Course Profile: TPC Sawgrass (Stadium Course)

Take note…

Gathering points. Look around while you play. The trees make TPC Sawgrass feel sprawling, but it’s actually quite intimate. There are a number of hubs of activity where greens and tee boxes are situated near each other. This style of routing, which enhances the spectator experience, was part of Deane Beman’s vision for the course from the beginning.

The center of the universe. When you are on the 15th tee, take a moment to reflect and realize you are a mere 250 yards from the moat-guarded Global Home of Golf.

We miss the isthmus. Between the 16th and 17th holes, there used to be a spectator peninsula. They should bring it back.

Favorite hole

No. 16, par 5, 410-523 yards

This gettable par 5 comes at the perfect moment in the round. After a pair of challenging par 4s, the 16th offers a scoring opportunity. This chance, however, is available only to those who take on some risk. Getting up and down from the bail-out area left of the green is extremely challenging, so to make an easy 4, you need to challenge the water. The two oak trees short left of the green complicate matters further; they are right where a savvy player might want to lay up. There’s no way to play No. 16 safe and consistently obtain a satisfying result.

Overall thoughts

The Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass was designed to give top professional golfers fits. In this writeup, I’ll focus on how it does that as well as any golf course in the world.

Few courses have withstood distance gains at the elite levels of the game better than the Stadium Course. Even though today’s athletes and drivers launch the golf ball farther than ever, length off the tee remains just one part of a winning strategy at TPC Sawgrass. The reason for this is that Pete Dye’s design has immense variety. When a course requires a wide range of shots, it becomes less likely that one type of shot will overwhelm it.

TPC Sawgrass is one of the most impressively varied courses in golf. When you consider that Dye started with a flat, swampy piece of land, the accomplishment seems all the more unbelievable.

One of the biggest challenges at the Stadium Course is getting comfortable on the tee. This is by design. Dye keeps changing the size of the window players have to hit their drives through. Over 14 tee shots, these windows range from 22 yards wide (fourth hole) to over 60 yards wide (14th). Nine of these prefer a right-hander’s draw and five prefer a fade. In addition to shifting the size and shape of the paths to the fairway, Dye uses visual tricks—bunkers, mounds—to obscure the landing zones. All of these factors combine to create one of the toughest driving tests I’ve seen.

The mixture of wide and narrow fairways keeps you off balance. If they were all narrow, your eye would adjust, and they wouldn’t feel that tight. By varying width, Dye never lets the player get comfortable. Because some fairways are big, the small ones seem really small.

The other way that the Stadium Course induces discomfort on the tee is by changing up the way the holes move and the preferred shot shapes. Recently, professional golfers have grown more one-dimensional with the driver. Twenty-first-century technology has made a high knuckle cut the go-to tee shot for almost the entire PGA Tour. For this reason, TPC Sawgrass has actually become more challenging for right-handers. Nine of its 14 drives prefer a draw to a fade. In Dye’s original design, no more than two tee shots in a row favored the same shape. But then the Tour decided to blow up the 12th hole, creating a string of draw-favorable holes from 10 to 14.

Dye’s approach shots have outstanding variety, too. On holes that call for draws off the tee, fades often work better into the green, and vice versa. This switchback dynamic is particularly evident on the par 5s. The second rewards a right-to-left drive and, if you fancy hitting the green in two, a left-to-right second shot. On the ninth, the opposite. The 11th and 16th both ask for draws off the tee and fades on the approach.

Demands like these are rare in the men’s professional game. At most PGA Tour courses, it’s all about leveraging the modern 460cc driver to produce one shot: a towering bomb. At TPC Sawgrass, it’s about having all the shots.

The par 3s at the Stadium Course, like the par 4s and 5s, are diverse in every way possible. They measure 177, 231, 181 and 137 yards, testing four different clubs, and each plays in a different direction. All of them also have unique green complexes. Everyone is familiar with the island 17th, which has an instantly recognizable profile even after four decades of copycats. The third green is pushed up and repels everything. The eighth green, in contrast, sits at grade and has an open front that allows shots to bounce in, which is appropriate for a long par 3. Finally, while the 13th is similar in yardage to the third, it has a wildly different green—massive, with multiple bowls that reward great shots and penalize average ones with dicey two-putts.

Professional golfers and the equipment companies that sponsor them will continue to find extra yardage. It’s their job. So it’s inevitable that supposedly brawny golf courses will be brought to their knees by the most boring, repetitive strategies. The more power-driven and one-dimensional the pro game becomes, the more the virtues of Pete Dye’s designs, especially the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass, will stand out. Given the minimal natural assets that the Ponte Vedra property afforded, you have to wonder why we don’t have more courses with equal variety and interest. -AJ

 1 Egg

Pete Dye’s first version of TPC Sawgrass, with its scruffier presentation and kookier greens, was a sight to behold. Over the past 40 years, TPC Sawgrass has become more of a commercial item, and the quality of its architecture has declined. The presentation has become lush and intentionally Augusta-like. The design features have become less pronounced and more “fair.” Overall, what remains of the design deserves an Egg, while the presentation and land both fall short of that status. A restoration of TPC Sawgrass as it was in the early 80s, along with a return to more naturalistic maintenance, could elevate it to a second Egg.

Additional reading, viewing, and listening

TPC Sawgrass Isn’t Completely Random—It’s Just Different (Article)

The Unheralded But Excellent Par 5s at TPC Sawgrass (Article)

Slope and Firmness: The Drivable Par 4 Recipe (Article)

Course Tour