Golfers say they like playable courses, but Pete Dye knows better. He thinks that we’re all masochists at heart so he builds them as tough as he can. There’s a reason why the tee sheets at the two ultra-hard Stadium courses at TPC Sawgrass and PGA West are full pretty much year round. When it comes to golf, we love being miserable.

One of his newest courses, Heron Point by Pete Dye at the Sea Pines Resort on Hilton Head Island, S.C., is classic Dye. (It’s his third course on the island, along with career-catapulting Harbour Town and perennial favorite Long Cove). Heron Point is actually a $9 million renovation of the Sea Marsh course, a George Cobb design that opened in 1964, but the only thing the two courses share is a footprint. Though the routing didn’t change much, the shot values sure did. Dye turned a flat, featureless course into a 7,103-yard rollicking roller-coaster ride with liberal uses of mounds, swales and sand. On water holes, he used pressured-treated timbers separated by grass strips for very distinctive and attractive greenside bulkheads.

Of course, even Pete will admit he sometimes goes a little overboard, so he recently returned to Heron Point for a week to oversee tweaks to 13 holes. He softened the course’s playing characteristics by expanding greens and removing swales on them to keep balls from running down banks to chipping areas well below the putting surface. The areas around the greens were also raised. In addition, he removed bunkers and mounds and added more forward tees.

The result is a course that’s sill very challenging and appealing to the eye, but one that plays faster and isn’t unfair to resort guests. “Everyone is very happy with the changes,” reports Cary Corbitt, Sea Pines’ director of sports. “Pete did a wonderful job of softening the edges without changing the look of it. There’s no course in the Lowcountry with this feel.”