The Ocean Course, Long Absent From Golf’s Spotlight, Is Back

The masterpiece on Kiawah Island, designed by Pete and Alice Dye to be as challenging as it is breathtaking, has not been the site of a major tournament in almost a decade.

KIAWAH ISLAND, S.C. — The P.G.A. Championship is returning this week to the Ocean Course, a daunting place rich in golf lore. Despite the course’s almost spiritual status in the sport — “The Legend of Bagger Vance” was filmed there — this will be only the second major championship held on the site. Pete Dye, who with his wife, Alice, began work on the course at Kiawah Island in 1989, never questioned whether his creation would be one of a kind. In 2012, as he walked the course one quiet evening a month before the P.G.A. Championship that summer, he stopped to wave a hand across the windswept landscape, where the crash of ocean waves is an ever-present soundtrack. “It is the only course we built that walks and swims,” Dye said. “It is of the land and it is of the water.”