Celebrity Net Worth values Dye’s estate at $50 million, but even before his success as a one of golf’s premier course architects, he was no stranger to success. Dye was quite the golfer himself, winning the Ohio State High School Golf Championship and medaling in the Ohio State Amateur Golf Championship before joining the US Army in 1944 in the hopes of dismantling enemy bunkers. The war ended before he was sent overseas, so Dye wound up as a greens keeper on Fort Bragg’s base golf course.

From there, he attended Rollins College and started selling insurance, becoming a “million dollar salesman” within a decade. Around the time he won the Indiana State Amateur Championship in 1958, Pete and his wife Alice first designed their first nine hole course, El Dorado, setting the stage for an illustrious career. Jack Nicklaus, who credits Dye with kickstarting his “second career” as a course designer, called him “the most creative, imaginative and unconventional golf course designer I have ever been around.” High praise from a master of the Masters. Soar on, mighty albatross.