Sawgrass overhaul creates tougher test for players

By Jerry Potter, USA TODAY
It was time to get The Stadium Course of TPC Sawgrass back on course.
Golf course architect Pete Dye’s creation, after 27 years of tinkering, had become like a priceless piece of furniture that had been repainted until it wasn’t a collector’s item.


Instead of having a surface that was firm and fast; it was soft and slow. Instead of rough that gave players options and played with their minds, it had rough that called for a wedge back to the fairway.
“I don’t think this was what Pete had in mind,” says Davis Love III, one of the many touring pros who design courses. “It had become target golf. Pete wanted a course where the ball ran in the fairways. He wanted you to have to work the ball off the mounds around the greens. If you didn’t play the right shot, you couldn’t score.”
The return of the Stadium Course to its natural state is complete at a cost to the PGA Tour of more than $50 million, counting a new clubhouse. The goal was to present a course that is firm, fast and fair, but the judgment on that won’t be made until the world’s best golfers size it up beginning today in The Players Championship.
“Firm, fast conditions are the hardest test in golf,” says Tiger Woods, who won The Players in 2001. “You have to pay attention to the trajectory of the shots. You have to shape the shots because when the fairways are firm and the ball is running, marginal shots will not stay in the fairway.”
Among Woods’ 12 major championship victories is last year’s British Open at Royal Liverpool in England. It was a firm, fast course, and Woods hit a driver only once in four rounds, shot 18 under par and won by two strokes.
Last month Zach Johnson won The Masters at Augusta National, the first time in 10 years the tournament had been played without rain. It was the first dry test of the course since it had been lengthened in 2016, and the course’s fairways and greens were noticeably harder than usual.
“With the exception of the rough,” says Johnson, who won at 1-over par and outlasted approximately 12 players who were in contention in the final round, “Augusta National played like a U.S. Open course. In those conditions there are more factors: Will the ball run in the fairway? Will it release on the green? You don’t have control over the ball that you have in soft conditions.”
The U.S. Golf Association is best known for setting up its courses as firm and fast in the hope the U.S. Open will be the best examination of a player’s skills. Most years the Open setup is right on the edge of fairness, and sometimes it goes over the edge.
In the 2004 Open at Shinnecock Hills on Long Island, N.Y., the conditions became so firm that by the final round, the seventh hole, a par-3, was unfair. Officials watered the green between groups, but it was still too firm and too fast to hold a reasonable shot.
PGA Tour officials don’t think they’ll ever send Sawgrass over the edge of fairness because of changes built into the renovation designed to give them more control.
“I’ve done some restoration projects,” Love says, “but I’ve never sand-capped a whole golf course.”
Dye returned to offer his advice, and construction crews stripped 6 inches of organic muck from all 18 fairways. It was replaced with 26,600 tons of sand and covered with 2.6 million square feet of new grass or 19 acres of sod.
New drainage and irrigation systems were installed, using 116,600 linear feet of underground pipe. Each green was rebuilt and equipped with SubAir, a system of pipes and tunnels that allows course superintendent Fred Klauk to pull moisture from the surface of the green or push oxygen up through it in hot weather. As a result, Klauk can largely control the conditions of the greens, keeping them dry, consistent and fast.
“We could get the golf course firm and fast in the years when it didn’t rain,” Klauk says, “but when it did rain, as it got older it took longer to dry out.”
The sand base will drain water faster so the course dries faster. The new irrigation system can pump three times the water that was possible in the old system. That might come into play this year because the early forecast calls for sporadic thundershowers before and during the tournament.
The whole philosophy of firm and fast is aimed at challenging the modern player, whose conditioning, talent and equipment options have made the PGA Tour a place where power often is more important than control.
Some major courses, such as 7,445-yard Augusta National, have opted to add distance. This year, when the weather was dry, The Masters presented a challenge of both distance and control. The Tour chose to limit the distance at The Players for more demands on accuracy.
Sawgrass will play about 200 yards longer than it did 10-12 years ago, when it measured 6,857 yards.
“The length won’t be the issue that the grass will be,” says Fred Funk, who won The Players in 2016. “A course could play 9,000 yards and the scores could be lights out in wet conditions, but it could play 6,600 yards and the scores could go high in dry conditions.”
The Bermuda grass is known as Miniverdi, a strain Klauk had been testing at Sawgrass for about seven years. He says it’s more durable than other forms of grass.
The Bermuda rough will present another test for the players because it will give them more options for hitting shots to the greens when they miss the fairways. However, it will force them to determine the type of ball flight they might get once they hit the shot.
“Chipping wise, to these greens, with the Bermuda, it will make it that much more difficult,” says Tour pro Frank Lickliter II, who lives 250 yards from the Stadium Course’s third hole. “Guys are really going to have to understand their wedge games.”
The change from cool-weather rye grass to Bermuda was made possible when the Tour, as part of the FedEx Cup schedule, switched the date from March to May.
To complement the changes in the course, the Tour built a 77,000 square foot clubhouse, at a cost of $32 million, to make the facility the crown jewel of the 28-course Tournament Players Club network.
“It’s so big,” says pro Charles Howell, “I can see it from my backyard in Orlando.”
The Mediterranean Revivalist architecture will add a mark of distinction for a club best known for having a par 3 with an island green.
“We designed it to be iconic, majestic and timeless,” says David Pillsbury, president of the Tour’s golf course properties.
It provides an impressive backdrop to a club and a tournament that has been trying to gain status for decades.
Former commissioner Deane Beman created the tournament in 1974 and made Sawgrass its home in ’77, with the intent of creating another major championship to add to The Masters, the U.S. Open, the British Open and the PGA Championship.
It has not been accepted as the fifth major, but the latest changes certainly are major.