TPC Sawgrass Stadium Course No. 17 island holeTANNEN MAURY
Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. - Twenty-eight years had passed since I last played the TPC Sawgrass Stadium course, the site of the annual PLAYERS Championship. I returned this week for two rounds, and learned again that the Pete Dye creation is not only a challenging course, it's also great fun. It's impossible to lose interest, from the first through the last hole.
The first game, on Tuesday this week, was with Duke Butler, the President of the PGA Tour's Frys.com Open, and John Anderson, the director of development at the World Golf Hall of Fame and Museum down the road in St. Augustine. The second was with Duke, Bob Dickson, a winner of two PGA Tour events and one on the Champions Tour, and their pal Richard Greengrass. How's that for a golfer's name? The name of the course superintendent is Bobby Weed.
Dickson and I had kept in touch over the years. I first met him at the 1970 Canadian Open in London, Ont., where I caddied for him. I continued to caddy for him for two or three tournaments a season for a few years. Dickson, 68, had won the 1967 U.S. and British Amateurs.
A lot came back to me as I played the course. I remembered not only teeing it up there in 1984, but that I'd visited there when the course was being built. Dickson was working for the tour by then. We traipsed around with PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman and Dye in what amounted to a swamp, or at least it felt like that. It's probably the last time I wore hip-hugger boots. Well, it was probably the only time.
Now it was some 30 years later, and the course had long ago proven itself as one of the most interesting tracks in the game for a tournament. The PLAYERS is the PGA Tour's flagship event, and its list of winners at the Stadium course includes many of the game's top players: Jerry Pate, the winner of the first one there, in 1982, Greg Norman, Nick Price, Fred Couples, David Duval, Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Tom Kite. Canada's Stephen Ames dominated the field when he won by six shots in 2006.
The course is most testing when it's fast and firm, which is how PGA Tour officials and Weed want it when the tournament starts on May 10th. It's been so warm all winter in northern Florida that the course is quite lush at the moment. The place was buzzing with activity this week, as workmen assembled spectator stands and hospitality areas, and even a replica between the ninth green and 10th tee of the famous, par-three 17th with its island green. Preparation was intense. A sign on the back tee at the par-five second hole read, "Professional tee closed in preparation for the Players."
We played from the white tees, 6,103 yards. The course is rated 70.9 from there, with a slope of 137. It's plenty tough, and, as I say, it was lush. We had to think our way around every hole, because some of the pin positions weren't accessible from the wrong parts of the fairways.
I missed my drive left on the 324-yard fourth hole in my second round, and had to lay up short of water in front of the green because the hole was cut on the extreme left of the green. There was no way for me to get on the green, let alone anywhere near the hole, from the left rough.
Dickson birdied the 8th, 9th, 10th, and 12th holes. He was four-under par when he hit the island green, or, to be sure, when his ball was in the air and heading for the back of the green. It landed on the back and bounced into the water. He hit the green with his next shot and finished with 70 for the round.
The 17th is one of golf's most dramatic holes. You either love it because of the thrill it offers for a good shot, or hate it because there's no bailout. The hole was playing 118 yards during our first round, and I took a 9-iron. On the tee, I felt some wind in my face, and changed to an 8-iron. The shot looked good. Yeah, right. I airmailed the green into the lake. I went back to a 9-iron and then hit the green. Double-bogey.
I learned my lesson for the second round, and went with the 9-iron to the same pin. Then came the thrill. The ball moved slightly right to left and we all thought it was headed right for the hole. Might this be an ace? I hadn't had one since 1992, when I hit a four-iron into the hole on the 14th at Beacon Hall in Aurora, Ont.
My ball landed two feet short of the hole, and it appeared to then hit the hole and spin out. It was hard to tell. The ball finished inside the leather, and I was conceded my birdie. A near ace on the 17th, sandwiched between pars on the 16th and 18th holes. Life was good.
"You played the TV holes one-under," Duke said of my play on 16, 17, and 18. He meant that television loves these three holes because of how water comes into play and the fact that tens of thousands of spectators surround the players. Anything can happen at any of the three holes.
Some course. It was good to return. As I played 36 holes at the Stadium course, it was easy to understand why it's so popular. It's the PGA Tour's flagship course for its flagship tournament, but it's also open for anybody to play. Don't miss it. And don't miss the island green.
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Lorne Rubenstein has written a golf column for The Globe and Mail since 1980. He has played golf since the early 1960s and was the Royal Canadian Golf Association's first curator of its museum and library at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario and the first editor of Score, Canada's Golf Magazine, where he continues to write a column and features. He has won four first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, one National Magazine Award in Canada, and he won the award for the best feature in 2009 from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada. Lorne has written 12 books, including Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters (2003); A Disorderly Compendium of Golf, with Jeff Neuman (2006); This Round's on Me (2009); and the latest Moe & Me: Encounters with Moe Norman, Golf's Mysterious Genius (2012). He is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame and the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Lorne can be reached at rube@sympatico.ca . You can now follow him on Twitter @lornerubenstein