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TPC at Sawgrass

Tournament Players Club at Sawgrass
TPC Sawgrass 17.jpg
Stadium Course's signature 17th hole
Club information
Location Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, United States
Established 1980, 37 years ago
Type Resort
Operated by PGA Tour TPC Network
Total holes 36
Tournaments hosted The Players Championship
(1982–present)
Website tpc.com/sawgrass
The Players Stadium Course
Designed by Pete Dye, Alice Dye
Par 72
Length 7,215 yards (6,597 m)
Course rating 76.8
Slope rating 155
Course record 63: Fred Couples (1992)
       Greg Norman (1994)
       Roberto Castro (2013)
       Martin Kaymer (2014)
       Jason Day (2016)
       Colt Knost (2016)
Dye's Valley Course
Designed by Pete Dye, Bobby Weed
Par 72
Length 6,864 yards (6,276 m)

The Tournament Players Club at Sawgrass (TPC at Sawgrass) is a golf course in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, a suburb of Jacksonville, United States. Opened 37 years ago in 1980, it was the first of several Tournament Players Clubs to be built. It is home to the PGA Tour headquarters and annually hosts The Players Championship, a golf tournament on the PGA Tour. Paul and Jerome Fletcher negotiated a deal with the PGA tour, which included the donation of 415 acres for one dollar (the original check is prominently displayed in the clubhouse).

TPC Sawgrass Stadium Course, the golf stadium of the course, has a capacity of 36,000.

The TPC at Sawgrass is situated in Ponte Vedra Beach's Sawgrass development. It has two individual courses, the Stadium Course and the Valley Course. The Stadium Course was designed in 1980 by noted golf course architects Pete and Alice Dye, and is known as one of the most difficult golf courses in the world. Constructed specifically to host The Players Championship, it employs a distinctive "stadium" concept: like in other sports, fans at the TPC sit in "stands" made of raised mounds of grass. It is known for its signature hole, the par-3, 137-yard 17th, known as the "Island Green", one of golf's most recognizable and difficult holes.

The course has been featured for many years on the best-selling Tiger Woods PGA Tour series of video games.

Meanwhile, the Dye’s Valley Course hosts the Web.com Tour Championship since 2013.

Over 415 acres (1.68 km2) in the Florida swampland, the course contains narrow fairways lined with hazards like marshes and "waste bunkers" (long strips of sand that groundskeepers never maintain); dozens of deep "pot bunkers," strategically placed to catch even a slightly misplaced shot; thick rough that features craters and mounds; tall, shot-obstructing palm trees; and rock-hard, lightning-fast greens. When the first Tournament Players Championship was staged at the Stadium Course in 1982, the story was not eventual winner Jerry Pate but the complaints the players had about the course, which had supposedly been built in their honor. "It's Star Wars golf, designed by Darth Vader," Ben Crenshaw pronounced. When asked if the TPC suited his playing style, Jack Nicklaus replied, "No, I've never been very good at stopping a 5-iron on the hood of a car." J. C. Snead called the course "90 percent horse manure and 10 percent luck." Over the following year, Dye tweaked the course, making the greens less severe and replacing several bunkers. After the changes, the course became far more playable. "Now it's a darn good golf course," Crenshaw said of the improvements.


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