, but also it doesn't seem like it bothered you. You know, something that you get the impression of when you look back at players' reactions to the eighty two Players Championship is sent to a sense that a lot of the players were frustrated.

00:10:04
Speaker 1: When in in Playing in eighty two was personal to me. It was very personal because my mom and dad. My mom moved to Jacksonville, like in the tenth grade. My dad was born and raised in Jacksonville. My grandfather was an original member in like nineteen twenty six or eight at San Jose Club in Southside Jacksonville. He was a nineteen thirty three member at point of Vidra until the day he died. In fact, my granddaddy was eighty two years old and watched me. He was actually, let's see how he was eighty two. He was born in nineteen two. He was eighty years old when he watched me win there. He died at eighty seven. And so my dad had grown up at Pontavidra Sawgrass across the street. That was the old sawgrass that Jimmy Stockton developed. Jimmy Stockton was in my dad's wedding and Brownie Waltley, junior of Stockton, Lockley and Davin, was best man in my dad's wedding. So it was personal for me to win, to win in Jacksonville. So that's the karma that people don't realize. It's like winning the US Open at twenty two in Atlanta, you know, you think about it. Bobby Jones asked for the Open to be played there. My father's boss's father was one of Bobby Jones' best friend VZ. Rainwater. Bobby Jones was a father was a lawyer for the Coca Cola business. My dad was a Coca Cola bottler, and so was VZ. Rainwater and Crawford rainwater. They were original bottlers in nineteen twenties. And I was born in Georgia and my family's from Georgia from eighteen hundred and right outside of Sandersville called Riddleville, Georgia. So when I won the Open, it was personal. In Atlanta, you know, it was just it was meant to be. And so when I won at Sawgrass, I'll tell you another great story. We got there on Monday, played a practice round Tuesday night. They had a participant's dinner, the player's dinner on Tuesday night at the clubhouse there the old clubhouse before it was torn down, the old original clubhouse, and they had on display there Dean Beamon had displayed the crystal Waterford Trophy. It was sort of a fluted, rectangular fluted vase, not a round base, but it was kind of a rectangular and almost square to like a square tube, but a big, beautiful, different kind of Waterford vase. And I went up and I looked at it, and I picked it up and looked at it. I sat it down and I walked over to the table where my wife was having dinner with my kids. They had two children at the time, and I told Sudy. I said, you need to go look at that vase. He said why, I said, that's my picture on the base. He said, what are you talking about. I said, there's an etched golfer putting that Waterford has used someone silhouette, and that's a picture of me in my same putter, my same stance, the whole nine yards exactly the same looking Wilson Adodo two And ironically I won the tournament with that putter. And I said, and I had kind of flipped around between putters. That was the putter I'd won the US Amateur with, and I played with a little bit on the tour, and I switched on and off, and I said, that is an absolute dead copy of me putting, and it's it's in that trophy. I said, I'm going to win this tournament. I told her that on Tuesday. So that was pretty pretty much as I said. It was personal with me, and it's almost like destined to happen. And another thing happened on Sunday going to the I birdied twelve. I did birty eleven, which is a part five. You wanted to make birdie on. I missed a putt there, but I did birdy thirteen, the little short four and they've changed the whole night. They put a lake on the left side of it. But I birdied thirteen twelve. And as you walk back to thirteen towards the Marriott Hotel, there was no Marry Out Hotel. Then. It was just nothing but jungle back there. As I walked that long walk back through the bushes, and you know, the golf course was wild and willy. Then. It wasn't as naturally managed and manacured light. I mean, it wasn't as manicure today. It was natural with palmeadows and just you know, basically bobcats and rattlesnakes twenty foot off the fairway and Armadilla's and you name it. It was wild. I mean, it was not the course you know today. So anyway, as I walked back to thirteen t I was walking on the cart path and you know, I just made Bertie, she kind of walking kind of brisk, and I heard somebody kind of running up behind me and they grabbed my arm. I turned around. It was Alice Dye and she looked at me and she said, you've got a birch. She said, you've got to win this thing. And you got to throw Pete in the lake. And of course Pete had been catching ungodly amount of heat for this golf course because it was the most diabolical. So that day there was nothing on earth and I mean that with it, not with exaggeration. There was no other course on the earth more difficult and diabolical than that golf course. And Alice, I think was a little bit worried because Pete was catching a lot of flak in his design career. And of course Dean Beeman that was talking the locker room and by the senior Hall of Famers just before they were into Hall of Fame, and I won't mention names. Some of them are dead now. Somer still lives in their eighties, and the talk was they were gonna get, you know, have a coup and fire Dean because we had no business owning a golf course, and it was crazy, and it was competing against some of these famous golfers design careers. They had their own design careers going. So they're thinking, well, wait a minute, PGA Tours hiring some outside guy named Pete Died to design their golfers. Why didn't they hire a player? You know, that's a Hall of Fame player who has their own design company. So that was another controversy. So Alice grabbed me by the arm and said, you gotta win this thing, she said, and when you do, I want you to throw Pete in the lake. And I turn around, looked at her, just calm as can be. And everybody used to think, you know, when I played, I was cocky. I really wasn't cocky. I just you know, I knew in my heart I could pull it off. And I said I'm gonna win. So I parted thirteen, birdie fourteen, so I put me two under on the back nine, and I birdied seventeen and eighteen, and you know, drove it. Hit a great shot on seventeen about fifteen eighteen feet left the hole, made the putt there, and then drove it right in the middle on eighteen and hit an orange golf ball about two feet from the hole for a gimme birdie foot and a half maybe away. And the rest was history. That I asked, I saw Dean and Judy, and Judy was looking at me, says, oh, you got to throw Dean in the lake too. I know you're gonna throw Pete in because I walked up the eighteenth fairway and the camera was on me. Little Davy Fence, who worked for CBS, and Trikennyan is in the truck. I knew that in summer all in Venturia up on the eighteenth Tower and you know, all my buddies and CBS were there, and I have no idea what they've said. But as I walked up the eighteenth fairway, and I'd already jumped in the lake in the in the summer of eighty one, and CBS covered that. At the Memphis Open, I was playing with Tom Kite and Peter Jackson. So I walk up the eighteenth fairway and Davy Fence says, you're gonna jump in the lake, and I said, Pete, die will go for a swim. Now I didn't even think I was going to go in. I thought I would just throw them both in the lake and that would be it. And then they were out there and you know, in the lake. So I threw them both in the lake off the bulkhead and then I jumped in behind him. But it was kind of one of those deals. When I got there that week, I just, you know, was never nervous on any shot, always felt good about my game, and the irony of it was I played about three weeks later at the Masters and got beata shot. Should have won the Master. Stadler won it, but I had a really good shot at it. I just missed, even though I shot thirty two on the back nine, thirty eight on the front nine, and Stadler won. And in the next month in May, I finished I think second at the Colonial, so I believe I was pretty close to leading the money list at that time. And I was practicing in June for the British Open, and I was hitting some one irons and Pensacola on some real hard ground and a real strong wind had come up and I was trying to hit the ball low into the wind with a one iron and I hit a shot and I felt my left shoulder pop. And that was kind of the end of my career for twenty years, until I ended up having five surgeries and finally they got it right where I could play on the Senior Tour. But you know, that was kind of that was the and I had a ten year exemption. It was a big deal. The most money anybody had ever won, ninety thousand dollars, A lot of endorsements. You know, life was great to have my own private plane. Jack and Arnold and I were the only three players had a private plane on the tour at that time. And I was twenty eight and you know, in pretty big tall cotton, I guess you could say for a Southern boy. And then in one swing in the first of June, that was kind of into my golfing competitive career. But you know it ended with a fun memory of winning the players.

00:19:17
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00:20:48
Speaker 1: Well, for me to hit that shot like Ben Crenshaw hitting a you know, a six foot pod, He's not nervous. Jack Nicholas isn't nervous on a six foot pot. Tom Watson was it nervous on a six foot but Leecherveno was never nervous on a nine yard web shot, and Jerry Fate was never nervous hitting a long iron shot. I mean, nerves weren't even in my vocabulary. And that's what I think. You know, when I look back and all my good friends, and these are guys I played with, and a lot of them I beat a lot and they beat me a lot. But you know one thing I can always feel good about is that, you know, I earned those wins. I hit a lot of great shots. And when I hit the five iron, and I went to the press room soaking wet, and I think Tom Place was running the interview for the PGA Tour and he said, you have any opening statements, and I go, yeah, I guess. I guess I pulled another five iron because I hit a five iron on the last hole to wind us opened two feet. And you know, I've hit a few other shots on the last hole in my career pretty close. And Bertie, I'll say this, I made more. I shot more thirty twos and threes to win than I did thirty six sixes and seven to win in my career. And you know, I just I just fueled on trying to go low on the last night hole that just you know, I was a way I like to be in that position. You know, whether you either had a lead or you could catch somebody for the lead. I like to kill, I guess, And you know the sad thing was my brother in law, God Blessing. Bruce Lepski played extremely well and he was I guess leading. Maybe he was or tied with the leader. Maybe I had a shot ahead of him and on seventeen, but he hit a threewood on sixteen on the far five went in the water and I think he made bogie there. Let's see his two in three up four. I think he did make six and I can't remember, but anyway, and I ended up winning by a couple of shots. I don't know if it was over Bruce or Brad Bryant. There were several guys that were right there in the end. Scott Simpson was there, but in that terrible I can't even tell you who I played with on Sunday. I think I played with Scott and Brad maybe, but because I would get in the zone and I didn't even think about anybody around me anything going on. I was just thinking about hitting every shot as close as I could hit it and playing aggressive, and I was always a very very aggressive player and ball striker. There was never a pen I wouldn't shoot at. I can tell you that, you.

00:23:26
Speaker 2: Know, yeah, that helps on that eighteenth hole. So tell me a little about the post victory celebration. You of course described it a little bit. But what was it like being in that water? Were you concerned at all about wildlife?

00:23:41
Speaker 1: No? In fact, I had asked Pete Dyer. I asked to ask Alison Pete on Friday, because, as I said, I had already was crazy enough that I jumped in the Mensis Open in seventy I mean in eighty one, I jumped in the lake there when I won the Mensis Open. And that's a long story why I did that. But when we got to the players and everybody was just screaming in the locker room, and so by Friday I knew I was hitting the ball unbelievable, and I just figured, heck, I mean, you shoot around two or three hundred par, are you're gonna win? You know? I guess I shot eight under or something like that, but I knew just a few under par would win. It was definitely like playing a major championship, and I asked Pete and Alice, I said, tell me. I think I saw Alice at lunch and I said, what's the what's the bottom of that lake like? And how deep is that? There are a bunch of stumps and things on there. She said, no, when it we drained it when we built it, and it's just dead flat and it's just sand, hard sand. And that's where they took a lot of the sand out of those lakes to fill, you know, fill the fairways. So uh, but you know, I never realized how high it was. And when I jumped in. After the fact, I go back and look at those videos. Heck, it was about an eight foot off the water. That buck was about eight foot and U it was a pretty big raising, dave, but to be eight foot in the air, but we didn't care. There was so much, so much adrenaline, the emotion of winning. It was an exciting time and it was, you know, a memory I'll never forget. It was. It was as great as winning the US Open, I can tell you.

00:25:18
Speaker 2: I bet yeah. So just one one last detail to clarify. You mentioned that that Alice d I wanted you to haul Pete into the water. If I'm understanding her logic right, it was because there was there was sort of a lot of a little bit of underlying antagonism or maybe not so underlying antagonism toward Pete because of the design, and so that this kind of humorous celebration would would sort of help relieve a little bit of that. Was that? Do you think her idea?

00:25:50
Speaker 1: Oh? Yeah, well it was. It was victriol, It was anger. The players were mad, angry. Uh, they were about to have a revolt. I mean you could use all those words. And it was a big deal politically for Dean and Pete Dye, I can tell you. And there were some really top players that, as I said, hall of fame golfers and didn't like the golf course at all, in fact, missed the cut. Some of the best players. If you go back and look at that field and see who missed the cut and who was playing. Just go go back and look at the last two or three years on the year end money list and then look at that field and see who missed the cut, you would be shocked. And they just didn't like it. It was too hard. And then once you get something that's negative in your mind, you don't like the golf course, you're done. There's no way you're going to play well. And I loved it. I loved every bit of it. I had played it, as I said, in October of nineteen eighty and got to play with Dean Beaman, the guy that created the concept. And Dean was out there every day he was in town, I'm sure, with Pete Dye and Vernon Kelly. Uh, looking at the golf course with Alice and Pete talking about certain strategic things and the little collection areas and the putting areas, and see, Dean had a great short game, so he loved those little collection areas. And then the the summer right after the first year of eighty two, they raised all those bottoms up maybe two feet, at least two feets a lot. I mean two feet is like like I don't even know how to describe to what two feet would mean. It's just it was, uh yeah, and uh, the change the design that much was uh just it's hard to describe. I mean, it's not even the same golf course it was. I'm telling you, you're gonna ask Dean Beam and he's still alive. Pete's dead, but you're gonna ask anybody. And Jack Nicholas made a comment, he said, it's a great course if you like to have to hit a six iron and landed on the hood of a Volkswagen and make it stop. And there was only a couple of people could do that. Jack was one of them. And I was a pretty damn good bass striker. I could hit a high cut and make it stop. And that's what you had to do. You had to hit the ball up in the air and spin it with those Ballota balls. And I was, you know, talented enough could do that. It doesn't mean I was better than everybody else, That's just what the course called for. And I was, you know, I was the top ten player, so heck I had you know, I had every reason to win. But you know, it was it was really it was I'll say it again, it was really a destiny. I just knew I was gonna win. It wasn't It wasn't even a thought in my head. You know, I knew it all along. Right, Well, think about this, I met I met Pete and Alice die in nineteen seventy four, and I had just won the US Amateur in seventy four. I was totally unknown. Nobody knew who I was from. I had never played in the State Amateur, played in it one time and won it, did not play in the Florida State Juniors. Was a college golferd Alabama, third year of college, and Andy Bean convinced me to play in the Florida Amateur I wanted, which invited me to play the World Amateur with Curtis Strange, who was world class. Gary Coch was world class, and George Burns was world class. So I got invited to go to Costa the compo, to this crazy golf course in lo and behold it was a crazy guy named Pete Die And I met Pete, and I met Peebee, his son who was still a good friend of mine, and Alice So and then I played that spring at hilton Head in April of it might have been March. I think it was in April April of seventy five, right around the Master's time. We played at hilton Head. We could have been before or after in those days. I don't remember because they've kind of flipped it around over the last forty years. But anyway, Pete was there at hilton Head. In fact, he was building a golf course called Long Cove, and I watched Pete build Long Cove. Guys like Bobby Weed actually worked on Long Cove, who was the guy that I worked with to build that what's called Dyes Valley. Isn't that crazy?

00:30:10
Speaker 2: Oh yeah.

00:30:11
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of juju, as they say, a lot of good things that went on with that. And in the fact that my grandparents, all my grandparents were living in Jacksonville. My mama's father had passed away, but my grandparents were there, and the fact my dad had grown up in Jacksonville. That whole crew of people down at Panavidra and his father was an original member. My dad was born in twenty six, and that's about right when my grandfather was about twenty four years old, maybe it was twenty eight, joined San Jose. He was an original member at San Jose twenty six or twenty eight, somewhere around then. And then Pana Beedra got built in thirty two and opened in like thirty three or something, thirty thirty one, thirty two, thirty three, and really kind of a crazy story. But my family is uh uh, you know, Jacksonville family. So it made it even better that I won in Jacksonville from my parents and my grandparents.

00:31:08
Speaker 2: And as you know, Pete Dye recently passed away. Alice d passed away last year. Overall, how how will you remember them? Obviously you you had known them for a very long time. What do you hope people will remember about them?

00:31:24
Speaker 1: Well, that they were very, very wonderful givers. They they had their own style of how they lived and traveled. They were great mentors to people. You know, Pete built four golf excuse me, five golf courses at Costata Compo And ironically now the last three years our company, my company has been involved with those five golf courses. We sort of taken on the role to keep the integrity the esthetics of the architecture and agronomics there. I go to Aksaa Kamp, I'm going next week down there. In fact, I go, you know, go down there a lot. And so it's a great honor to have met Pete Die as a twenty one year old kid. And now I'm sort of stepped in his place at one of his favorite places, and that's where he died. In fact, I'm not even sure his body's back yet. I know they had he was to be cremated. You don't have to promote, don't write about this. But he was still in the morgue a week or so after he died because they couldn't get him cremated. He was at La Romana, at the little hospital, and Peebe was down there with him. I saw Perry in February at the golf show the first week of February, and Peebe left that day he died and went up to the Bahamas to a project, and Pete died that day. But I've been very, very close with Pete for the last of god, what's that forty five years, since nineteen seventy five, seventy four, so that was forty five years, forty six years. And he was a great mentor for me building golf holes. So I'm very honored to just be able to try to hold the integrity of his great create creations at costady Compo.

00:33:15
Speaker 2: That's great. Yeah, And you know, I'm a big fan of Kiva Dunes. Actually I've I've played there, and I can kind of see the influence. In fact, if I think about Casa de Compo and think about Kiva Dunes, that you know, it seems like that it seems like you may learn some things from his designs.

00:33:37
Speaker 1: Well, I'm not very smart, but I hang around smart people, so I try to learn as much as I can. And I just try to work hard and try to be a giver and give back to the game. And that's the thing I would say. I remember about Pete and Alice, and that's why it was so much pressure on Alice that day, because she knew how much Pete and Alice given to the game. They didn't build golf courses for the money they gave. They built golf course because because Alice was a great amateur player in her own right. She grew up in Indiana, Indianapolis, and her husband was really a fine amateur player, and they gave so much to the game. I guess Alice was the first woman to sit on the PGA of America board that I remember, and I know she was head of the Architects Society. I mean they were, you know, for a woman, she did on incredible things in a man's world. And of course Pete was a legend. Oh my god, I was telling Pete die stories this morning to a young superintendent. Well he was about forty years old here in Pensacola and he worked at oak Tree, and he worked at the Honors, and Pete built bunch of his courses in Chattanooga and in Oklahoma City. And you know the stories Pete used to tell me about how he got fired by Augie Bush or fired by herb Coher and then they'd hire him back. And I'm sure Dean wanted to fire him a few times. He was quite a character, you know. And you couldn't help belove Pete Dye and Alice was just gosh, she was assault of the earth. She was like a mother to me, I'll tell you. And so I dearly miss them both, dearly miss them both.

00:35:14
Speaker 2: Well, thank you so much for talking to me, Jerry. I really appreciate your time.

00:35:17
Speaker 1: Well, I'll see it the players. I'll be down there. I'll be there Wednesday and Thursday, so I hope to see you.

00:35:22
Speaker 2: Gotcha, all right, thanks so much, talk to you later, all right. If you've been enjoying the Friday podcast, please leave a rating and review in iTunes. Those really do help. And if you'd like to see a visual rendition of the TPC Sagras story, check out our YouTube channel. We have a new video up there called TPC Sagras, the invention of stadium golf. It has great drone footage, some cool historical photos and soundbites from Dean Beeman, Tom Doak and of course Jerry Pate. Thanks for listening, enjoy the Players Championship and we'll see you back here next week