My preview of the Players Championship and the review of TPC Sawgrass are up at Cybergolf.com. Here’s the link.
Here’s also a snippet for you:
“It was the age of Nicklaus, but unlike the flash-in-the-pan rivals of Tiger Woods, Nicklaus had a pantheon of Hall of Famers to battle each week: Watson, Seve, Johnny Miller, Weiskopf, Crenshaw, Trevino, and Hale Irwin, to name a few. With television making them stars and household names, professional golfers were no longer just “gypsies who used deodorant” – as Dan Jenkins once called them. Purses were fattening as well, and for every mom-and-pop Tour stop in Akron, Greensboro and Memphis, there was also a luxurious resort or country club waiting in Hawaii, SoCal and Fort Worth.
Emboldened by the economic boom, Tour commissioner Deane Beman embarked on a plan to forever change the landscape of tournament golf. Looking for a new and permanent home for the Players Championship, the flagship event of the PGA Tour, Beman ordered the purchase of 415 acres of desolate gator- and-moccasin infested swampland near Jacksonville, Fla., for one dollar.
That single dollar purchased a sea change in golf, but not the way Beman expected.
“Beman was trying to make the Players Championship a major,” explains one prominent golf journalist. “None of the four majors is operated by the Tour, and the Players has the strongest field of the PGA Tour-operated events. So Beman got the most controversial designer of the generation – Pete Dye – and sent that mad scientist into the lab to design Frankenstein’s golf course. The idea was to build a monster of a course, couple it with the best field in the year, and send out a media blitz that this was a fifth major.”
Pete Dye’s Stadium Course at the TPC Sawgrass – just “Sawgrass” to its friends – rose from the swamp, and did change the course of golf history. Dye’s work is certainly iconic. With its island green 17th hole, the course had an instant trademark. But it also became the first course to feature natural-grass amphitheaters around greens and enormous mounds flanking the fairways to seat spectators. Moreover, for good or ill, Sawgrass inspired a generation of target golf courses throughout the world, and gave birth to a nationwide network of stadium courses designed for tournament play and spectator accommodation, over 20 more TPC facilities in all. Most importantly, Sawgrass was public. Back then it was one of the few Tour courses golf fans could play: an everyman’s Augusta National.”
Just one thing…my editor made a change that’s actually a mistake. I wrote in my draft “Disco battled KISS on your radio dial.” For some reason, I think Jeff thinks KISS is disco, because he switched it to “Disco blared KISS on your radio dial…”
When I repped Ominous Seapods back in the day, their manager was the former manager of KISS, so I understand the nuance between disco and rock:):) Heck, some people think KISS saved music from disco…but that’s a discussion for another day. Enjoy the piece, and get ready for roller derby, hockey, the Travis Invitational, Connecticut National, and Pebble Beach.
