Tour Guide: Entering Golf’s Stadium

It’s a big week for the PGA Tour, which has pretty much the entire golf spotlight, give or take your appetite for watching an Asian Tour event filled with LIV players chasing OWGR points. What should you expect when you tune in for the Players at TPC Sawgrass? A lot of variety and plenty of big numbers.

The Best Non-Major Test of the Year

By Joseph LaMagna

Welcome to Players Championship week, one of the best weeks of the year! TPC Sawgrass is my favorite non-major championship golf course on the PGA Tour schedule. The combination of tough penalties associated with wide misses off the tee, hole variety, and windy conditions make for arguably the best test on the schedule. I also can’t think of a better set of par 5s on the PGA Tour.

Nitpicking a little bit, I do believe Sawgrass should be played in firm conditions. Moving the event to March has meant cooler temperatures and generally higher winds, each of which has benefits. But the course plays slower and softer, which reduces strategy. Missing around these small greens in the correct spots should be a fundamental piece of the test. The firmer the conditions are, the more important it becomes to miss greens in the correct locations and the more difficult it becomes to control shots in order to leave approaches in those favorable spots. I prefer when the event is played in firmer conditions in May, but again there are some benefits to playing in March. It’s fine.

The par-5 11th hole at TPC Sawgrass embodies so much of what I love about this golf course. Players must hit their tee shots on line. If you spray it off the tee, you’re going to struggle to get the ball back into position. Sawgrass slaps you in the face when you’re errant. This isn’t a fargiving golf course. The green, protected on its right side by both a water hazard and a greenside bunker, plays quite differently depending on the pin location. For some pins, bailing out left into the greenside fairway area presents a very difficult up-and-down, especially when the course is playing firmer. The more you shift your approach target right, though, the more you’re bringing water into play. Like on many other holes at Sawgrass, there is a fine line between success and finding yourself praying for an escape with bogey.

Results of second shots at the 11th during the second round at the 2023 Players Championship (PGA Tour)

The above plot from last year’s second round shows where players’ second shots ended up. Some guys are chipping their tee shots out sideways, some are laying up to a good number in the fairway, some are in the water, and some are on or around the green. It’s a great example of the tremendous variety on display at this tournament.

When discussing TPC Sawgrass, people are quick to point out that it doesn’t favor any one type of player, and that results can be pretty random. To the second point, the combination of wind, small greens, and water will produce a high degree of variance. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It might not be great for the PGA Tour if every course produced this much variance, but I don’t have a problem with a high-variance flagship event. To the first point, while I’d agree that more playing styles have a chance of succeeding at Sawgrass, I’d contend that particular skill sets are still more valuable than others at this course. Specifically, golfers built for success at Sawgrass keep the ball in play off the tee and have excellent short game.

Perhaps no player on tour exemplifies these two characteristics better than Si Woo Kim, winner of the 2017 Players Championship at age 21. Si Woo Kim consistently ranks among the most accurate drivers in the world, and calling his short game world class is not an overstatement. Kim is incredible around the greens. I’d recommend tracking Si Woo Kim this week not only to observe how his game fits the course but also because watching Si Woo Kim is a roller coaster. Si Woo hits drivers off the deck, clips chip shots off tight lies to perfection, and has a world-class rate of rage-filled outbursts. On every hole at Sawgrass, any number is in play with Si Woo Kim.

Enjoy the golf this week. There may not be a better venue on the PGA Tour.

Hard to overstate how good Fred's hair was in the 80s. (Image: YouTube)

The Year of Orwell and Couples

By Will Knights

In 1984, the Players Championship was set for its third edition at its then-new home, the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass. We’ve all heard the stories of players bitching and moaning during the first two years. In Year 3, we saw both ends of the scoring spectrum.

It started out with something of a nightmare. The first round of the ‘84 Players saw extremely windy conditions, with gusts over 40 mph. “That’s one of the worst days I ever remember,” Mark McCumber told Adam Schupak. More than 60 balls found the water on No. 17, and the island green played to a stroke average of 3.85 that day, the highest single-round scoring average in the hole’s history. It’s borderline unfathomable to think that players making par on a hole could pick up nearly a full stroke on the field! And while the competitors didn’t have any fun, it was surely a great day for the clubhouse gift shop as fans escaped the elements.

The next day, Fred Couples shot a course-record 64, which came as a surprise in multiple ways. Not only was it a complete about-face in terms of scoring given Thursday’s disastrous conditions, but the 24-year-old Couples had given up on the week before it started. After missing the cut in each of his first two appearances at the event, he told his wife to stay home and not bother making the trip. “We both knew I’d miss the cut,” Couples said after the round.

Spoiler: he did not miss the cut.

Couples ultimately shot 71-64-71-71 and beat Lee Trevino by one shot to win his first of two Players Championships (he won again in 1996.) It was just his second career title and made him the youngest winner in tournament history, a record that would stand until Adam Scott’s victory in 2004. (If you’re interested, here’s 90 minutes of final round coverage with Pat Summerall on the call.)

We still haven’t quite seen the same level of carnage as we did during that first round in 1984, although the early rounds of the 2021 Players came close. The course record has fallen multiple times, most recently with Tom Hoge’s 62. And the title of the youngest winner now lies with Si Woo Kim, who as Joseph noted above won in 2017 at just 21 years old. But those records took years to fall.

1984, though, had it all.

One Shot from Last Week

By Will Knights

I’m very much cheating this week as I’ve chosen not one but roughly 10 golf shots. But you don’t get to see the result of any of them.

Plenty of star power packs the leaderboard @APInv 💪 pic.twitter.com/pJvTGp2tZn

— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) March 9, 2024

The reason I chose this clip is because it does a great job of showing the lower body movement of some of the best players in the world. Most amateurs, myself included, struggle to properly fire their lower body to begin their downswing. And while this video shows that there is no one way to fire the glutes and legs, each player featured here does a great job of launching their hips toward the target and rotating into their lead leg. It takes lots of practice to sync up, but strong use of the lower body can unlock a lot in the golf swing.