The new and improved Players Stadium Course gives the event the personality it has always needed, because it's the golf course Pete Dye has always wanted. From the time Dye first scribbled its routing on a cocktail napkin, he wanted the course to play like an Old Country links. After all, it was to be created from a swamp just a mile inland from the Atlantic, with plenty of available sand once he drained the swamp.
But TPC Sawgrass soon experienced grass-roots problems -- literally. Its Florida location dictated the use of warm-weather Bermuda grasses, but they were dormant and the color of straw in March, terribly unphotogenic for television, and, because they weren't growing, no divots would fill in. So the course was always overseeded with ryegrass, making it green and pretty but soft and wet. It was impossible to mow fairways, greens and chipping areas tight and fast. Worse, in late spring and early summer, when tourists arrived to play the course they'd seen on television, the course was always in miserable shape, with the emerging Bermuda competing with the dying ryegrass, forming patchy, clumpy conditions. The rye would decay and end up in the root structure, an ever-increasing layer of muck that made tees and fairways even more spongy.
DURING (left): At the par-4 seventh hole, the back-left greenside bunker was replaced by a chipping area. AFTER (right): Oaks, pines and three bunkers were added in the right rough at No. 7, and the lake bank was regraded.
GOLF COURSE LIPOSUCTION
Moving the tournament to May offered Dye and longtime superintendent Fred Klauk the opportunity to install links-like characteristics. But first they had to perform golf course liposuction. The top layer of turfgrass was peeled off, and the six inches of organic muck beneath it was scooped out and hauled away, 24,000 tons in all. Then the equivalent of seven miles of dump trucks rolled in, and a six-inch layer of sand was spread across each hole, after subsurface drainage had been installed, to quickly dry everything in the event of a cloudburst. A state-of-the-art air-circulation system was installed beneath each green, allowing Klauk to suck water out on soggy, wet days, or pump cool air to the roots on hot, humid ones.
For greens, Dye selected the latest turfgrass innovation, MiniVerde Ultradwarf Bermuda, as fine-bladed as any bent-grass green, so it can be mowed as short as bent. It's never grainy, and it's also the rare Bermuda that keeps its green color throughout the winter.
The hybrid Bermuda on tees, fairways and chipping areas was upgraded; for a contrasting rough, workers mixed it with old-fashioned Common Bermuda, a gnarly combination when allowed to grow to three inches.
None of the new turfgrass will be overseeded. The course can remain tan in the off-season because it will naturally turn green by early May in time for the championship. As for wear-and-tear from routine play over the winter months, the course will be closed for play three weeks before the Players Championship, ample time to repair scars.
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