TPC Sawgrass Turns 40: A Look Back At The Birth Of A Legendary Golf Course

TPC Sawgrass, the flagship of the Tournament Players Club chain, opened for play forty years ago. It was raining buckets when Hale Irwin, one of the top players of the day, took a ceremonial tee shot and ushered in a new era for the PGA Tour.

In the late 1970s, before the golf course was built, the site was a 415-acre tract of swampy pancake-flat wooded land you could tool around in a rowboat. It took a Field of Dreams level leap of faith to envision that it had the bones to be transformed into the home of the Players Championship. That vision belonged to Deane Beman, the second commissioner of the PGA Tour who served from 1974 to 1994. 

The original plan for golf’s top tier tour was to purchase Sawgrass Country Club which had signed on to stage the Players Championship for three years beginning in 1977. The property was bank-owned following a foreclosure. Prior to the first tournament it was slated to host, Beman had negotiated a deal with the bank to buy the country club and several adjacent buildings and properties for $1.8 million.

“I thought I had everybody in line to agree to do it. There was a lot of reluctance, but I thought I had them convinced,” remembers Beman.  “One of my board members, a banker actually, suggested that we wait until the tournament was held before we made the decision.”

Right before the tourney, Arvida Corporation—a large Florida real estate developer—swooped in and bought the property from the bank. With Beman’s deal dead, he attempted to buy the golf course from the new owners but they weren’t interested in playing ball.  Charles Cobb, the chairman and chief executive officer of Arvida, further dashed Beman’s dream telling him that if he couldn’t get approval from his board to buy a property for a bargain price, he’d never be able to convince them to build a golf course.

“He made me a $100 bet that I couldn’t get it done,” said Beman

Undeterred, Beman began scouting locations everywhere from in and around the Jacksonville area to Amelia Island.  After his first choice, a site just south of where TPC Sawgrass currently sits fell apart—the owner balked at his request to build a causeway so that there could be two entrances to the property—he went on to plan B.

Beman bought the swampy Ponte Vedra Beach land from Jerome and Paul Fletcher for the lofty sum of $1.  While raw land at under a penny an acre may sound like the Florida land deal of the century, it was a win-win for both parties. The Fletchers owned four thousand acres in total in the area and giving up a small slice of it to the PGA Tour so they could build the permanent home of the Players Championship would make the value of the remaining land greatly appreciate.  It didn’t take long either. Once course construction began, Arvida Corporation smelled success and began buying up the surrounding land.

As for the spoils of the bet: that $100 is now behind glass in TPC Sawgrass’s clubhouse. The inscription on the accompanying plaque reads: “To Deane Beman, the man who did what we said couldn’t be done. From Chuck Cobb and his associates at Arvida, who bet on the difficulty of the task, not on the capability of the man doing the task.”

Once the die was cast, the first order of business was to build a canal all the way around the property to drain the water into the Intracoastal Waterway.  Next on the agenda was to dig down to create lakes for the golf course.

“It turned out good for us because when we pulled all the muck off from where the fairways would be, we had all that material to build the spectator mounds and I wanted to build what I called a stadium golf course,” said Beman.

The concept of a stadium course that caters to the spectator experience where galleries on elevated perches could peer down at the golf action below was conceived by Beman and a D.C.-based course architect named Eddie Ault while working together on drawings for a project on the eastern shore of Maryland back in the early 1960s. While that project never got off the ground, the idea was resuscitated to create something unique and special for the Players Club at Sawgrass.

The crowd-accommodating stadium concept went beyond the golf course itself and also took into account every facet associated with hosting a large-scale pro tournament on an annual basis: miles of underground utilities, space for hospitality areas, television staging areas, and parking too.

To make his dream a reality, Beman hired on Pete Dye, the golf course designer who had successfully transformed a similar plot of land in South Carolina into Harbor Town, a track that was adored by touring pros.

“Pete was great to work with, he had a phenomenal work ethic,” said Dye protégé Bobby Weed who would on to become the golf course superintendent at TPC Sawgrass before being named as the tour’s in-house chief designer, and later starting his own design firm.

Weed had been at the Players Club during the early phases of the construction process before moving onto Hilton Head to build Long Cove. Dye would commute from Ponte Vedra to Hilton Head to monitor the progress and on one occasion Weed remembers him coming back absolutely caked in mud.

“He said ‘I just don’t know if Sawgrass will ever get built, it just may be too difficult because it’s a very tough piece of property and it just may have never meant to be a golf course,” remembers Weed. “But he had such an unwavering strong work ethic that Pete literally, single-handedly, pulled everyone along and made it happen. The golf course was ahead of its time and nobody else could have done it other than Pete.”

No. 17

A notoriously difficult golf course, TPC Sawgrass is packed with psychological tests, but none more pronounced than the hair-raising vantage from the tee box of the par-3 17^th hole which Beman calls the “ultimate head shot.”   

The beating heart of “The Gauntlet,” the nickname for TPC Sawgrass’ volatile finishing stretch, the island green is the Freddy Krueger of golf holes. A surrounding lake claims over 100,000 golf balls a year, and pros, especially when there are millions on the line in the thick of the Players Championship, often fall victim to the watery grave too.

“It started out as a peninsula green but Pete decided one day after talking with his wife Alice [who co-designed the course] that they ought to make it an island,” remembers Beman. “I reluctantly agreed to that but under one condition— Pete wanted the hole around 165-170 yards long.  I said if you’re going to build an island green, I don’t want it more than 135 yards long.”

Alice Dye was also onboard with shortening the length of the hole and talked Pete into softening up the greens a bit. She was concerned that on windy days groups would get backed up on the 17^th and nobody would ever finish their round.