Thoughts From Sawgrass

No. 17 isn't golf's first island green -- just the excruciating, captivating standard for the concept

By Bill Fields
Photo By Stephen Szurlej May 16, 2008

For fans of strategic golf architecture who love options and angles and loathe you-must-hit-it-here! holes, No. 17 on the Stadium course at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., is anathema. A player gets as many choices on the 137-yard, island-green par 3 as a prisoner gets for dinner. His ball is dry or wet, and he has passed or failed. That said, as demonstrated again last week at the Players championship -- where it did its usual job of becoming part of the plot and, in fact, was the scene of the decisive action in the playoff won by Sergio Garcia over Paul Goydos -- the hole is almost beyond type, a singular sensation in tournament golf.

On the large hillside to the left of the 17th, one can smell cigars and sunscreen, hot dogs and perfume. If you had a couple of good hound dogs and pointed them toward the tee, you could probably pick up the scent of anxiety, too. For four days every spring, the party-and-picnic crowd that gathers to see and be seen witnesses some of golf's most white-knuckle moments. The world's best golfers are taken to task by a short little one-shotter whose moods literally shift with the wind, corrupting gusts that can upset their spirit as much as confuse their club selection.

Golf's water hazards have come a long way since the first one, which came to be when the Old Course at St. Andrews evolved on land where the Swilcan Burn meanders toward the sea, tightly guarding the first green along its way. Bernard Darwin, who weighed in astutely on things golf for decades, called the burn "an apparently paltry little streamlet," but acknowledged its surprising ferocity to a golfer who isn't careful. "It is an ingloriously little stream," he wrote. "We could easily jump over it were we not afraid of looking foolish if we fell in, and yet it catches an amazing number of balls."

The Swilcan Burn remained the most famous water hazard in the game for a long time until being supplanted by a bit of the Pacific Ocean on the 16th hole at Cypress Point and Rae's Creek on No. 12 at Augusta National. Cypress' par 3, with its lengthy carry over the ocean, came to be seen as the ultimate go-for-broke, make-or-break, swim-or-drown hole despite a sliver of land that affords a two-shot strategy for the timid or the weak. Nearly everyone, hall of famer to hacker, has the horsepower to reach Augusta's most daunting water hole, but clearing the creek and escaping unscathed is not as easy as it looks because of the extremely thin green above which blow the most mysterious breezes in golf.

The 17th hole at the Stadium course is neither as beautifully brawny as Cypress' 16th nor as challengingly seductive as Augusta's 12th. Larry Dorman of The New York Times once described the shallow (four-foot deep) body of water as "Lake Balata" when golf balls the pros used were still of wound construction with soft covers. Recreational players deposit more than 120,000 balls a year in the lake; they are eventually retrieved by a scuba diver who must not only check that his tank is working properly but that the resident alligator is otherwise distracted.

Tournament week also is responsible for contributing its share of balls, including from caddies, who, in a long-running tradition, get to take a crack at the green in the practice rounds. Last Wednesday, in the Bruce Edwards Memorial Caddie Competition, Jeff Willett, who caddies for Brian Bateman, won a laptop computer and a 42-inch plasma television for the best shot by the loopers, inside two feet, from the 128-yard middle tees.

Jim Colbert, who competed in six Players at TPC Sawgrass, used to try to appease the golf gods by tossing four balls in the lake before the tournament began. No ball finding the water before Thursday morning may have angered anyone more than the 8-iron course designer Pete Dye flew over the green in the pro-am in 1982 on the eve of the inaugural Players on the layout he created out of swampland. Actually it wasn't so much the ball he hit in the water but the one that came rolling between his legs seconds later. "Deane [Beman] had it set up," Dye recalled last week. "He had a pretty little girl on the tee with golf balls. I was in between clubs; I couldn't get there with a 9-iron and an 8-iron was too much. After I knocked it over, here came this ball rolling between my legs. I was livid. But I knocked the next one on."