Restoration with bite

Casa de Campo Resort & Villas in La Romana, Dominican Republic, announced its Pete Dye-designed Teeth of the Dog course will undergo a restoration project led by Jerry Pate Design beginning January 2025.

Since opening in 1971, Teeth of the Dog has become widely known as one of the top courses in the Caribbean. Dye’s design hallmarks are all showcased on the dramatic seaside layout, including railroad ties, vast waste areas, peninsula greens and tees, hand-sculpted putting surfaces, and an assortment of pot bunkers. The seven oceanfront holes are astoundingly beautiful, causing Dye to famously quip: “I created 11 holes and God created seven.”

Starting on Jan. 20, 2025, Pate and his team will work on modernizing and updating the course with an assortment of course enhancements, including regrassing playing surfaces with Pure Dynasty Paspalum. In addition to installing Pure Dynasty Paspalum on tees, fairways and greens, three inches of sand will be added to the fairways before seeding for improved playability and irrigation.

Other work will include:

• Restoring and slightly recontouring the surrounding edges of greens
• Reshaping and expanding greenside bunkers to flat bottoms while enhancing faces to offer a more dramatic appearance
• Installing new concrete on cart paths and adding new rock-path curbing around tees and greens

“I have long admired Pete Dye as he was a creative genius who transformed the modern game of golf with his immense talent and imagination and no course typifies that more than Teeth of the Dog,” Pate said. “The layout is truly one of the best in the world, and our job is to preserve Pete’s lifeworks and put a bit more ‘bite’ back into Teeth of the Dog.”

Teeth of the Dog will reopen for resort and member play in November 2025.

“We will miss Teeth of the Dog for most of 2025, but we are excited and honored to take Pete’s masterpiece to a new level and completely restore the integrity of his legendary course to new heights,“ said Gilles Gagon, longtime friend of Dye and golf director emeritus and senior director of golf sales at Casa de Campo Resort & Villas. “With all the many years Pete and I worked together, I know he would be beyond pleased with the upcoming work to be done on the course that ignited his stellar career and legacy as one of the world’s premier golf architects.”     

The two other Dye-designed layouts at Casa de Campo, Dye Fore and The Links, will remain open throughout 2025.  

“We are honored to assist in securing the incredible legacy Pete Dye created with Teeth of the Dog as we ready the course to be enjoyed by golfers for decades to come,” Casa de Campo President Andres Pichardo Rosenberg said. “Pete not only created his classic Teeth of the Dog layout for us, but his Dye Fore and Links creations are golfing gems that also stand testament to his exceptional body of work.”