The PLAYERS Championship: a hole-by-hole guide to the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass

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(UPDATED: March, 2025.)

When you read or hear the phrase "championship golf course," what comes to mind?

I'm guessing images of tree-lined fairways, large and undulating greens, thick rough and deep, gruff-edged bunkers likely dance in your head. Big-time U.S. Open and PGA Championship tests like Bethpage Black, Oakland Hills, Oak Hill, maybe even modern brutes like 2024 PGA Championship host Valhalla Golf Club spring up. Even Bay Hill, perhaps, given last week's setup of gnarly rough and white-fast greens.

Perhaps the Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass doesn't quite fit the mold. But over more than 40 years, it has proven itself worthy of testing the very best golfers each year. There may be horses for some courses, but Sawgrass had never seen a back-to-back winner until last year, when Scottie Scheffler pulled off the feat as part of a historically dominant season.

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Only six golfers have won The Players more than once since it moved to its current venue, and only Steve Elkington's 1991 and 1997 wins came less than a decade apart until Scheffler's back-to-back. The Stadium takes a toll even on its champions, and steadfastly refuses to reward any particular style of play. Accurate driving, pinpoint iron play and spectacular short-game abilities certainly never hurt, but few great courses reward guile and guts more.

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Raised from hundreds of mucky, snake-infested acres at the dawn of the 1980s, Pete Dye's swamp monster looked and felt different from the outset. Therein lies its genius. It originally had terraced berms around tee boxes: built-seating for fans to view the carnage from golf's gladiator class. When the world's best first ventured there in '82, they left broken and bloodied. As Dye recalls in his memoir Bury Me in a Pot Bunker, no less genial a figure than Ben Crenshaw said, "The place was designed by Darth Vader!"

To the extent Pete Dye was indeed a middle-American Vader, the Stadium Course is his Death Star. Its arsenal of weapons would make Luke Skywalker sweat. The manmade contours of the fairways and greens frustrate the progress of a golf ball far more often than they help it. Abrupt rough-covered moguls become hazards unto themselves. Bunkers range from Saharan expanses to tiny pots you can straddle. Water comes into play both sneakily (holes 4, 7) and with obnoxious bravado (holes 16-18).

The course changes speeds constantly, yo-yoing from short to long to medium-length holes and back again. Only three times do consecutive holes play in a similar direction. A hole that yields three times as many birdies as bogeys (hole 9 in the '24 Players) follows a hole that yields nearly twice as many bogeys as birdies (8). Maintaining momentum can close to impossible.

The Players Stadium Course is a rare championship venue that is publicly accessible, albeit at a sometimes shockingly heavy price - upwards of $900 at peak times of year. Its look has evolved significantly over the years as its ownership - the PGA Tour - has become increasingly image-conscious. The rugged, scruffy-edged aesthetic Dye and then-commissioner Deane Beman envisioned - more Pinehurst No. 2 than Augusta National - is out, although news that two-time champion Davis Love III (1992, 2003) is serving as main architecture consultant may augur a return to a more naturalistic look. For now, though, lush overseeded turf and bunker sand as crisply white as Jay Monahan's newest button-down are the prevailing aesthetic.

So with all the course's snares and all its changes in mind, is it worth playing?

In my opinion: absolutely. I would argue that only Augusta National and Pebble Beach are more instantly recognizable among American golf courses, and while Sawgrass doesn't have an ocean backdrop (the Atlantic is a click east of the gate), its wholly created environment and the history it has seen gives it a mythic quality. And even though the course was purpose-built to test professional golfers, it is surprisingly playable for the rest of us from the correct set of tees. Landing areas widen nicely from mortals' markers, and without the stands up, playing the island-green 17th feels more novel than nerve-wracking. Awe and gratitude replace frustration when you're playing as a guest, rather than a competitor.

I was invited to play the Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass in December 2023. It was the 600th course I've played in my life, and I'd put it a skosh outside my all-time top 10. As we were walking to the 18th tee, I asked fellow first-timer Mark, who had paid full-boat (plus rental clubs), whether he felt he had gotten his money's worth. "Absolutely," he said.

TPC Sawgrass - THE PLAYERS Stadium Course

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Pete Dye's opening holes are seldom extremely difficult, but they tend to be miniature mission-statements. So it is at the Stadium's opener, a subtle switchback hole that asks for a slight left-to-right tee ball followed by a slight right-to-left approach. The golfer who readily works the ball both ways has an immediate advantage here, and over the next 17 holes.

The first of a phenomenal quartet of par fives begins with the mildest one, so accommodating that it was the only hole on the course where no one made worse than a bogey in any round in 2023's Players. That doesn't make birdie a foregone conclusion, though, as it requires two well-shaped long shots to reach the large putting surface. Mounds and pot bunkers will put those who miss the green in awkward stances and lies.

This mid-iron par 3 doesn't look like much at first glance, but as soon as the player notices the slight angle of the left edge of the green, all sorts of discomfort starts to rush in, especially as the flags of more than a dozen countries flap in the breeze over the golfer's shoulder. Hole locations on the upper tier require a perfect yardage - or plain foolishness - to access.

PGA Tour players like straightforward golf holes, and this one is anything but. A skinny, slightly angled fairway, horrific rough awaiting those who bail left off the tee and a fiddly green set beyond a skinny lagoon between three pot bunkers add up to a sub-400-yard hole that played as the 5th toughest in 2023's Players Championship.

The first of only four par 4s one might consider long at the Stadium Course, the tee ball here plays into a pitched, saddle-shaped landing area, leaving a longish approach to a green that sits down in a dell. A soft-landing left-to-right approach is made trickier by the fact that the contours around the green draw the golfer's eye to the left. It's a brilliantly subtle example of Dye's mastery of space.

The nasty-looking left-side fairway bunkering looks like the no-go-zone off the tee, but the straight right edge of the fairway disappears into pine straw and trees, blocking out players who bail out. The fronds of the tall, skinny palms that ring the pedestal green all seem to sit exactly at the height where a proper wedge shot should fly.

The expansion of a pond left of this fairway in 2016 made a tough hole even more visually intimidating. Much as the right-side greenside sand might deter players, the tougher up-and-downs are found from the pot bunker or sunken chipping area left.

The longest par 3 on the course can be a bear from the very back tee. Right-side hole locations require players to negotiate a bunker whose elevated lip shoves shots left across the green. The lower-spinning modern golf ball does players few favors here, as the extra bite into the green would be welcome here.

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Increased hitting distances by the world's best golfers has made whaling away at this green in two shots viable in the right wind conditions. But there's considerable peril: live oaks that will swallow shots short left and mounds and pots that await players who bail out. The elevated green is best approached with a full wedge under most circumstances.

A near-mirror-image of the first hole, number 10 raises the stakes slightly with a more confined corridor off the tee. The large bunker that cuts across the landing area wraps around the front fairway and green, their shapes fitting together like puzzle pieces.

Overshadowed by the 16th among the Stadium's superlative par 5s, this big momentum-swing hole whips left, then right around a fairway bunker that, from the air, reminds of Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream." The small green tends to shed even wedge approaches, so a long-iron or fairway-wood attack has to descend from the heavens to have a chance of stopping in a nice spot.

Over its years of TPC Sawgrass ownership, the PGA Tour has steadily sanded the rougher, rustic aesthetic edges off of the Stadium Course in order to make it look somewhat reminiscent of Augusta National, with lush green turf, blinding white bunkering and an overall primness that Dye typically eschewed. Another thing Dye didn't build much of: drivable par 4s, which makes the 2016 redesign of this hole (reportedly with Dye's blessing) a bit of a head-scratcher. What used to be a wood-and-wedge hole to a small green is now an inferior copy of the famous drivable 15th hole at TPC River Highlands in Connecticut when played from forward tournament tees. It's not a bad hole necessarily, but it doesn't fit with the rest of the course and doesn't quite function properly. For one, the green is too big. I hope I live long enough to see this hole restored to Dye's original design.

Speaking of Augusta National, this tricky par 3 is Dye's interpretation of the 16th hole at the home of the Masters, with a green with a high right side and lower-slung left-hand section where a pin can be tucked precariously close to the water and only accessed by landing a shot right and watching it tumble down a tier. Surprisingly, right-side hole locations tend to be tougher, as the green runs away.

The beginning of a volatile closing stretch played nearly a quarter-stroke over par in the 2023 Players, with 38 birdies against 109 bogeys and 19 doubles or worse. The tee shot is downright uncomfortable: sand and water left and grass bunkers right. Si Woo Kim's driver off the deck from no-man's-land en route to victory in the 2017 Players is one of the most underrated shots of the last decade on the PGA Tour.

Oak limbs seem to reach out to grab a tee shot from both sides here, making an already narrow driving corridor feel like a squiggly bowling alley. The reward for conquering this bewildering vista is a (by Sawgrass' standards) straightforward mid- to short-iron approach.

The beginning of one of championship golf's greatest three-hole stretch runs is a par 5 where opportunity knocks. A big, sweeping right-to-left tee shot can leave long hitters as little as a mid-iron, but even with a modest club in, the shot is intimidating, with water right and long and awkward lies left. The hole averaged nearly half a shot under par in 2023, but there were 22 bogeys and five doubles, too.

The Stadium's famous island green is one of golf's great set pieces, and one that golfers will think about from the moment they book their tee time, never mind the moment they arrive at the first tee. It's little more than a driving-range 9- or 8-iron for even mid-handicappers, and the green is one of the larger ones on the course, but the surrounding water and the weight of the moment, plus the putting surface's three distinct sections, make it appear tiny. The way Dye (with wife Alice, who inspired the hole) layers psychological intrigue on top of obvious technical difficulty is a big part of why this hole is better than most.

With a glistening lake left and a massive clubhouse built in 2007 that resembles a Bond villain's hideout in the background, an already slim fairway becomes even more elusive. No one would blame you for bailing right into the safety of the rough and trees, but the approach from that side is almost impossible. Courage off the tee is rewarded with a good look at the large, two-tiered green that has been home to so many great moments in more than 40 years of The Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass.

Architecture

July 27, 2018

Want to know why golf holes and courses are the way they are, and why you love some and hate others? Learn all about golf course architecture here.