Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Frida Egg Podcast. Today we have a documentary episode for you on the story of how TPC Sawgrass, the venue of the Players Championship was designed and built. We actually released this episode this week last year as the fourth installment of our Frida Egg Story series. Now, of course you remember this week last year.
We all do.
It was when the seriousness of the COVID nineteen pandemic really became clear in the US, and the Players Championship was canceled after Round one. In the midst of all of that, we released this episode and people did listen to it. We really appreciated that, but we thought we would give it another chance this week, given that the
Players Championship, by all indications, will actually happen. This episode has interviews with Dean Beeman, Jerry Pate, Vernon, Kelly, Tom Doak, Sean Martin, and Adam Shuepack, and we thought they said some really interesting and valuable things about Pete Dye, about the process behind TPC Sawgrass, and about the influence of both Die and what has become his most famous design. So, without further ado, here is episode four of Fried Egg Stories. Alligator Pitt the making of TPC sawgrass.
The fried egg requires a different technique.
What you need to do is.
Actually square the face so they'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 night and clean lion a greenside bunker.
You need to be aggressive on any show weather it's sitting cleanly for its fried egg.
Well, we've all faced it.
The dreaded fried egg not.
To be cleared, 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 a 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 worked together to design and build the Harbortown 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 great.
Dunnie looks beautiful.
Jack.
Really, it's been a lot of fun here and well, yes, that's a great contrast today the beautagrasses with a beheas centipede pin strong brings you back to Pinehurst and some of the old British golf links 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 Dye'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 to left as left to right holes. It has small and green, It demands accuracy. It doesn't favor a long hitter versus a shorter hitter. So I thought it had a great balance and it was a great test of golf and a fair test to golf.
By nineteen seventy eight, Beaman 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
man to build it was Pete Dye. Today, on Frida Egg's Stories, we are going back four decades to the building of the stadium course at TPC Sawgrass in the nineteen eighty two Players Championship. This story has been told and retold over and over, and since it's Player's Week right now, you'll no doubt be reminded by various journalists, TV hosts, and podcasters of the usual bits of lore.
Dean Beeman purchasing the property for one dollar, Pete Dies sketching a routing on the back of a place mat, the creation of the island Green, the complaints of the pros, and Jerry Pate after his victory in eighty two hauling both Beman and Die into the pond next to the eighteenth Green. Don't get me wrong, we'll replay a few of those hits in this episode. We're not about that. But the real reason I'm curious about the TPC Sawgrass story has to do with the personalities involved in the
contrasts between them. On the one hand, you had Pete Dye. Golf architecture was a passion for him, not just a business enterprise, and as we know in the way he designed courses. He was intensely hands on and independent. He was an artist. On the other hand, you had the PGA Tour under the leadership of Dean Beeman, thirteen years younger than Pete.
Die.
Beeman was energetic and assertive, a deal maker. TPC Sawgrass was his venture, and he had ideas of his own about what it should be. No less an authority than Alice Dye, Pete's wife and most trusted design consultant, had her own doubts about the partnership between Dean and Pete. Oh, Pete, you're crazy, she said, you can't build for Dean. He's particular, he's efficient, he's all the things you aren't. He'll have his hands in there trying to tell you what to do.
Don't do it. But he did, and oddly enough it worked. In this episode of Frida Egg Stories, we'll try to figure out how today the PGA Tour is the eight hundred pound rilla of the golf World. Back in the nineteen seventies, it was more like a newborn COMPUTIONI. The Tournament Player's Division as it was then known, had just separated from the PGA of America, and it was a scrappy operation.
Yeah, it was.
Really a mom and pop shop back then.
Adam Schupak 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 sport surging and popularity, so you know, he had a lot of work cut out for him when he took over his commissioner.
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 deliverer a look that could exterminate headlce 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
golf a bigger sport. And you know, he wanted to create a fan base that was much broader than just its own participants, and that meant doing things a little differently than they'd been done in the past.
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 Turn of Players Championship, later known as the Players Championship and now apparently as just the Players Anyway. From the beginning, Beeman 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
its own major. Well, for one, it's not easy to manufacture prestige, but Beeman tried his best. After staging the first three tournament players Championships at three different courses, he decided to stick with one. It had worked for the Masters, after all, So starting in nineteen seventy seven, the players absorbed to the Greater Jacksonville Open and set up shop at Sawgrass Country Club, which 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 it.
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 Beaman 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, a 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
hundred and fifteen acres to Beaman for one dollar. From there, the commissioner pieced together financing from a non recourse loan, a few dozen expensive founding memberships, and a few thousand cheap annual memberships. It was a tidy sum acquired at minimal risks.
PG tour.
Commissionary's working for a board, he's working for the players, and they had a lot of doubts and they pretty much, you can't risk any of our assets.
They didn't have a lot of 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 of 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,
wild boar, and deadly snakes. In order to cut a path, I followed deer tracks that led me to dry areas in the swamp before I nearly drowned in the depths of the marshland well.
The property was.
It was dead flat, It had a lot of standing water on it'bstantial rainfall here in Jacksonville following rainfall.
Until to dry it 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 in upland, But when the Intracoastal Waterway 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
need to be almost wholly re engineered. To him, it was a blank slate where he could realize his vision for a stadium golf course.
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 could to build the spectator areas in the highest places on the course and the golf courses in the playing services on the lowest point of the golf course, 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 of
a stadium. The second part of the concept that I thought was very important was the routing of the golf course should be in a way that produced the most what I call areas of activity. Instead of spreading the
golf course out and stringing the holes out. They shared wind back and forth in a way that created us hubs of activities where a spectator could maybe walk two or three hundred yards and see four or five different shots close to a couple of tees, a couple of greens, and maybe a fairway, and not have to walk five miles to watch a lot of golf. Because there are some spectators that want to follow their favorite player and others that just want to watch golf.
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 tees
at once. Perhaps in part because he appreciated these historical references, Pete Dye took beeman stadium concept and ran with it. Over dinner at the Homestead restaurant in Jacksonville. Die sketched a back nine routing on that now famous Place Mat and Beeman knew he had the right architect. Granted a Place Matt is a lot easier to work with than a four hundred and fifteen acre alligator pick.
We killed rattlesnakes and moccasins all the time, almost every day. Were also alligators and spatters and all kinds of stuff out on the side, and you wore snake boots or 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 play It was like quicksand. And when you were digging san and 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 anyway you see a lake out there, it's because there was sand in that area and we didn't have the money to buy sand.
And once you excavated the sand, sometimes you would hit this gushy kind of play material and it didn't seem to be in the bottom to it and out on I think it was number seven. One night we went a backo when we were digging building the green, and he got into that stuff, and I mean literally, without a couple of hours, it completely covered the tracks of the back hoe and was up to the cab, which
is about five feet. We were able to pull it out with a dozer, but it just showed how treacherous the sight was.
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 machetes, 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 Dye's 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 an alligator pit.
And what they do is they'll be in an area of saw grass and they'll root around and make an alligator pit that's probably twenty feet square around where they ripped up the vegetation and kind of dug them but a little bit deeper, and that's where they live and that's where they sleep in the water. And all they're scavengers. They don't eat live meat. They kill things and they put it in that pit to rot and when it's
real gamey, then they'll eat it. So when you come to one of those pits, you can tell what it is because it stinks to high heaven. And he said, boy, I hate to be in something like that, and I said, yeah, me too. So in the meantime, we're pushing through. We're pushing through the saw grass and it's about five feet ah, so thick.
I mean, you can't.
It just wears you out to push against it, sort of leaning leaning into it. I was in front and Dave was following me, and all of a sudden I was leaning. All of a sudden it just parted and I fell in this hole. And I knew immediately what it was because it's stunk to high of it and I'd fallen into an alligator. H Fortunately the alligator went home.
But you know, so I'm lad of this thing, and my full concentration is on keeping my alpha order. All of a sudden, David comes and 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 have and what is this? So it's what we were talking about. It's an alligator. He's gone. He just disappeared. He took off so fast.
How did you get out?
Oh?
I got out.
I was I was right behind, but nothing happened to it.
Kelly, who hadn't worked on a Pete Dye project before, quickly got a taste of Diye's creative process.
When we first started working with him. We had to get upset of plans for the bank in order to cheer a loan. It was the hardest thing to get a set of plants. Beat resisted and just didn't want to give us a set of plants. And finally we were able to secure a set of plants from him. We gave them 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, waitmen, I forgot something, and I went running back to the
truck and got the plans. And so I come running, come running back, and Pete says to me, what's that And I said, Oh, these are the plants, And he said put them back in the truck, and I don't want to see him again. That was the last time we had the plants on the job.
And that it seems to me 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 ground. 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 Beman, there was also a crucial element that kept the peace.
There was a tremendous amount of respect between Dean and det 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
ground improvisation. According to plans, the par three seventeenth would have water just on the right, but around the seventeenth green, as it happened, was some of the best sand on a generally mucky property, So the crew kept digging that sand out and using it as foundation for turf elsewhere on the course. Eventually there was an enormous pit where the seventeenth hole was supposed to be. Here's how Pete
Dye recounted what happened next. I called Alice over to discuss with her where we could find a new place for the green. She said, put the green back where it was and fill the hole with water. Simple enough. This sort of husband wife collaboration was common on Dye projects. One summer when he was in college, Tom Doak worked on the crew at Die's Long Cove Club on Hilton Head Island.
They were renting a house three miles away and see Pine's plantation, and 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, 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 architects would make to their
own construction sites. And it was actually a guy on our crew that would have been a college roommate of PD's, you know, Pebe was shaping on the golf course and Steve, his roommate, was out there working on the labor crew. And I get to know Steve a little bit, and at one point Steve just sort of said, really casually, well, you know, nothing's really done out here until miss Sally
says it's okay. And I thought that was funny at the time, but but I really did get the impression by the time I was done working for Pete and Alice that Alice had a lot to say about you know, maybe not the final say, but she was certainly going to tell Pe if she didn't think, you know, she thought golf course is too hard or too easy, or if that feature didn't look right, and you know, hers was the most important opinion to Pete.
So while Pete die was firm in his own convictions, he was also eager to gather input from others.
I can stand as an architect, the hardest 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 graph and you get to lose perspective of this is too hard, is this too easy? And it really helped out somebody out there you trust just this you know, it's okay, it's fine, or it's oh 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 p Die and Dean Beaman 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 Beaman and the early tour was run out of basically, I believe it was a town homer, 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 Beaman and Die got turned up when the pros started to visit the new course.
So Sawgrass Country Club, which hosted the players, with 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
is always gonna be severe when it's new. And then also you know, combine some of that with just the wild surrounds off the fairway. If you strayed from the corridors and hit it into that stuff, I mean you're looking at lost balls, You're having trouble hacking out. It was very raw and very very penal.
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 grasso 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 Wilt, a lot of work was done to take some of the severity out of the greens.
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 TVC was really built to be a low meetenance 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 pretty imperfect.
But that was not Pete's idea going into it. One of the quotes I remember him saying it to the original tournament in nineteen eighty two, with everything here is the dead opposite of Augusta on purpose.
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 him. He didn't want to hear how what they said. He didn't care so much what they said about it. You know, he just wanted to see if the shots work the way he intended them to.
And you know, so we just go to one hole at a time and watched three or four groups play through, and Pete did see somebody hid a good shot and go, oh, that hole works. We can go to the next hall now.
But the pros were coming to their own conclusions.
You know.
Going in, people knew I think that it 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
designed by Darth Vader. Jack Nicholas after missing the cuts that I've never been very good at stopping a five iron on the hood of a car.
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 Die designs.
So I kind of understood Pete strategies.
I had to feel for how he liked.
To strategize holes, and there were just certain places you couldn't hit the ball.
You just if you'd hit it there, you were in trouble.
And when I saw the Stadium course for the first time, a lot of people complained about it because the greens were sort of perched up off of the grade, so you had a lot of areas.
That had I would call.
Them false fronts in the front, and the green ran off on the left side and the right side, and there were very very small pinnable areas that were little target areas, and if you didn't hit it there, the ball would gather some fifteen to thirty forty feet away from there into a low depression either on the green or off the greens. So you had to be extremely accurate with your iron. You had to be a good driver of the ball, which I was, and you had to be a really good iron player, which I was.
So his designs sort of played right into my hand.
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 naturally managed and manacured light. I mean, it wasn't as manicure today it was natural with pal meadows 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. And I mean that 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, Pet 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 bass 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 bass riker, you can kind of do that because the ball's going to go where you aim.
Peate also had the advantage of having played at the grand opening of TPC Sawgrass in nineteen eighty and being pair 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 fairways 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 just avoided.
Off the tee.
So by playing safe off the tee, you're not really avoiding as much trouble as you think you are, and you're just bringing that much more into play around the greens. And so it is very visually intimidating, but you're also going to be best suited if you take the challenge on.
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. Added 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 thought 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 there was talk in 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, some are still alive in their eighties, and the talk was they were going to get, you know, have a coup and fired Dean because we had no business owning a golf course and it was crazy, and it was competing against some of the famous golfers design careers.
They had their own design careers going. So they're thinking, well, wait a minute, PGA Tours hiring some outside guy named Pete Died to design their golf cours. Why didn't they hire a player. It was victrial, it was anger. The players were mad, angry. I mean, you could use all those words. It was a big deal politically for Dean and Pete Die, I.
Can tell you.
And there were some really top players in that, as I said, hall of fame, golfers that didn't like the golf course at all, in fact missed the cut. And then once you get something that's negative in your mind, you don't like the golf course, you're done. There's no way you're going to play well. And I loved it.
On Sunday, after burdying 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 Sagrass that if he pulled off the victory, he would do the same today.
So anyway, as I walked back to thirteen Can, I heard somebody kind of running up behind me and they grabbed my arm.
I turned around.
It was Alice Die and she looked at me and she said, you've got to win this thing, and you got to throw Pete in the lake.
Alice's idea, it seems, was that a little playful public come up ins might do some good. It might provide an outlet for the rising hostility toward her husband and their design business.
Of course, Pete had been catching ungodly amount of heat 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.
Pet went on to par thirteen, Birdie fourteen, and Bertie 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 Pet'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
pros are hitting eight or nine irons. Almost no one goes directly at the pin, but Pate did with a five iron, and he knocked it to two feet.
For me to hit that shot like Ben Crenshaw hitting 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 Terveno was never nervous on a nine yard wed shot, and Jerry Fate was never nervous hitting a.
Long iron shot.
I mean, I nerves weren't even in my vocabulary. And when I hit the five iron, and I went to the press room, and I think Tom Place was running the interview for the PGA Tour and he said, you have any opening statements, and I go, yeah, I guess, I guess I pulled another five iron.
But let's go back for a moment to the eighteenth fairway after Pate had stiffed his approach and.
The camera was on me, little Davy Finch, you worked for CBS and Trick Kenny and is in the truck. I knew that, and you know all my buddies and CBS were there, and I.
Have no idea what they've said.
But as I walked up the eighteenth fairway, Davy Finch says, you're gonna jump in the lake, and I said, Pete, die will go for a swim.
As he waited for the groups behind him to finish, pet saw Dean Beaman'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 Trickinny in 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 gonna 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 how 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
racing dive. But to be eight foot in the air, but we didn't care. There was so much, so much adrenaline, the emotion of winning.
It was an exciting time and it was, you know, a memory I'll never forget it was.
It was as great as winning the US Open.
I can tell you.
Dean Beeman that's his own way of remembering the experience. How did the water feel?
It was pretty ugly.
The jumping and it's theater of just desserts may have taken the edge off the player's outrage. Dean Beeman 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 locker room changing He's just been thrown in the lake. Ed Snead and Tom Weiscoffer 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
funnel the tea shot towards the hole. However, if you miss on the wrong side of it, you're now putting down a very steep slope to the hole. Two putting is almost impossible. So Ed and Tom had played together. They said their te shots landed within two feet of each other. One of them funneled down towards the hole, the other state up top. And they were asking, how can we have a golf course where two shots that land within two feet of each other have such vastly
different results. That doesn't seem fair. Pete looks at them and he says, well, the only reason that happened is because you guys are chicken. If you were aiming at the hole, that two feet wouldn't have mattered at all. But you're afraid of the water on the left, so you're aiming for a slope in the green to try to save you, and that has too small of a margin for error, which you just told me you're not good enough to hit.
In spite of appearances, though Pete Die 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 this stadium course, we may have to put in some more obstacles to keep
them totally frustrated. But ultimately it wasn't Die's call. After the eighty three Tournament Players Championship, the pros revolted. According to Adam Shuepack's account, a group of top players sent a letter of complaint to Commissioner Beman. Among the signees were Ben Crenshaw, Taylorwin Jack, Nicholas, Craig Stadler, Tom Watson, and Tom Weiscough. Quickly, Beaman arranged a meeting at TPC
Sawgrass between Pete Dye and a player committee. They toured the course and the players grilled Die about the green contours. The commissioner saw their side well.
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 to 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, they were 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, I almost certainly saw the writing on the wall. How do you think mister Die 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 golf 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, is
now highly regarded among PGA Tour members. In a way, it's become a symbol of the tour the Dean Beaman built, sturdy, impressive and efficiently run. Here's Adam Schuepack.
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 Beaman 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 Tode'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
rugged quirk of Die's original design had been preserved. Tom Doak takes a fairly diplomatic view.
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
average to poor day. You know, they don't mind not shooting sixty seven all the time, but they don't. They don't want the numbers to get up there and the TPS see when you were having a bad day there darnwell reflected it on the scorecard.
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 Sagrass 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, and 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. Their friendship had begun in nineteen seventy four when a twenty one year old Pate played the World amateur at Teeth of the Dog. Today, his firm looks after Teeth of the Dog and the other die courses at Casada Compo.
As we've sort of taken on the role to keep the integrity of the aesthetics of the architecture and agronomics there. I go to Kasa Da Kamp, I'm going next week down there. In fact, I go 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 Fried Egg podcast, I already know that Pete and Alice I 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
and historical. Their generosity, their accomplishments, their eccentric, nomadic lifestyle, their influence on a generation of architects, their commitment to the game and to the craft.
They didn't build golf courses for the money. 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 for a woman. She did on.
Incredible things in our man's world and of course Pete was a legend.
Oh my god.
You know the stories Pete used to tell me about how he got fired by Augy Bush or fired by herb Cooher and then they'd.
Hire him back. And I'm sure Dean wanted to fire ms. He was quite a character.
You know.
And you couldn't help beloved Pete Dye and Alice was just gosh, she was the salt of the earth. She was like a mother to me, I'll tell you. And so I dearly miss him both. I dearly miss him both.
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.