40 Years at TPC Sawgrass: Remembering the First Players Championship at Stadium Course
In 1982, North Carolina was still college basketball’s dominant professional franchise; baseball legend Cal Ripken was poised to play his first full 162-game season for the Baltimore Orioles; and The Players Championship moved to a wild and dramatic new course arisen from swampland, TPC Sawgrass.
We have seen many memorable finishes at The Players over the last 40 years. Tiger Woods, pick one; Hal Sutton and “Be the raht club tew-day!”; Craig (We Barely Knew Ya) Perks and his sensational chip-ins; Rickie Fowler’s playoff stones; Fred Couples, twice; Paul Goydos losing a playoff to Sergio Garcia; Len Mattiace’s unlucky heartbreak at the par-3 17th hole; Fuzzy Zoeller’s white towel that symbolically cooled off Greg Norman after a sizzling 24-under par performance. And more.
None could top that first edition of The Players in 1982. It had everything, starting with a great winner — Jerry Pate, as talented as anyone in golf for a few years. It was bright with color — Pate won The Players with an orange Wilson ball. (Wayne Levi beat Pate to the history books by being the first to win a PGA Tour event with an orange ball earlier in 1982 when he captured the Hawaiian Open.)
It had a shocking finale. In an unforgettable, not-totally-staged prank, Pate pushed the PGA Tour commissioner and the course designer into the lake at 18 and dived in himself. Who could ask for more, sir, not counting that hungry Oliver kid from the Broadway musical? The Sawgrass debut was great theater and even better TV.
As we head for another visit to Sawgrass, here are some notes from the 1982 Players, or as it was known then, the Tournament Players Championship:
Ground Control to Major Deane
Dan Jenkins, the 20th century’s finest sportswriter and also one of its great traditionalists behind that hilariously snarky front, declared The Players Championship a major after its very first edition at Sawgrass. Here’s part of his lead paragraph from Sports Illustrated then:
“If Pete Dye is the Leonardo of golf course architects, Jerry Pate is surely the Esther Williams of touring pros, and the two of them pooled their talents last week to elevate the Tournament Players Championship into one of golf's major events. Call it the game's fifth major if you like… but the fact is, the player with the best swing and the most potential in the game today, Jerome K. Pate, went out and Ben Hoganed the daylights out of the most demanding new layout in the world today, winning the TPC against the toughest field you could have assembled today. And if all this doesn't make the TPC a major championship, then Jerry Pate, Tour Commissioner Deane Beman and Dye can't swim a stroke.”
The scorecard: It’s hard to believe the late Jenkins’ enthusiasm because if someone else wrote that, I can hear him (in my head) saying something like, “If Hogan didn’t win it, it’s not a major.”
The Game of the Name
Many have tried but none have successfully tagged any of the TPC Sawgrass iconic holes with nicknames that have stuck. NBC and Dan Hicks tried to foist “The Gauntlet” on viewers as the name for the closing three holes, a suggestion that reportedly came from Beman himself.
Even a writing legend such as Jenkins came up short.
In that 1982 story, Jenkins tabbed the par-3 17th hole “Fantasy Island” after a popular but cornball ABC show that starred Ricardo Montalban. That show’s run ended in 1984 and Jenkins’ nickname didn’t make it even that far. He also dubbed the 18th as “Beman’s Lagoon” in honor of the brilliant made-for-TV moment when Pate pushed Beman and Dye into the lake, then dived in after them “so I could drown ‘em,” Pate joked later. OK, he was probably joking.
Others have tried. The Bermuda Triangle. Nah. The Swamp Monster. No, thanks. Alligator Alley. Nope. The Colosseum? Sorry, already it’s already taken by TPC Scottsdale for its par-3 16th, golf’s loudest and most unruly hole. The Gauntlet is the only nickname that lingers online, largely by default.
The scorecard: If the shoe doesn’t fit, you can’t acquit. Or something like that. Not everything needs a nickname, Scooter. Let’s just enjoy one of golf’s best finishing stretches.
A Backstroke of Genius
One more thing about about Pate’s famous stunt and subsequent dive. Did he really throw the game’s commissioner and the course designer in the lake and then do a racing dive after them without seriously investigating what was under the water? Sort of. Pate’s idea of a safety check was asking Dye on Friday during the tournament, already believing he was going to win, what was at the bottom of the lake by 18. “Because if I win, I’m going to throw your butt in,” Pate said. Dye answered that it was all a sand bottom beneath four or five feet of water.
When Sunday’s finish came, Beman’s wife held his wallet and watch while Dye’s wife, Alice, held Pete’s wallet. “Pete doesn’t wear a watch,” Beman said then. “He never knows what time it is.”
Pate’s 2004 version of events had him calling Beman and Dye over to the edge of the water to point out a design problem that needed fixing. Then he pushed Deane in, grabbed Dye and tossed him in.
Dye said in 2004, “Even when I saw Jerry throw Deane in the lake, I thought that was the end of it. Next thing I know, I’m flying through the air like a jerk. It wasn’t like going into somebody’s swimming pool. There were stumps out there! Fortunately, we didn’t pile on top of anything. Jerry dived in, probably the dumbest thing you could do. I can’t remember how many names I called him. When I was in the air, I thought, 'Nothing like this has ever happened in golf.'”
Pate explained his safety protocols. As a former competitive swimmer in his younger days, he wasn’t worried about lake depths because he knew how to do a shallow racing dive that would barely break the water’s surface of the water. So that’s why he did a racing dive instead of simply jumping in. “It looked better, too,” Pate said.
Dye liked that he got a free pair of slacks from the head pro so he could change clothes after his dunking. Beman subsequently contracted hepatitis. “He was floating on his back, spitting up water like a fountain,” Dye said in 2004. “He told me later, ‘You know, I got hepatitis from that lake.’ I said, Well, you shouldn’t have been drinking the water.”
The scorecard: The tournament has moved on from The Dive but that big splash put TPC Sawgrass and The Players Championship permanently on the map. Let’s face it, if Bruce Lietzke or Vance Heafner won that first one, it wouldn’t have had the same impact.
CBS Sports got an "A" for catching the water sports on camera, and a wink for later cutting away to footage of a gator swimming on property but in a different pond, giving some viewers the idea that gators lurking nearby. Forgotten Pate Trivia: Pate’s dive was an encore of what he’d done the previous June when he ended a two-year victory drought by winning the Memphis Classic.
This Quiz Is 90 Percent Crap and 10 Percent Stupid
The modern style of Dye’s TPC Sawgrass, which invented the term “stadium golf,” didn’t sit well with many traditionalists among PGA Tour players, especially those who didn’t fare so well. See if you can match the quotes said during 1982’s tournament with who said them:
One. “This course plays all around my game and never touches it. I've never been very good at stopping a five-iron on the hood of a car.”
Two. “Where are the windmills and animals?”
Three. “There's no mystery here. All you have to do is hit a perfect drive, a perfect second shot and a perfect putt. What I'm still trying to find out is whether you win a free game if you make a putt on the last hole.”
Four: “Is it against the rules to carry a bulldozer in your bag?”
Five: “This course is 90 percent horse manure and 10 percent luck.”
The speakers: A-Tom Watson. B-J.C. Snead. C-Jack Nicklaus. D-John Mahaffey. E-Fuzzy Zoeller.
The scorecard: The answers are 1-C, 2-E, 3-D, 4-A. 5-B. The course was difficult not only because of all the water hazards but because the wooded areas featured thick underbrush and weren’t cleared out as they are now. That led to rounds that took more than five hours to play. Give player Ed Sneed bonus points for this line: “Pete Dye ought to be fined for slow play.”
Show Me the Money
In 1982, Pate took home $90,000 in first-prize money from the tournament purse of $500,000. In 2022, The Players Championship winner will receive $3.6 million from a purse of $20 million.
Was “The Splash” really that big of a deal? Yes. The tournament’s purse jumped $200,000 the next year and doubled to $1 million within five years of Pate’s victory. Coincidence? Not likely. In a case of “Leave it to Beman,” its prize fund rose to $1.5 million by 1990 and $2.5 million by 1993.
The scorecard: The Players Championship took off in Pate’s wake. Asked then what he was going to do with his $90,000 after handling the diabolical, challenging course, Pate joked, “I’m going to give it to Pete (Dye) to help pay for redoing some of the greens.”
Forty years later, memories of the best Players Championship remain priceless.