Acquired Taste

The pros didn't like the TPC at Sawgrass Stadium Course, but after many changes, it's a hit--if not what Pete Dye had in mind

Island fever: As in the third round of the '04 Players, the 17th is the center of attention.

By Ron Whitten

Photo By Stephen Szurlej

March 18, 2005

In tournament golf, familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, it breeds contentment. Tour players favor returning to the same haunts year after year, probably because the big picture never changes. It takes more than a few new bunkers or back tees to disrupt their comfort level on courses they know intimately, places such as Augusta National, Bay Hill in Orlando or Colonial in Fort Worth.

These days, most tour players also feel that way about the Stadium Course at the Tournament Players Club at Sawgrass, southeast of Jacksonville, Fla., now in its 24th year as permanent site of the Players Championship. With arguably the strongest field of any event each year (uncluttered by amateurs, club professionals or fluke qualifiers from Romania), the Players is the game’s “fifth major” in the minds of many tour players, and the quality of the 25-year-old Stadium Course—the granddaddy of all TPC courses—has had a lot to do with that groundswell.

They didn’t always feel that way. When the Pete Dye-designed course first hosted the event in 1982, the players mostly hated it. It was target golf in the extreme, with firm fairways twisting around water hazards and long stretches of crushed coquina shell, little lumpy greens surrounded by moguls and pot bunkers and, of course, the game’s ultimate bull’s-eye, the now-notorious island-green 17th hole.

J.C. Snead, then the reigning tour curmudgeon, called the course, “90 percent horse manure and 10 percent luck.” Tom Weiskopf told reporters, “It’s like being inside a great big pinball machine.”

But today’s generation of players really likes the course, especially veterans who have seen it evolve from the 1980s. “It’s a wonderful golf course, one of Pete Dye’s best,” says Rocco Mediate. “It’s far better than a lot of courses we play major championships on,” says Mark Calcavecchia.

“Most of the players have grown to like the course more and more,” says Brad Faxon. “I think it helps that we don’t change locations. The Players has grown in popularity because it stays in Jacksonville. The fact the Players Championship doesn’t move around has helped people accept the golf course. If you want to be a good player, you’d better learn to like it.”

It probably also helps that the course has seen many changes over the past two-and- a-half decades, most aimed at making it less quirky and unpredictable in its bounces. Most of the changes were instigated by tour players, who have always acted as if they own the place. (In a sense they do, since the PGA Tour, the non-profit organization of which they’re card-carrying members, does, in fact, own the place.)

A vocal early critic was Tom Watson. “They’ve taken Augusta’s greens and miniaturized them,” he said at the 1982 event. “I take that as a compliment,” Dye responded. “I’ve always thought Augusta’s greens were too big.”

Watson organized a petition drive in the locker room that year, demanding changes to the greens. A year later, a 10-man player committee—including Jack Nicklaus, Hale Irwin, Ed Sneed, Jim Colbert and Ben Crenshaw—toured the course with Dye and PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman and presented a laundry list of alterations. Dye and his crew dutifully carried out the changes, chiefly flattening the greens considerably to make them more receptive. (The greens would be further softened in 1988, when Dye rebuilt them to USGA specifications.) Today, they’re gentle enough to handle green speeds of 12 feet on a Stimpmeter during championship week.

At the behest of the committee, the green on the short par-5 16th was completely replaced. It went from a long, narrow target along a lake’s edge to a wide, deep catcher’s mitt where only a truly bad swing will end up in the drink. Curiously, the committee made no recommendations regarding the island 17th, and today it remains the least-changed hole on the course.