Design Notebook: A TPC Sawgrass Wishlist

Hello and welcome back to Design Notebook, where we, like Lucas Glover, are wondering when someone will “stand up” for PGA Tour pros “for a change.” Purses worth $20 million, luxury courtesy cars, fine cuisine in player dining… when will the abuses stop?

In this month’s edition of DN, I outline my hopes and dreams for TPC Sawgrass, venue of this week’s Players Championship.

A TPC Sawgrass Wishlist

I wouldn’t blame you for not knowing that Love Golf Design—the firm led by two-time Players champion Davis Love III, his brother Mark Love, and lead architect Scot Sherman—is consulting at the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass. The only detailed discussion of this commission that I’ve heard is in Andy Johnson’s interview with Love and Sherman in this January 22 episode of the Fried Egg Golf Podcast. Love’s and Sherman’s comments on TPC Sawgrass make me cautiously optimistic about the future of the course. It’s particularly striking to hear Love put his finger on why Pete Dye’s best-known design has lost some of its original edge: “A bunch of us tour players got involved and let it get dumbed down.” Huh! Also, amen.

The PGA Tour deserves a lot of credit for branching out from its own design services team to work with Love Golf Design. Both Love and Sherman are deeply knowledgeable about Dye’s architecture. Love had remarkable success at Dye’s courses during his playing career, winning at TPC Sawgrass twice and at Harbour Town Golf Links five times. Sherman worked for the Dye family in the early 1990s.

Sherman, who recently completed a restoration of Dye’s Delray Dunes Golf and Country Club in Florida, believes that Dye’s designs deserve the kind of historical study usually reserved for older courses. In 2021, he told Geoff Shackelford in an interview in The Quadrilateral, “I do think folks have a realization, just like Ross restorations or Raynor restorations or Devereux Emmet restorations or on down the list: Pete Dye is on that Mount Rushmore.”

Exactly what Love Golf Design will do at TPC Sawgrass—or, more pertinently, what the PGA Tour will allow them to do—remains to be seen. In the meantime, here’s my own four-point wishlist:

1. Restore Dye’s green designs

“At TPC Sawgrass, they’ve lost some of [the] severeness in the greens,” Love acknowledged on the podcast. He went on to say that he showed leaders at the PGA Tour vintage photos of the course. “And they go, ‘What hole is that?’ I go, ‘Yeah, that’s the problem. You don’t know what hole it is because it’s so different.”

Dye’s original greens at the Stadium Course were smallish and domed, with sharp slopes separating pinnable areas and steep runoffs on the sides. They were altered at least twice before the course was even four years old. First, as former PGA Tour commissioner Dean Beman recalled in this 2020 episode of Fried Egg Stories, many of Dye’s contours were tamped down before the 1982 Players Championship, the first held at the new course. Then, after the 1983 Players, several greens were further softened, based on recommendations (read: ultimatums) from a player committee led by Ben Crenshaw. These changes started a trend at TPC Sawgrass that continued over the next four decades.

Love and Sherman seem eager to reintroduce some severity to the course. “You have to challenge the really good players with the shots into the green,” Love said. “[They] have to hit the correct shot, land it in the correct place.” Restoring some boldness to TPC Sawgrass’s greens—to the extent possible, given modern green speeds—wouldn’t just make the course harder. It would also heighten the importance of position in the fairway, shot-shaping on approaches, and precision in recovery play. These dynamics would bring back the strategic tension that many 21st-century editions of the Players Championship have lacked.

2. Reverse the “Augusta-fication” process

The PGA Tour’s current model for the presentation of the Stadium Course is obviously Augusta National: verdant turf everywhere, bright white sand, crisp lines, pine straw under the trees, and non-indigenous flower patches used as accents. Forty years ago, TPC Sawgrass was far more rustic in appearance. With its scraggly native areas and rough-edged bunkers, it resembled Pinehurst No. 2 more than it did the home of the Masters. This was intentional on Dye’s part. According to Tom Doak, Dye told him during the 1982 Players, “Everything here is the dead opposite of Augusta—on purpose.”

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Love seems aware of how maintenance practices at TPC Sawgrass have evolved. “It did get nice and neat,” he said on the podcast with Andy. “It’s a little too nice and neat. Around the tee boxes, [this is] fine because we’re moving a bunch of people around a big golf tournament. But as we get closer to the green, bringing the Pete Dye back into it is going to be a lot of fun.”

I’m not sure precisely how Love plans on “bringing the Pete Dye back into it,” and I doubt that the Tour will let his firm fully restore the TPC Sawgrass’s 1980s aesthetic, but it’s a good sign that he at least identifies the course’s over-refinement as a problem. Most crucial, though, is that Love Golf Design and the PGA Tour do what they can to get the Stadium Course playing firmer, even if it means moving the turf clockwise on the color wheel. Here’s what Dye wrote on that subject in 2013: “I do believe the rustic nature of the Players Course was lost over the years. That has lessened its demanding design features… since the course was originally designed to play firm.”

3. Fix the 12th hole

For the 2017 Players Championship, the PGA Tour reimagined the 12th hole at the Stadium Course as a drivable par 4. It wasn’t a bad idea, but the execution was clumsy.

In many small ways, the revised hole didn’t feel like it belonged at the course. For instance, green-side hazards at TPC Sawgrass tend to be pressed hard against the putting surfaces. On the new 12th hole, however, the green was surrounded by a buffer of short grass, with water and bunkers off-set by several yards.

One silver lining of the 2017 redesign was that it produced a functional, drivable par 4. As I documented in 2019, the field laid up from the tee about two-thirds of the time. This indicated that going for it was dangerous enough to intimidate most players, but not so dangerous that everyone was forced to keep driver in the bag. This balance of risk and reward created a decent amount of interest and drama.

No. 12 during the 2017 Players Championship

But then the inevitable happened: some pros believed that the hole was too punishing, and the Tour, displaying a typical lack of backbone, softened the slope toward the water in the approach to the green. Now the players don’t really have to make a tough decision on the 12th tee: if the markers are back, almost everyone lays up; if they’re forward, almost everyone goes for it.

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I’m not sure Love Golf Design can do much to salvage this uncommitted jumble of a hole design, but moving the green closer to the water might be a start. This would make it scarier to go for the 12th green from the tee and to hit approaches from the layup zone. Dye’s concept for TPC Sawgrass was all about putting great players in uncomfortable situations and forcing them to show the full extent of their skill and nerve. A better-guarded 12th green would fit this ethos. Players wouldn’t want to hit driver, but maybe they would anyway, just to avoid the equally daunting prospect of a half-wedge to a shallow, tilted target with water lurking behind.

4. Bring back (some of) the grass bleachers

In its early years, the Stadium Course, true to its name, featured many large sets of grass bleachers. The ones jutting into the lake by the 17th green were especially impressive. These structures are now gone, replaced by more conventional smooth banks (and acres of hospitality tents, of course). TPC Sawgrass is still an excellent venue for fans, but it no longer boasts the distinctive look and feel of a “golf stadium.”

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Now, the PGA Tour may have had valid reasons for eliminating the grass bleachers. I imagine they were tough to maintain and, in some cases, probably impeded spectator flow. However, they represented a unique and innovative aspect of Beman and Dye’s original vision. Restoring a couple of sets (maybe just the ones around the first tee?) would be a nice tribute to the course’s roots.

An old picture of the first tee at TPC Sawgrass and its grass bleachers.

Under Love Golf Design’s direction, TPC Sawgrass has an opportunity to become a high-profile example of a Pete Dye restoration—one that other Dye courses, many of which will soon be due for drainage and irrigation overhauls, could take inspiration from. I just hope the PGA Tour has the courage to let the experts do their thing.

Chocolate Drops

→ The PGA Tour announced on Monday that an oak tree just off the sixth tee at TPC Sawgrass has been reinstated. “For the first time since 2014,” read a press release from the Tour, “players will once again navigate their tee shots under the strategically placed leaning tee, a signature element originally designed by architect Pete Dye to test precision and decision-making. The restoration honors the course’s history while adding a new layer of intrigue to one of the Stadium Course’s most distinctive holes.” This is not really the genre of restoration work I most want to see at the Stadium Course, but hey, baby steps.

→ The Third, a new course by Love Golf Design at Panama City’s Watersound Club (which, as you may have already guessed, features two other courses), is set to open on Thursday, March 20.

→ Dunedin Golf Club, a 1927 Donald Ross design in Tampa, has reopened after a historically informed renovation by Kris Spence and engineering firm Stantec. Owned by the city of Dunedin, the course is open to the public and offers green fees ranging from $70 to $130. Spence is a well-regarded Ross specialist (I particularly admire his work at Roaring Gap Club in North Carolina), so I’d expect the architecture to be up to snuff.

A Course We Photographed Recently

Yarra Yarra Golf Club (Bentleigh East, Australia)—designed by Alex Russell in 1927, renovated according to historical evidence by Renaissance Golf Design in 2016

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Quotable

“Looking back, I realized that the radical design of the Players Course was too new for the Tour professionals. They had never seen anything like it, and they were displeased when a wayward bounce or unexpected roll off a green ruined what they felt was a perfectly hit shot.” –Pete Dye