ShareThisThe signature hole at the PGA Tour's signature course is starting to feel more like a scrawl on an otherwise refined course. As the tour's flagship Players Championship starts Thursday at the Tournament Players Club at Sawgrass's Stadium course in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., the 137-yard 17th hole with its island green is mutating into more an artifact of its time rather than as a hole that will endure as an authentically great one.
Its major characteristic is an absence of any bailout. But for a small bunker at the front of the green, the putting surface is surrounded by water. Should the wind blow, as it often does, and should the green be firm, as it already is, any player can make any number.
Wily architect Pete Dye, deservedly a member of the nearby World Golf Hall of Fame, designed the controversial 17th with input from his wife Alice, a fine designer herself, as more or less a gimmick hole. A dinner during the tournament that Dye attended in the early days of the course, where the tournament was first held in 1982, comes to mind.
Dye chortled when he contemplated players trying to cope with the hole. Over the years much has happened there, and most of it hasn't been pretty. Sean O'Hair, winner of last week's Quail Hollow Championship in Charlotte, was two shots out of the lead when he rinsed a couple of balls on the 17th two years ago. That was it for him.
"The 17th hole at the Stadium course is all about trying to psyche out tour players," the accomplished architect Tom Doak said in an e-mail this week. "As Mr. Dye once described it to me, it's a 130-yard hole with an 8,000-square-foot green -- a target a tour pro would hit 98 percent of the time, if he wasn't scared of it."
Dye loves links such as the Old Course and Royal Dornoch in Scotland, with all the options they allow for shots. His admiration for these courses, and work he's done elsewhere, makes the 17th an aberration on his resume. That's okay with him. He said earlier this week on Peter Kessler's XM/Sirius radio show "Making the Turn" that a course that isn't both challenging and controversial has a problem.
Architect Robert Trent Jones II said during a recent interview that the hole is an elaboration on another with an island green -- the 157-yard ninth hole at the Ponte Vedra Inn & Club in the same area. Herbert Strong designed the course in the 1920s, and Jones's father later worked on it. The club claims its hole is the first with an island green.
"The hole (at the Stadium course) is dramatic and it creates a real stage, more like an Olympic swimming arena," Jones said, "but it's clearly artificial. In our era of naturalism, it's probably out of place."
The 17th helped the Players attract instantaneous attention. The PGA Tour wanted its tournament to be big, very big, when it moved across the street from another course to the Stadium. It's grown since then, and it's matured, and it's now the most important tournament behind the four majors.
But the tournament would likely maintain its stature without the 17th hole, because the field is just about the best in golf, including the majors. The 17 other holes are excellent, and feel unified. Many are strategic rather than penal. The 17th is an increasingly bizarre anomaly.
The hole also sets a poor example for aspiring architects. It's easy to build a hole with an island green. Find water, build green. Doak has never built such a hole, and, he said, "I probably never would. None of my work to date has been designed with tournament play as the first priority, and for resort golfers, an island green par-three is a gimmick that slows down play."
Doak added: "There were so many copies of this hole built in the 1980s and early 1990s, that it has lost all of its appeal for me."
Dye will watch this week as the 17th toys with the psyches of the game's best players. Enough already. It's time to declare a moratorium on island greens.
(Contact Lorne Rubenstein at rube@sympatico.ca)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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