THE PLAYERS CHAMPIONSHIP

The Players Championship is four days in March on a course built out of a Florida swamp, and it regularly assembles the strongest field of the golfing year.

It is also the only tournament owned by the players who compete in it.

The Dollar

Deane Beman became commissioner of the PGA Tour in 1974 with two problems. His flagship tournament had no home, having moved between four courses in its first years. And he had spent the 1974 Phoenix Open, at five foot seven, trying to watch golf over the backs of other people’s heads.

The second problem produced the idea. Beman wanted a course built with spectators in mind, with mounds raised along the holes so that anyone standing on them could see. Nothing like it existed. Every important tournament was played at a private club where the ground had been laid out for members rather than for crowds.

For the first problem he found four hundred and fifteen acres of wooded swamp at Ponte Vedra Beach and persuaded the landowners to sell it to him for a dollar. The cheque hangs in the clubhouse. So does a hundred-dollar bill from a bet he won with the developers, inscribed to the man who did what they had said could not be done.

Pete Dye built it, and the ground was the difficulty. Beneath the trees was muck, which will not grow grass. Dye’s team dug and found a layer of clean white sand under the muck, so they inverted the site: lifted the muck off, set it aside, brought the sand up, and put the swamp underneath it.

The first tournament played there was won by Jerry Pate, who marked it by throwing Dye and Beman into the lake at the eighteenth and then jumping in after them.

The Seventeenth

The most famous hole in American golf was not in the plans.

Dye had drawn the seventeenth as an ordinary short par three with a lake along one side. But the sand around that green was the best on the property, and his team kept digging it out to build the rest of the course, until the green stood alone in a hole filling with water.

Alice Dye looked at it and told her husband to make it an island.

He did not like the idea. He built it anyway. It plays a hundred and thirty-odd yards, offers no bail-out of any kind, and has been copied more than a hundred times around the world.

Alice Dye was not a bystander in her husband’s work. She was a serious amateur golfer who won state and national championships, and the first woman elected to the board of the American Society of Golf Course Architects. The hole everyone knows is hers.

What to Know

The seventeenth is the spectacle and the eighteenth is the harder hole. Water runs the length of its left side and the tee shot asks a professional to aim at it.

The crowd at the seventeenth is the loudest in American golf and a genuinely different thing to stand in. The mounds Beman built hold several thousand people around a green the size of a large room.

March in north Florida is mild and windy, and the wind is the whole defence of the short holes. A hundred and thirty yards in still air is a wedge. A hundred and thirty yards across water in a crosswind has drowned major champions.

The course is public and can be played, which was Beman’s other point. Most of the great tournament venues cannot.

The Court

The Players Championship is not the Court’s own. Hospitality on the closing holes, clubhouse access and tee times in the days around the tournament are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward. Jacksonville is half an hour north and holds most of the rooms.