When PGA TOUR Commissioner Deane Beman conceived the idea for a new event he called the Tournament Players Championship (you know it today as THE PLAYERS Championship), he had a hard time finding a place on the schedule for his new creation. His solution? Take the first-year event to an existing city already hosting a PGA TOUR tournament and go from there.
In the first year of THE PLAYERS, Atlanta Country Club was the site, the long-time host of the Atlanta Golf Classic. Year two saw the tournament move to Fort Worth, Texas, and venerable Colonial Country Club, the Colonial National Invitation going on a one-year hiatus. Year three? Same thing, but at Inverarry Country Club in South Florida.
Sawgrass Move
In 1977, Beman moved the tournament to Sawgrass Country Club in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, supplanting the Greater Jacksonville Open on the schedule. Instead of the tournament moving away from Sawgrass in 1978, Beman had found a home for his tournament inasmuch as he had grand designs on the TOUR moving its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to the sleepy North Florida enclave, which it did, in 1979.
The thing was, though, while Beman wanted Ponte Vedra Beach as the tournament’s permanent host city, he didn’t see its newest home as the future. Beman had his eye on another—how should we say?—more interesting piece of real estate.
$1 Purchase
Across A1A from Sawgrass Country Club, Beman had taken a parcel of land donated to the TOUR for $1, he hired architect Pete Dye and asked Dye to turn swampland at the time called Innlet Beach into THE PLAYERS’ permanent home with a snazzy new name—the Tournament Players Club at Sawgrass, eventually shortened to TPC Sawgrass. After five playings of THE PLAYERS at Sawgrass Country Club, the tournament made its move in 1982, and it’s called TPC Sawgrass home since.
Not everybody immediately embraced Dye’s design. Some players felt the newly built course was unfair, especially around the greens, and they weren’t shy about making their feelings known. Tom Kite and Tom Watson, among many others, took painstaking time to detail their thoughts about every hole, especially the greens that they mailed to Beman. In a letter to the commissioner, Kite wrote, “As I mentioned before, I think that the concept of the greens at the Players Club is all wrong in that the greens all slope off in every direction to such a degree that it is impossible to hit a shot and know until it reacts to the green which way it will roll.”
Renovations and Revisions
Beman, relying on his experience, as a player, read and listened to all the feedback and eventually created a committee of players—Jim Colbert, Ben Crenshaw, Hale Irwin, Jack Nicklaus, and Ed Sneed—to work with Dye on renovations and revisions following the 1983 tournament. The greens became less severe, and Dye narrowed some fairways. The course, bit by bit, became more refined looking, as well, the built-in grass bleachers surrounding some tee boxes (No. 1, for example) eventually going away primarily because of maintenance issues (try cutting a tiered, grass lawn every few days). The par-3 17th, with its peninsula green, became one of the most-famous holes in golf and, like Augusta National, the entire course developed into a well-known venue, one fans knew well, as the tournament kept coming back year after year.
Now in its 42nd year of hosting the tournament (the TOUR canceled the 2020 PLAYERS due to the global pandemic), TPC Sawgrass has come a long way from its infancy when Nicklaus famously said in 1983, “I never was much good at playing 4-iron shots to the hoods of cars. That’s about the size of the targets you’re aiming at on these greens.”
After his comment that brought a laugh to the assembled media, Nicklaus paused and said, “Eventually, this is going to turn out to be a fine, fine golf course.”
This was first published in Essential Golf – you can read the complete magazine here.