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Teeth of the Dog at Casa de Campo in Dominican Republic to be restored by Jerry Pate Design

Jerry Pate Design will upgrade the playing surfaces and bunkers at a massive Dominican Republic resort.

Casa de Campo, the sprawling destination in the Dominican Republic with three resort golf courses, has announced plans to restore its Pete Dye-designed Teeth of the Dog layout starting in January of 2025.

Teeth of the Dog – named for the small, sharp rocks along the shore – is widely considered one of the best courses in the Caribbean. Opened in 1971, the layout features seven dramatic holes that play tight enough to the ocean to get a player’s socks wet. The course not only was built by the legendary Dye, he lived there with his wife, Alice, for years, and some of his ashes were spread on No. 8 of Teeth of the Dog after he died in 2020.

The restoration will be done by Jerry Pate Design, the company owned by the winner of the 1976 U.S. Open and the 1982 Players Championship. After that latter victory, Pate threw Dye into the water on the new Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass that Dye had recently designed.

The Pete Dye-designed Teeth of the Dog course at Casa de Campo in the Dominican Republic (Courtesy of Casa de Campo/Matthew Majka)

Much of the work to be done at Teeth of the Dog is cosmetic. All tees, fairways and greens will be re-grassed with Dynasty Paspalum, which is ideal for seaside courses, especially one like Teeth of the Dog where ocean spray easily can blow onto the golf holes. The fairways will be sand-capped three inches deep, which promotes firm and bouncy turf ideal for golf.

Pate’s team also will expand the current greens back to their original sizes, with some slight recontouring. All greenside bunkers will be reshaped and expanded to flat bottoms with enhanced faces for a sharper, more dramatic look. Other work includes renovating the cart paths.

Work is expected to be completed by November 2025.

“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 in a media release announcing the restoration. “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.”

Casa de Campo’s Teeth of the Dog in the Dominican Republic (Jason Lusk/Golfweek)

The resort’s other two Dye-designed courses will remain open to guests. The 27-hole Dye Fore course features many holes along incredible jungle cliffs above a river with long views down toward the ocean, while the 18-hole Links course plays through the center of the 7,000-acre property with wider fairways and tricky greens.

The resort as a whole is massive with a world-class marina, a smorgasbord of dining options, a wide assortment of activities ranging from shooting sports to the beach and one of the best beach bars in the world. The property includes an assortment of accommodations ranging from hotel rooms to luxury villas frequently rented by top celebrities.

The updates to Teeth of the Dog will be the first large-scale work to the course since it opened.

“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,“ Gilles Gagon, longtime friend of Dye and the golf director emeritus and senior director of golf sales at the resort, said in the media release. “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.”

A Barbados bucket list that all outdoorsy travelers need to see

Explore the island.

On sunny January days, Brits, Canadians, and other tourists from cooler climes revel in the warmth of Barbados. It’s a welcoming country for visitors.

While Barbados is known as the easternmost Caribbean island, it’s technically in the Atlantic Ocean. The island country is only 21 miles long by 14 miles wide, but there’s plenty to do there on and off the beach. Plus, there’s a surprising amount of geographical diversity for such a small island. The southern and western shores are best for swimmers and beachgoers, while the wilder, hillier eastern coast attracts surfers and cliff walkers. Plan your adventure with this list of the best outdoorsy things to do in Barbados.

See it to believe it: Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw reach deep into their bag of design tricks to make Cabot Saint Lucia play as well as it looks

Best golf views in the world? Cabot Saint Lucia enters that conversation. But how will it play?

Bill Coore doesn’t want to talk about “signature holes.”

That leftover cliché of 1980s course development and marketing has fallen out of favor among many fans of great golf architecture, for good reason. In trying to design one hole that is especially photogenic or memorable, the other 17 might be best left on the cutting room floor.

“We’ve failed, to be quite candid, if we have a signature hole,” said Coore, partner of Ben Crenshaw in designing several of the best modern courses in the world. “To me, that basically is saying that you spent all your efforts on that one hole. You grounded the entire golf course around one hole.”

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Coore admits with a chuckle that he has resorted to subterfuge when presented the question of what is the signature hole at several courses he has routed around the world.

“We’ve actually gone to the reverse sometimes when somebody will ask what’s your signature hole – at least I have, I don’t know that Ben has – but a couple times I have literally picked the most bland hole on the entire course, and I’m talking about photogenically and visually speaking, and said that’s our signature hole right there,” the native of North Carolina said with a laugh.

Instead, Coore wants to lay out courses that flow from hole to hole, never lacking in interest while taking advantage of all the ground has to offer. He’s more concerned about the shots to be played on any given hole, less so with photo ops.

“We think of golf as being a collection of holes that go together and fit together,” he said. “Maybe one or two or three or four are more dramatic than the others, but we don’t think of them as signature holes.”

So what to do with a site such as Cabot Saint Lucia in the Caribbean, home to Coore and Crenshaw’s still-in-development Point Hardy Golf Club? The whole place screams, “Take a picture!” Cliffs rise straight from the Atlantic Ocean with new golf holes perched atop them, waves crashing into white foam below. This is one of Earth’s great meetings of land and sea.

Imagine any of the most scenic seaside golf courses in the world. Cypress Point or Pebble Beach in California, any of the layouts at Bandon Dunes in Oregon, Royal Dornoch and a handful of other Scottish or Irish heavyweights, a slew of Mexican and Caribbean beauties. Point Hardy Golf Club is a match for any of them, as far as visuals and proximity to salt water.

Given such a beautiful tropical site that really has all the makings of a photo shoot, with a mile and a half of see-it-to-believe-it scenery, on what do Coore and Crenshaw narrow their focus to build a golf course bestowed with so much drama?

“Playability, playability, playability,” Coore said.

Really, Bill? Not the point of cliffs jutting into the ocean on this end of the property, or the promontory at the other end? Even Coore smiles as he describes the wow factor of Cabot Saint Lucia, one of several new Cabot Collection properties that will expand the Canadian company’s reach over the next several years from Nova Scotia to the tropics, Scotland, Florida and western Canada.

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“The site is so visually spectacular,” said Coore, whose design credits include such highly ranked layouts as the Sheep Ranch and Bandon Trails at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon, Sand Hills in Nebraska and Cabot Cliffs in Nova Scotia. “Most people will come here and ooh and ah, particularly as you look down the hill or look along the cliff at the shoreline and the ocean. It’s almost beyond description, dramatic. Ben and I are both pretty conservative when it comes to our assessments and descriptions, but you’ll see, it’s just, well …”

His voice trails off as he imagines the cliffs and all the opportunities for superlative golf holes upon them. Then he gets back to the matter at hand and what he considers the primary job of a golf architect, especially at an extreme site such as Point Hardy featuring volcanic hills and rocky ground. Coore has said before that it’s easy to build a hard golf course, and the trick is in designing a fun layout that golfers want to tackle again and again.

“Playability, playability, playability,” he repeats as his mantra. “And trying to create a golf course that doesn’t end up being one that people might come and take photographs of every hole and just a photogenic course, and then they go, ‘Eh, it really wasn’t that much fun; I didn’t enjoy it,’ kind of thing. It would be too extreme, or something. That’s what we’re hoping not to happen. We want to try to create something that they’re going to want to come back and play.”

Photos: Point Hardy Golf Club at Cabot Saint Lucia nears completion, and you need to see it to believe it

See the photos of some of the most visually dramatic oceanside golf holes ever built.

What do you get when you hire the famed design team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw to build a course on one of the most dramatic meetings of land and sea imaginable? Ben Cowan-Dewar, co-founder and CEO of the Canadian-based Cabot Collection, has his answer in the Caribbean nation of St. Lucia.

Scheduled to open in December, Point Hardy Golf Club at Cabot Saint Lucia is perched above the Atlantic Ocean on cliffs that offer a simply ridiculous set of visuals on more than half the club’s 18 holes. Picture any of the most scenic holes anywhere – Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon, Pebble Beach Golf Links or Cypress Point in California, even the original Cabot courses in Nova Scotia as famous examples – and Point Hardy matches them all for you-gotta-be-joking views, proximity to the ocean and pulse-raising golf shots over cauldrons of salt spray.

All the holes at Point Hardy, including the inland holes atop a ridge or playing through a valley, are within sight of the ocean, and eight of them offer a chance to rinse a golf ball in salt water. On a day when the trade winds kick it up a notch, golfers will feel ocean spray at several points along the routing.

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The hard part wasn’t building a dramatic course on the steep ground at the northern tip of the volcanic island. On a recent walk around the course as construction of Point Hardy nears completion, Coore said the toughest part was building golf holes on which the fun factor at least approaches the level of the visuals.

“Playability, playability, playability,” said Coore, who has routed some of the best courses to be constructed in the world over the past 30 years. “It would have been very easy to build a course where the views are incredible but that just wasn’t any fun to play, because the terrain is so steep. The challenge was to make it fun, to make people want to play it again.”

Did the team succeed on that front? Time will tell, and Golfweek will have plenty more on Cabot Saint Lucia in the coming months. In the meantime, just take in the incredible photos below of the two strings of golf holes closest to the ocean at Point Hardy.

Keep in mind with the following photos that the course is still in grow-in and that several holes haven’t been grassed yet, so brown areas on greens and fairways seen in these photos are completely expected as the grass takes root. The bunkers have not yet been filled with sand and appear as natural scrapes in the photos. This is still very much a work in progress.

And to answer a few questions we know are coming:

Point Hardy will allow some versions of public-access play early on as its membership role is filled, with details still being determined. Eventually the course will be at least mostly private.
Yes, it will be expensive compared to most U.S. daily-fee prices. Green fees and stay-and-play options have yet to be set, but don’t expect it to be cheap on a site like this. A vehicular analogy: This course is a Lamborghini full of bravado and pulse-racing moments, not a four-cylinder Kia that simply gets the job done, and the pricing will be along those lines.
Will it be among the best courses in the world? There’s no way to know where it will sit on Golfweek’s Best rankings of top courses in the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America and the Atlantic Islands until our raters visit and offer their scores. But don’t be surprised to see Point Hardy very near the top of that list.
Cabot Saint Lucia includes a housing development, ranging from fairway villas all the way up to mansions priced at millions of dollars. Besides the golf, there will be a beach club in a gorgeous bay and a full slate of luxury amenities. There are no plans for a traditional hotel. Accommodations will be available as rental luxury residences and villas.
Point Hardy Golf Club will play to 6,616 yards with a par of 71.

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Golfweek’s Best 2023: Top 50 courses in Mexico, Caribbean, Atlantic islands and Central America

The 2023 Golfweek’s Best ranking of tropical courses include plenty of water views.

Welcome to the Golfweek’s Best 2023 list of top golf courses in Mexico, the Caribbean, the Atlantic islands and Central America.

The hundreds of members of our course-ratings panel continually evaluate courses and rate them based on our 10 criteria. They also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings on each course are averaged to produce a final, cumulative rating. Then each course is ranked against other courses in the region.

This list focuses on the golf courses themselves, not the resorts as a whole or other amenities. Each golf course included is listed with its average rating from 1 to 10, its location, architect(s) and the year it opened.

*New or returning to list

Other popular Golfweek’s Best lists include:

Casa de Campo: The definition of oceanside golf in the Dominican Republic

Pete Dye’s Teeth of the Dog splashes salt spray into your face as you tackle seven holes laid out tight to the Caribbean Sea.

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You can see the water early. It’s the Caribbean Sea, blue and perfect, and of course there’s no missing it. Visitors likely saw plenty of it on the flight to this island nation.

Before a player ever sets off the first tee of Teeth of the Dog, the sea is seemingly right there in view from the main Casa de Campo clubhouse, down and across the ninth and 18th holes. There are glimpses of blue on the early holes. It’s oh-so-close on the third and fourth holes, just a skosh more than a hundred yards away, providing a taste of salt on the air to make you think you know what it means to play golf alongside the ocean.

But it’s not until you step onto the fifth tee box that you experience the sensory overload of playing golf directly alongside the sea. Salt spray. Trade winds. Palm trees. A tiny green perched above the waves – take one too many steps backward while reading a putt, and you might make a splash. It’s almost too much for the golf-travel obsessed.

No. 5 at Casa de Campo’s Teeth of the Dog in the Dominican Republic (Gabe Gudgel/Golfweek)

Right there on that tee box is where many golfers learn what it means to play tight to the ocean. Not playing near the water with a restricted view through some condo towers or mansions, not on a cliff high above the waves, not on the inland side of a beach dune with the wet stuff a full wedge away. Instead, this fifth tee shot is an incredible introduction to swinging so close to the sea that you might get your socks wet – a real possibility if your approach shot falls short and you go for a bold recovery from the rock-strewn beach.

“I remember the first time I played Teeth of the Dog and I pulled up to No. 5,” said Robert Birtel, director of golf operations at the sprawling Dominican resort, “and I was like ‘Whoa, what’s going on here?’ ”

What’s going on is up to 176 yards of bravado, beauty and visual intimidation. It’s the late Pete Dye at his finest – an unforgettable golf shot set in a postcard.

And it’s just the beginning. No. 5 is only the first of seven holes on Dye’s Teeth of the Dog – so named because the sharp rocks along the shore called to mind a canine’s canines – where it’s not only possible you blast a ball into the sea, it’s frequently surprising if you don’t.

Golfweek’s Best courses 2022: Mexico, Caribbean, Atlantic islands and Central America

These courses top Golfweek’s Best rankings in Mexico, the Caribbean, the Atlantic Islands and Central America.

Welcome to the Golfweek’s Best 2022 list of top golf courses in Mexico, the Caribbean, the Atlantic islands and Central America.

Other Golfweek’s Best lists include: