Fried Egg Stories: Making TPC Sawgrass

The fried egg requires a different technique.

What you need to do is actually square the face so it'll dig down underneath that bad lie and propel that ball right out onto the green.

Here's the thing. Playing out of a buried lion of bunker is completely different than playing out of a nice clean lion of greenside bunker.

You need to be aggressive on any shop weather. It's sitting cleanly for its Friday egg.

Well, we've all faced it, the dreaded Frida egg.

It's not to be feared, though. It's actually a pretty easy shot to hit.

Sailing out of Gravesend, England on the trade route, Captain William Hilton one August morning in sixteen sixty three came upon an island peaceful and serene.

What you're hearing is the telecast of the nineteen sixty nine Heritage Golf Classic. It was a new event held at a new golf course, Harbortown Golf Links had been built by a forty three year old architect named Pete Dye. Back then, Pete Dye wasn't well known in the mainstream way, but his collaborator had a more recognizable name.

Hello, I'm Jack Nicholas. This is Pete Dye.

The two men lean against the balustrade of an outdoor stairway, both looking a little flushed in their full suits.

Pete and I have worked together to design and build the Harbor Town Golf Links here at Seapin's plantation. We're here on the eve of the first Heritage Golf Classic to be played over the Thanksgiving weekend. Having a golf tournament on the first year of operation, it's a dream come true for.

Both of us.

And the golf course looks straight.

Down the sea.

That's beautiful, Jack, Really, it's been a lot of fun here and we have that's a great contrast today the unagrasses with a behea centipede mine strong brings you back to Pinehurst and some of the old Briddies golflings.

Looks great.

It was quite a coup for Pete Dye to be there on TV side by side with the greatest golfer in the world. If you were a golf architect in nineteen sixty nine, he didn't get an awful lot of press unless your name was Robert Trent Jones. So the opening of Harbortown marked a turning point in Pete Die's career. Here was a course to be discussed. It was quirky and challenging, and it proved popular among the pros. One of those pros was Dean Beeman, who played his first Heritage in nineteen seventy one.

My favorite golf course was Harbortown, and Harbortown was today is many players' favorite golf course.

They really like it.

Harbortown is a golf course that has just as many right right to left as left to right holes. It has small and green. It demands accuracy. It doesn't fit a long hitter versus a shorter hitter. So I thought it had a great balance and it was a great test of golf, then a fair test to golf.

By nineteen seventy eight, Beeman was commissioner of the PGA Tour and he had just negotiated the purchase of a wild, soggy property near Jacksonville, Florida. There he intended to build a new venue for the Tournament Players Championship. He wanted the course to tax the abilities of the world's best golfers while providing a better viewing experience for spectators. It would be a stadium golf course, and he knew the

Yeah, it was really a mom and pop shop back then.

Adam Shupack is a golf journalist and the author of Golf's Driving Force, a biography of Dean Beaman.

When the Tour moved its headquarters to Panaviter Beach, it was working out of a four bedroom home with Dean's office was the master bedroom. The garage had the copier and postage meter, and you know for an intercom, they just yelled at each other.

It was.

It was a really small staff and Beaman took over in nineteen seventy four and used to say that, you know, the largest capital ast that they had was an IBM Selectric typewriter. They had about twenty walkie talkies and they did it on. They had three Budweisers and the Canna beans. I mean, it was a time period where bowling was still attracting higher ratings than golf, and tennis was the

It didn't take long for Beaman to start making aggressive moves. He was in his mid thirties and he had a background not only as an elite golfer who had won two US Amateurs, but also as an insurance broker, he knew his way around tax documents as well as boardroom negotiations.

You know, he was an intense man. He's got these piercing blue eyes, and you know, his friends used to say that, you know, he could deliver a look that could exterminate headlice. And it was a job that required toughness, because you know, he had this quest to kind of roll over the status quo in this traditional game, make

In his first year, Beaman converted the tour into a nonprofit, exempting it from paying income taxes and changing its financial fortunes. Beeman's other signature project was the new tournament Players Championship, later known as the Players Championship and now apparently as just the Players Anyway. From the beginning, Bemon had big plans for the event. The USGA had the US Open, the PGA of America had the PGA Championship and the RNA had the Open, why shouldn't the PGA Tour have

Was a very dynamic golf course that was played in March where the wind blew. It was as close to an ocean side course as you could get, and so it had all those elements in them.

But while Beeman liked Sawgrass as a course, he thought it could be improved as a venue.

There was going to have to be a substantial investment made in the golf course and the facilities to accommodate both the players and the gallery and what we wanted to do.

So Beeman attempted to buy Sawgrass Country Club, but for a variety of reasons, the deal never happened. Instead, he set out to build a new course, the home course for the tour, just across the road from Sawgrass Country Club was a huge tract of wilderness. The owners knew that being in business with the ascendant golf tour would raise the value of their land, so they sold four

As PGA Tour commissiony, he's working for a board, he's working for the players, and they had a lot of doubts, and they pretty much said, you can't risk any of our assets. They didn't have a lot to day, but they didn't want to put anything on the line. And if he failed, it was his neck. And so he went out figured a way to do it where they just couldn't say no. And it was you know, that is one of the most brilliant deals ever in the game of golf.

After all that, though, Beeman found himself in possession of a piece of land that, to put it mildly, seemed ill suited to golf. Here's how Pete Dye described it in his autobiography Bury Me in a pop bunker. When I first inspected the proposed site for the player's course, my only compatriots in the impenetrable swampy jungle were deer, alligators,

The property was.

It was dead flat. It had a lot of standing water on it. There's substantial rainfall here in Jacksonville. Following rainfall until it dried out, it was a pretty wet piece of property.

It hadn't always been that way. The array of oak, pine, sweetgum, and magnolia trees on the site indicated that it had once been an upland, but when the Intracoastal Way was built nearby in the early nineteen hundreds, water began to collect on the site. By the nineteen seventies, it was a Florida forest mashed up with a Florida swamp. But Beeman didn't mind that the property was flat and would

No golf course up to that point had been bought, had been built that more interest was concentrated on the gallery than the players.

Most golf courses are built for players.

We needed to build build one for the players, but we also had to we want. I wanted to build a golf course that would be the first what I called a stadium golf course.

Well, I wanted. I wanted two things. There were two.

Elements that I thought were extremely important in making a stadium course as successful as it could be. One is that you did all you care to build the spectator areas in the highest places on the course and the golf courses in the playing serfs on the lowest point of the golf court, so that the spectators were actually walking with you, and they would be above the players, and so more people could see. And that's the concept

It's striking how these ideas, although novel at the time, call to mind the features of certain time tested tournament golf courses. As Pete Dye pointed out in his autobiography, the Links courses of Great Britain and Ireland have dunes that form natural spectator mounds along the fairways and around the greens, and Beeman's notion of hubs of activity reminded me of how Augusta National returns to certain landforms, creating gathering spots where spectators can see multiple greens and teas

We killed rattlesnakes and moccasins all the time, almost every day. Were also alligators and spiders and all kinds of stuff out on the site, and you wore snake boots or you didn't really go out there.

Vernon Kelly was the project manager at TPC Sawgrass.

There was something out there we called blue gumbo clay. What it was was almost a plastic kind of clay. It was like quicksand. And when you were digging sand out of the pits, because wherever you found sand, we excavated it for the golf holds, and that's how we created seventeen. Of course, almost anywhere you see a lake out there, it's because there was sand in that area

Early on, it could seem like the land itself was rejecting the golf course.

The first thing we had to do was to find the property, so we had the boundary surveyed, and the surveyors actually went out there and cut the survey line with the cheties, and then you know, went from point to point and marked the points with the survey steaks and survey tape. Well, the vegetation grew so fast out there, literally within a couple of days, you could barely find the cut lines, which were the pass from state to streak, and you couldn't find the steaks at all.

And then there was the wildlife.

So one day we were walking along it as hot as could be, and the bugs were about to carry off the skews and the rest, and I was talking to David.

That would be David post Away, Pete Dies Construction superintendent.

He said, do you think there are any alligators out here? I said, oh, yeah, they're all over the place because they can travel in this water. It's about knee high and they can move from place to place. And he said, those are step on one. It's all. We won't do that, but you can find them because there'll be a an

Kid.

Fortunately the alligator was home, but you know, said, I'm laying of this thing, and my full concentration is on keeping my balpha order. All of a sudden, David comes pops right through the grass and falls right on top of me. He looks around. He says, oh my god, he says, the stinks that I haven't what is this. It's what we were talking about. It's an alligator. He's gone. He just disappeared. He was He took off so fast.

How did you get out?

Oh? I got out. I was. I was right by, but nothing happened to it.

Kelly, who hadn't worked on a peat dye project before, quickly got a taste of Die's creative process.

When we first started working with him. We had to get upset of plans from the bank in order to just strin alone. It was the hardest thing to get a set of plants. Pete resisted it and just didn't want to give us a set of plants. And finally we were able to secure a set of plans from him. We gave him to the bank and everything's ready to go. So we were on the site the first day. We were walking out to the first t I said, oh, wait, man,

Job, and that, it seems to me, is exactly where Pete Die and the tour could have found themselves at loggerheads, the craftsmen versus the corporation, the improviser versus the plan followers. But as it turned out, Dean Beeman himself had a healthy regard for Die's methods.

That's Pete.

Pete wants to be hands on boots on the I want to see it. I don't want to see it on a piece of paper. I want to see it with my own eye and my boots on the ground and get wet.

And from Vernon Kelly's point of view. While there was a contrast in styles between Die and Beaman, there was also a crucial element that kept the peace.

There was a tremendous amount of respect between Dean and deep In both ways and Alice both ways.

Years later, Alice I admitted that her initial fears about the partnership had been unfounded. Dean was wonderful, she said. He let Pete do his thing, and both of them let Alice do her thing. She too was on site, and she too had a knack for boots on the

They were renting a house three miles away and see Pine's plantation, And you know, Pete would be there six or seven days a week at six thirty in the morning with the crew, and Alice would come out maybe two or three times a week, you know, at lunchtime or in the afternoon, and she'd just come check on progress and see, you know, see what what had been done since the last time she was out there, which you know, even that would be more visits than most

So while Pete Die was firm in his own convictions, he was also eager to gather input from others.

I contend, as an architect artist, one of the hardest things to do when you're in the middle of a construction project is half perspective on you've sort of you've gotten away from playing golf on grass and you get to lose perspective of this is too hard, is this too easy? And it really helps to have somebody out there you trust just this you know, it's okay, it's fine, or it's O, wait, are you sure you want to be doing that? You know, and most architects don't have that.

The Stadium Course opened in nineteen eighty, but as the eighty two Players Championship approached, the first players to be held at TPC Sawgrass, the pressure on both Pete Die and Dean Beeman ratcheted up.

It was definitely a move forward for the PGA Tour because they were opening their own golf course.

Sean Martin is a senior editor for PGA Tour dot com, and in twenty seventeen he wrote a feature called Leap of Faith behind the Stadium Course's wild debut at the nineteen eighty two Players Championship. It's really great and a major inspiration for this episode.

So now they were getting into the golf course business, and there was debate among the players whether or not the PGA Tour should be getting into the golf course business, whether or not that was a wise business decision.

You know.

You look at Adam Schupack's book about Dean Beeman and the early tour was run out of basically, I believe it was a town home or a condo at the Sawgrass Country Club. So it was a very modest organization, so to now all of a sudden get into the golf course business. It was a risky venture.

And the heat on Beeman and Die got turned up when the pros started to visit the new course.

So Sawgrass Country Club, which hosted the players, was literally across the street, so when guys were in town for the players, they could go over and see TPC. It was carved out of a swamp. It was much more severe than what you see today. I think some of that is just when you build slopes and you shape them, they never look quite as severe as when they get grass on them. And so just I think of course

The players began to make their opinions known, and not long after the grand opening, Dean Beaman oversaw some significant changes.

It was difficult for me to envision what the final product would be based on looking at dirt when the grass was on it, it was far different.

Than I had imagined.

And clearly as soon as it opened, even before tour players came in and wanted to play it, I determined it was much too severe. The greens themselves were much too severe. So during the course of that year, before the first tournament, a lot of work was gone to take some of the severity out of the green.

But when the eighty two Players Championship arrived, the course was still very rugged and very difficult. Tom Doak headed down from Cornell during his spring break to watch the tournament. When Doak remembers that era of TPC Sagrass, the image of a relatively bare bones golf course comes to his mind.

You know, one of the things about the TPC that most people don't realize is, you know, in nineteen seventy ninety eighty was terrible recession time in America, and the TPC was really built to be a low maintenance golf course in a fairly low budget golf course to build. And of course once it was opened for three or four years, they all of a sudden it was like, well, this is the headquarters of the tour. We've got to spruce it up, and we've got to make it look

When Dope got to the tournament, he went out and found Pete Dye on the course.

I think it was on like the eleventh or twelfth hole. Basically he was just going around to one hole at a time and watching players come through and you know, watching shots and seeing how they reacted. He wanted to see how they played them. He didn't want to hear how what they said. He didn't cares so much what they said about it. You know, he just wanted to see if the shots work the way he intended them to.

But the pros were coming to their own conclusions.

You know.

Going in, people knew I think that there was going to be a high Tension Week. This was a players were facing something that was new, something that was very penal. Players had an opportunity to voice their opinions and voice them strongly and loudly, and the press obviously was very willing to write them. And so you had some great quotes that you know, I think players had probably spent some time thinking about. And so you had Ben Crenshaw of all people, referring to it as Star Wars golf

At least one player, however, was in his element.

As far as a Pete Die golf course, I was fortunate enough to play in nineteen seventy four, I played the Teeth of the Dog at Casady Compo.

Jerry Pate was a twenty eight year old US amateur and US Open champion. He had a silky, powerful swing and a fearless attitude, and he felt that he had a bead on Pete Dye designs.

So I kind of understood Pete strategies. I had a feel for how he liked to strategize holes, and there were just certain places you couldn't hit the ball. You just did you hit it there, you were in trouble.

Still, like everyone else, Jerry Pate was struck by the rawness and difficulty of the new TPC.

And you know, the golf course was wild and willy then. It wasn't just naturally managed and manacured light. I mean, it wasn't as manicured today. It was natural with palmettos and just you know, basically bobcats and rattlesnakes twenty foot off the fairway and Armadilla's and you name it. So that day there was nothing on earth. I mean that, not with it, not with exaggeration. There was no other course on the earth more difficult and diabolical than that golf course.

But unlike almost everyone else, Pate wasn't much bothered by the stadium course's severity. This was at least in part because he just wasn't the worrying type.

Yeah, so he was this gregarious balls riker, just fun loving flagging shots and I guess maybe kind of cavalier in that way, aiming at flags and playing I think, kind of care free, because when you're that good of a ball striker, you can kind of do that because the ball's going to go where you aim.

Pate also had the advantage of having played at the grand opening of TPC Sawgrass in nineteen eighty and being paired with Dean Beaman himself. Beaman had shown him where he could be aggressive off the tee and taught him not to be intimidated by Die's visuals.

Look, the fairways are much wider than they appear. They're classic Pete Die deception, you know, who build up bunkers or slopes that will make the fairway look smaller than they are. But the problem is is really the fairwaies or wider than you think. And if you lay back off the tee, the second shot you're going to face into the greens is harder than the shot that you

So Pete was even more confident than usual going into the eighty two players. Not only did he like Pete Die courses and do well at them, not only did he have the right skill set and disposition. Not only did he have intel on TPC sawgrass, but he also had deep family connections to Jacksonville. His father had been born and raised there, and his mother had moved there in high school. Add it all up and Jerry Pate felt that he had destiny on his side.

I just knew I was gonna win it. It wasn't even a fall in my head, you know, I knew it all along.

Well, he didn't exactly jump out to the lead. He hung around shooting seventy seventy three seventy. After fifty four holes, he was tied for sixth, three shots behind his brother in law Bruce Letsky and co leader Brad Bryant. Meanwhile, Pate was very aware of the rumblings among veteran players about the course and the tour's new direction.

And they was talking the locker room by the Senior Hall of Famers just before they were into Hall of Fame. And I won't mention names. Some of them are dead now. Somer still lives in their eighties, and the talk was they were going to get, you know, have a coup and fire Dean because we had no business owning a golf course. And it was crazy, and it was competing against some of these famous golfers design careers. They had

On Sunday after Burnying twelve, Pate had closed the gap between himself and the leaders. The year prior, he had won in Memphis, and in celebration he had leapt into the lake by the eighteenth green. So rumors were already going around TPC Sawgrass that if he pulled off the victory, he would do the same today.

So anyway, as I walked back to thirteen t and I heard somebody kind of running up behind me and they grabbed my arm. I turned around. It was Alice Dye and she looked at me and she said, you've got to win this thing, and you gotta throw Pete in the lake.

Alice's idea, it seems, was that a little playful public come uppings might do some good. It might provide an outlet for the rising hostility toward her husband and their design business.

First, Pete had been catching an ungodly amount of hate for this golf course, and Alice, I think, was a little bit worried. Can I turn around? Looked at her just calm as can be, And everybody used to think, you know, when I played, I was cocky. I really wasn't cocky. I just you know, I knew in my heart I could pull it off, and I said, I'm gonna win.

Pate went on to par thirteen, birdie fourteen, and birdie the Island seventeenth hole. He drove it right up the god on eighteen and had a five iron into the green. Until that point, the most famous moment in Pate's career had involved another seventy second hole five iron, this one at the nineteen seventy six US Open. He hit it so close to a dangerous whole location that some accused him of pulling it. Today, the approach to the eighteenth that TPC sawgrass is still a scary shot, even when

For me to hit that shot, It's like Ben Crenshaw hitting a you know, a six foot pot. He's not nervous. Jack Nicholas isn't nervous on a six foot pot. Tom Watson wasn't nervous on a six foot but Lee Taveno was never nervous on a niney yard web shot, and Jerry Pate was never nervous hitting a long iron shot.

But let's go back for a moment to the eighteenth fairway, just after Pate had stiffed his approach.

And the camera was on me. Little Davy Fence who worked for CBS, and Trikennyan is in the truck. I knew that, and you know, all my buddies at CBS were there and I have no idea what they've said. But as I walked up the eighteenth fairway, Davy Fence says you're gonna up in the lake, and I said, Pete, die will go for a swim.

As he waited for the groups behind him to finish, Pate saw Dean Beeman's wife, Judy, who urged him to throw Dean in the water with Pete. As that was happening, CBS, with Vin Scully calling the action, was working a bit of TV magic.

There was a gator that had been seen in the pond at seventeen, So Frank Trickinney and the great CBS producer put up a split screen and there's kind of waiting for Jerry to throw them in at the trophy ceremony on one side and the other side of this gator in the water. But what Vin said was that this gator is on the lake at seventeen. The lake on eighteen is not connected. And so the television viewers thinking they're about to jump into this gator infested pond.

Now I didn't even think I was going to go in. I thought I would just throw them both in the lake and that would be it. And then they were out there and you know, in the lake. So I threw them both in the lake off the bulkhead, and then I jumped in behind him. But you know, I never realized that high it was, and when I jumped in. After the fact, I go back and look at those videos. Heck, it was about an eight foot off the water. That bulkhead was about eight foot, so it's a pretty big

Dean Beaman has his own way of remembering the experience. How did the water feel?

It was pretty ugly.

The jump in the lake and its theater of just desserts may have taken the edge off the player's outrage. Dean Beaman kept his job and Pete Die kept designing courses for the PGA Tour, but the pro's opinion of the stadium course at TPC Sawgrass didn't change right away.

After the tournament was over. Pete's in the lockerroom changing. He's just been thrown in the lake. Ed Snead and Tom Wiscoff were waiting for him, and Pete knew both of them from Ohio, and they had a question about the thirteenth hole, which is a par three. There's water left and the green is bisected by a pretty severe swale, and so the whole locations down on the left. They're by the water, but you can use that swale to

In spite of appearances, though Pete Dye was not unmoved by the criticism, He wrote in his autobiography, the verbal assault against our new creation hit like a stake in my heart. Still he saw no evidence that the course was too hard. After all, Jerry Pate had won at eight under. In order to make the top ten, you had to break par. In fact, Die said at the time, when they learn how to play the stadium course, we may have to put in some more obstacles to keep

Some of the lowest areas on the greens that were pin positions were in places that the green surfaces at the higher part.

Of those greens were so severe that the.

Ball coming off the high side down on the low side wouldn't stay on the green at all.

So it was literally impossible to not three parts, many.

Many times from one transition part of a green to another. And the players were right, it was too severe. It was still too severe to be really a fair test to golf. Yeah, our feelings were still hurt, but they were right.

Months later Ben Crenshaw, the co chair of the architectural Committee, presented a list of changes to be made to the Stadium course. At that point, Die almost certainly saw the writing on the wall. How do you think mister Dye reacted to or felt about the fact that he was modifying or had to modify the course.

The answer is he was very reluctant to make the changes that we wanted made. He wanted it as difficulty could because he wanted to challenge the best players in the world.

But and he didn't care.

He didn't think off was fair in the first place, so he was not He was not happy with the continual modifications of it.

But the modifications were made, mostly carried out by Die's associate Bobby Weed between eighty three and eighty eight. Weed once said, one of my biggest regrets of being in the business is I was the one who had to make all the changes. Those changes did, however, mollify the pros and TPC sawgrass, which today boasts Augusta like conditions, complete with flower beds accenting the arena of the seventeenth Hole,

Dean came along at a time where the PGA Tour was just this mom and pop shop, and he really, during his twenty years tenures, assembled the building blocks that are the foundation of the modern PGA tour. And I feel like the PGA Tour is still running. The Dean Beam and playbook. It's worked all this time, and it continues to seem almost invincible and impenetrable to whatever comes along. It's just a well oiled machine.

Now. Whether the alterations to Die's original design were for the best remains a topic of debate in the golf world, one that breaks down along familiar lines. If you're a competitive or score oriented golfer, if you prize fairness and course design whatever that means, you'll likely see the changes as positive, even necessary. Others may argue that fairness is an irrelevant concern, especially when everyone is competing on the same course. These people may wish that more of the

I don't know if he can say the changes made the course better or worse. You know, it's all it's all a matter of opinion, and it's all your perspective on what the objective of the course should try to be. To me, it just made it different than the original intention, you know, in terms of how much pressure it put on the players to hit good shots consistently through the golf course. But you know, the bottom line is, you know, pros don't like shooting seventy five when they have an

In a sense, Alice Stye's prediction had come true. But it wasn't Dean Beeman specifically who came into conflict with her husband. It was the players and they had the last word at some point, perhaps during that walk around TPC Sawgrass with the committee in nineteen eighty three, he must have recognized that fact. After his triumph at the eighty two Players, Jerry Pate was living large.

And I had a ten year exemption. It was a big deal, the most money anybody had ever won, ninety thousand dollars, a lot of endorsements. You know, life was great. To have my own private plane. Jack and Arnold and I were the only three players had a private plane on the tour at that time. And I was twenty eight, you know, in pretty big tall cotton, I guess you could say for a Southern boy. And then in one swing in the first of June that was kind of into my golfing competitive career.

He was on the driving range at Pensacola preparing for the Open by practicing one iron stingers into the wind off of hard ground. On one swing, he felt his left shoulder pop, and that injury turned Jerry Pate into one of golf's great what if stories. He never won again on the PGA Tour, but he stayed in the golf business, eventually starting a course design firm of his own. Over the years, he became close with Pete and Alice Dye.

We've sort of taken on the role to keep the integrity of the aesthetics of the architecture and agronomics there. I go to Kastada Kamp, I'm going next week down there. In fact, I go down.

There a lot.

And so it's a great honor to have met Pete Dye as a twenty one year old kid, and now I'm sort of stepped in his place at one of his favorite places, and that's where he died.

If you listen to the Frida Egg podcast, you already know that Pete and Alice Die are no longer with us. Pete passed away in January at the age of ninety five after a battle with Alzheimer's. Alice was ninety one when she died in February of last year. They're longtime friends. Like Dean Beaman, Vernon Kelly, and Jerry Pate tend to speak about Pete and Alice in terms of both personal

They didn't build golf courses for the money they gave. They built golf course because because Alice was a great amateur player in her own right, her husband was really a fine amateur player, and they gave so much to the game. I guess Alice was the first woman to sit on the PGA of America board that I remember, and I know she was head of the Architects Society. I mean, they were, you know, for a woman. She did on incredible things in a man's world. And of

This was the fourth episode of Frida Egg Stories. It was created and hosted by me Garrett Morrison, with mixing and engineering from Jay Eric. Our executive producer is Andy Johnson. Thanks for listening.