How The 17th Hole At TPC Sawgrass Was Made l The Hole At l Golf Digest

Welcome to ‘THE Hole At’, where Golf Digest’s Ron Whitten (the leading expert in golf course course architecture) breaks down the hidden histories behind the most famous holes in golf. In this episode, Ron dives into the famous Par-3 17th hole at The Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass. From its original waterless blueprint design, to the creation of its nerve-racking forced carry tee shot, to remaining one of the most daunting Par-3s you can play, Ron explores the fascinating history behind one of the game’s most iconic golf holes.

Host: Ron Whitten
Producer & Editor: Ben Walton
Cinematography: Ben Walton & Will Fullerton
Audio: Mike Kelly
Executive Producer: Christian Iooss

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Hi I’m Ron Whitten the architecture editor emeritus of Golf Digest Magazine with another deep look at a single golf hole this time the 17th hole at TPC sass players Stadium Course the infamous island green Par 3 the epitome of Target golf the most recognizable the most photographed and perhaps the most

Frightening hole in the game we all know this hole even if we’ve never seen it in person Pete Dy was hired to design a course to test the best PGA Tour players in the world each year at the Players Championship he felt the best way to do that was to mess with

Their heads this is a hole he said that gets into every player’s mind from the very first te it nags them for 4 hours or more they know it’s coming they have to face it it really is the simplest of golf holes just a couple of te’s a green

26 yards deep 30 yards wide and a lake almost all the way around it the longest it plays is 137 yd before the 2001 Players Championship Golf Digest asked three golfers to hit 50 shots each at the 17th hitting in rotation tur proo Mark McCumber the 1988 players champion hit 42 under the

Putting surface seven into The Fringe and one in the water four handicap golf rider John Hawkins hit 38 onto the green two in The Fringe two in a bunker and eight in the water 16 handicapped Tony belli Jacksonville Jaguars offensive tackle hit 25 on the green 20 in the

Water five on the collar and one in the bunker the three agreed it wasn’t that hard a shot as the title suggests it was mined over water technically it’s not an island green at all it’s a peninsula with a very narrow foot path ismos the ismos is important not just for

Providing golfers and mowers access to and from the green it also contains irrigation and drainage pipes that run under the green beneath the walkway and onto the mainland here’s the original plan of TPC sress which in those days was called tournament Players Club at Inlet Beach the site was a swamp so the

First thing that was done was to drain the swamp by digging a mod around the perimeter of the proposed course that left a lot of muck so Pete’s associate David postwe who is construction supervisor on the project started digging through the muck to see if he could hit some Solid Ground what he

Found was several veins of pure white sugar sand so his Pete later put it they flipped the entire property dug away the muck put it aside dug out the sand put it aside then filled the holes with the muck and put the sand on top if you look

Closely at the original plan you’ll notice the 17th was a conventional par three with a small pond on its right there’s no detail as to the bunkering or other features but but I’m sure Pete was envisioning something along the lines of the 17th hole at Harbor Town where the

Water is not really in play but the more they dug the deeper and wider the cavity became in the area Dean Bean the PJ tour commissioner and Pete’s boss on the project wanted big high spectator Mounds lining the last three holes so most of the mck Dugout was piled up to create

Those Mounds there wasn’t any way to fill the hole back in given the Mounds Pete couldn’t fit a hole in facing north but he wanted it to face North so that he’d have all four par 3es playing in four different directions his wife Alice said just keep the green where it was

And make it an island and that’s what he did they framed it not with Rayo ties but with Cypress planks and then filled it in with some of that Sugar Sand the green was a simple shape Pete called it apple-shaped others would later declare it to be a frying

Pan over the fire he added one pot bunker to the front right also a simple shape Pete normally designed in the field drawing rudimentary diagrams in the sand using a stick but Bean’s Bankers wanted real plans so a complete set of whole by hole diagrams were drawn

Up nobody seems to remember who drew them in the late 1980s Mike herdson received the plan of the 17th from Bean who at the time was touring with the idea of having a nationwide network of TPC brand driving ranges each with a replica of the island 17th Green in the

The middle of the range nothing ever came of the idea but Mike kept the plan and later had Pete verify its authenticity by signing it if you look closely at the plan the main change from what was built is a second walkway to the green now it could be that at the

Time they were considering wooden walk Bridges to and from the green rather than the actual ismus that was built and from the circles around the green it appears the plan at that time was to use something big and solid like vertical telephone poles to ring the green green

Something Pete had used as bulkheads on other projects with either change it would have looked much different during final shaping Pete didn’t think the hole would be all that hard for pros so he caned the green towards the back Alice took one look at it and said I can see

The Telecast now the announcer comes on ladies and gentlemen the first threesome is still on the 17th T nobody has been able to stay on the green we may not finish this tournament so he raised the back of the green you can see that here how the

Ismos is lower than the back of the green this was the completed hole in 1981 a year before it opened notice the huge spectator Mounds like Stadium seats the one on the left of this picture was to provide views of the 16th green and the entire 17th hole the far mount on

The right was curved around to provide views of both the 17th and the par 4 18th you can see the volume of material that was removed in order to create these huge Galler Mounds by the late 1980s the 16th green had been relocated closer to the water but the big

Spectator Mound was removed in order to make room for money-making Sky boxes the grassy Stadium seats along 17 still existed though but by the early 2000s They too had been removed in its place was a gradual slope on which people could still sit and watch play and

Behind them wide flat spots to house more sky boxes when I last played the course in 2019 I arrived at the 17th te and saw two things first I thought the entire green had sunk several feet turns out the Lake water level was just higher than normal but I also noticed a railing

Around the back of the green oh my gosh I thought somebody must have fallen off the back of the green and lawyers made them put up a railing that will ruin the whole but it was nothing that drastic the Main’s crew had just rebuilt the ismos and roted the entire ire thing so

They build a temporary walkway to keep golfers off the tender Turf in his autobiography burying me in a pot bunker Pete Dy insisted he only designed two Island Greens in his entire career this one in the 17th at PJ West Stadium Course built in 1986 and patterned suspiciously after the TPC one except

For rocks instead of a wooden bulkhead the earliest documented Island greens were at Atlanta Athletic Club Now East Lake in 1908 which still exists and at baldest roll in New Jersey which doesn’t aw tilling has took it out when he remodeled baldest roll in 1922 but Tilly did do an early one at

Galen Hall in Philadelphia in 1917 and it’s still in play just as rustic as ever Herbert strong did one in 1932 at Pedra club and it still exists just a mile or so up the road from TPC Saw Grass Robert Trent Jones did one of the Golden Horseshoe in Virginia not to be

Outdone Desmond Mirad did one in 1970 On a par five the 18th at Mission Hills in Rancho Mirage California which was the site of the lpga’s dinos shur event for decades there have been novelty Island greens as well Robert Bruce Harris did a dual Island Greens on the par 3 13th at

Finkbine golf course at the University of Iowa and John styel did a genuine apple-shaped green at Apple Tree Golf Club in yakam water Washington the most famous novelty island green is the 14th at cordelane Resort in Idaho where Scott Miller created a floating island green that sits offshore in Lake cordelan I

Had the privilege of exploring this one when it was built in 1990 and it’s like an iceberg more of it is submerged a big honeycomb of concrete and styrofoam and Chambers holding Irrigation in drain pipe than is visible and it’s a true Island you need

A boat boat to get to and from it what all these Island greens have in common is unlike the 17th at TPC sass they have some margin for error enough room for bunkers and even trees there have been any number of heroics in the history of the 17th ho in practice rounds Jerry

Pate dunked four balls in the water but birded it three out of four days when he won the 1982 Players Championship the first held at TPC sass playing an orange ball if you recall that’s the Players Tournament where pay tossed Beaman and D into the lake beside the 18th green then

Dovian himself when he won in 2015 Ricky fer birdied the hole three times in a single day first early Sunday morning on a wrap-up of the third round then that afternoon in the Final Round And once more for the win in a playoff over who else Sergio Garcia then there’s

Tigers hers at the Saturday round of the 2001 Players Championship Tiger hit nine iron long almost winning in the Water behind he was 60 yards from the hole facing a downhill double breaking putt Johnny Miller asked Gary KO in the tower at 17 if he thought tiger got the right

Line better than most Gary said better than most the ball stopped at a ridge then went down the slope broke right and into the hole tiger W by one the next day but I more clearly remember tiger in the 1994 us Amer six down to trip Keeny

With 17 to play he rallied and pulled all square by the 17 T tiger hit first right at the flag on the back right but almost flew the green bouncing backwards off The Fringe and ending on the collar from there he rolled in his 15-footer and did his now classic fist punt maybe

The first aired around the world that gave him a one-up lead and when he haved 18 tyer won the first of three straight us AMS one year when the club did 40,000 daily fee rounds the maintenance crew retrieved 120,000 golf balls from the water around the 17th green that’s an

Average of three balls per golfer what’s that tell us that most of us when we hit into the drink on 17 don’t head to the drop area for our next shot where it’s only 92 yards and faces into an upward slope of the green no we insist on

Staying on the tea we want to hit that green we don’t want the hole to win we don’t want Pete D to win but he does time and time again that’s what makes it a great hole