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By Laury Livsey
PGA TOUR Staff

During his Sunday afternoon radio show, the talk-show host on WTAM 1100 AM near Cleveland has some free stuff to give away, so he decides it's time to dust off an old trivia question that he's certain his listeners won't be able to answer. "For one free golf lesson," he says, "name the player to hit the first official shot at THE PLAYERS Championship the first year the tournament was held at the TPC Sawgrass in 1982."

The first tee at TPC Sawgrass, as shown in 1982.

Before long, the board lights up, and the answers come rolling in.

"Jack Nicklaus?" somebody answers.

"Sorry. Nice try," the host says. "Let's go to Mike in Shaker Heights. Do you have a guess?"

"Greg Norman?"

"Nope. Go ahead, caller. The player who hit the first official shot at THE PLAYERS Championship at TPC Sawgrass."

"Tom Watson?"

"No. Watson played in that first event, but he didn't hit the first ball."

And so it goes. Answer after answer after answer. Wrong, wrong and wrong. The host leans back in his chair and smiles. "They never get that one."

Professional golf in the Jacksonville area really began, in earnest, in 1945 when Sam Snead won the Jacksonville Open. That started a stretch of nine straight years that Florida's First Coast hosted the tournament, with Snead and Cary Middlecoff, both World Golf Hall of Famers, winning two titles each.

The Greater Jacksonville Open returned in 1965 and had a 12-tournament run through 1976 before THE PLAYERS (nee Tournament Players) Championship supplanted it in 1977 when that event moved to Ponte Vedra Beach's Sawgrass Country Club. So local golf fans were well acquainted with PGA TOUR golf when the TPC Sawgrass opened and the tournament moved across A1A to the new Pete Dye-designed course.

What fans weren't exactly sure of was how TPC-style golf would work. The new course added a sense of curiosity and intrigue to the area's golf history.

"There was a fair amount of excitement and anticipation about that first year," said Bill Calfee, a TOUR player in 1982 and now president of the Nationwide Tour. "It was a big deal, a really big deal for the TOUR to have our own golf course, to have our own home for THE PLAYERS Championship."

Bill Calfee

Calfee should know as one who was aware of the new course well before it opened. In 1978, while in town for that year's PLAYERS, PGA TOUR Commissioner Deane Beman invited golfers to visit the new, um, facility.

At the time, it was little more than a swampy marsh with trees. Calfee got into a four-wheel-drive truck with Bob Dickson, a former player and a TOUR administrator at the time, and they drove to what is now the 10th green. "Deane was there telling us what was going to be where, and I'm looking around at this piece of property going, 'There is no way in the world.' I couldn't imagine that there was going to be a world-class golf course here. I thought, This is crazy. How the hell are we going to do this?"

Three years later, 147 players found out, and they were about to get their first crack at "stadium golf." The unique-looking course, with its abundance of mounds, railroad-tie bulkheads and built-in bleachers cut into the landscape (since removed) had opened for play on Oct. 24, 1980, but 18 months later, the week of March 15-21, 1982, the course had its official unveiling to the masses.

There to christen the place was a who's who of golf. On the range stood Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Gary Player, as well as Johnny Miller, Lee Trevino, Tom Watson and Snead, the 69-year-old who had won in Jacksonville 36 years earlier.

Also hitting balls on the range were the rank-and-file of the TOUR, guys like Calfee, Pat Lindsey and an Ohio native named Gary Trivisonno, who would later go on to some acclaim as the host of his own golf radio show in Cleveland.

The week before the 1982 PLAYERS, the TOUR was in Miami for the Doral-Eastern Open. Trivisonno tried and failed to qualify for the tournament, so he flew back to his home in Pensacola, hung out for a week practicing and then tossed his clubs in the back of his black Jeep Cherokee and drove across the Florida Panhandle with his wife, Jennifer, to Ponte Vedra Beach. It would be Trivisonno's first visit to TPC Sawgrass. His crack at Doral, unfortunately, was a normal situation for players like him.

This was a year before the all-exempt TOUR arrived, and players with exempt status still had to travel to a tournament site and try to Monday-qualify their way into the field. More times than not, they'd shoot a score that would leave them outside the candy store, their noses pressed against the window. That, unfortunately, described Trivisonno. The Doral tournament was just another failed week.

Extensive grass bleachers once were a staple of the Stadium course.

In 1982, however, Trivisonno didn't have to worry about qualifying for THE PLAYERS. He had earned a spot in the elite field on the strength of one good tournament, the 1981 Pleasant Valley Jimmy Fund Classic in Sutton, Mass., where he enjoyed a fourth-place finish and won $14,400 of his season total of $16,860, enough money to get him an invitation to THE PLAYERS.

The Trivisonnos arrived in Ponte Vedra Beach, before making their way to Neptune Beach and the Sheraton hotel that is now a Days Inn. Just grateful to be in what even back then was considered the best field in golf, Trivisonno had no idea he would later carve out a special place in tournament history.

His weekly routine regardless of where he was playing was a simple one, and he didn't deviate from it that week at THE PLAYERS. "I was the kind of guy who got [to the course] at 9 or 10 and left at 6, 6:30. I didn't hit balls from sunup to sundown," Trivisonno said. "I was always like, the more I play a course, the better off I am. So I wouldn't beat balls on the range."

The week of the '82 PLAYERS, he played 27 holes on Monday and 27 more on Tuesday, practice rounds with buddies Larry Mize and John Mazza. Once his rounds were over, he'd head back to the Sheraton to relax.

"I really liked it," Trivisonno said, remembering his first practice round at the course. "I liked a little room off the tee, and I didn't mind hitting irons into tight areas. But it was very difficult. I think some of the guys even complained and moaned a little bit."

Yeah, just a little.

Tom Weiskopf said to the now-defunct Jacksonville Journal, "It's like being inside a great big pinball machine," while Watson said, "They've taken Augusta's greens and miniaturized them." And those were two of the nicer comments.

"The course was just so darn hard. The 16th green, especially. It was a really, really tough course," says Mike Donald who shot rounds of 70-80 and ultimately missed the cut. Slugger White, who had left the TOUR as a player after the 1981 season and was in his first year as a TOUR rules official in 1982, a job he maintains today, was on the team that helped set up the course's front nine.

"Sawgrass is such a wonderful place. It's hard, but it's fair," White said. "Back then, the greens didn't accept shots as well, and now they do accept shots. But in 1982, the course was very difficult, really hard and fast."

Raymond Floyd didn't seem fazed by the place. The defending champion, who beat Barry Jaeckel and Curtis Strange in a playoff at Sawgrass Country Club a year earlier to win the 1981 PLAYERS, played in the pro-am, teeing off after Tom Kite, Craig Stadler, Jim Simons, Keith Fergus and Ron Streck had all posted 3-under 69s.

As Floyd approached the 17th tee, he'd taken 57 strokes and stood eight strokes under par. Two pars would give him a startling 64, but it wasn't to be. That's when the TPC Sawgrass showed its teeth. Nobody was going to shoot a 64, even in a pro-am. Instead of two pars, Floyd limped home with a bogey-bogey finish yet still posted an impressive 66 to pick up the $1,000 that went to the pro-am winner.

The following morning, Trivisonno had no thoughts of shooting 64. He just hoped to play well enough to make it to the weekend. As he stood on the first tee, he had no idea he was about to make history. By virtue of the groupings' tee times, he would be the answer to his own trivia question. The 1982 PLAYERS was to be Trivisonno's 25th TOUR event, and he wasn't the least bit nervous. "Nah, not at all," he remembers. "I was just excited to play, to be in the field." That changed when Beman walked up to the second-year pro out of the University of Alabama and said, "Since you'll be the player to hit the first official shot, I'd like you to take that ball out of play after you're done with the hole so we can display it."

Gulp.

"I was immediately nervous about losing the ball," Trivisonno said. "I'm thinking, If I lose this ball, what am I going to tell him?"

Trivisonno pegged his tee into the ground, put his Titleist on it, pulled out his persimmon Titleist Tour Model driver and knocked that first tee shot straight down the middle."

Whew.

Trivisonno's history-making front-nine experience went a lot like his opening drive. Everything was safe. He didn't make any birdies but walked away with an even-par 36.

Things didn't go so well after he made the turn. His round blew up at the 16th (remember Donald's comments?) when his approach found the water and he made double bogey. After escaping with a par at the island 17th, Trivisonno's drive on the closing hole again found the water, leading to another double bogey.

"I didn't think the course was unfair. But it was demanding and difficult," Trivisonno said.

A case in point came on the seventh hole during that first round. "I remember Gary on No. 7, a long par 4. He hit this gorgeous drive, right down the pipe. And we get down there, and he had hit it so far the ball had gone through the fairway, through the rough and into a hazard," said Lindsey, Trivisonno's playing partner those first two days. "It was typical to what happened to a lot of us. We didn't know how to play the course very well, and even your best shots could turn into double bogeys."

Lindsey figured the place out enough to carve out a 4-under 68 Thursday to find himself tied for fourth, a stroke behind leaders George Burns, Lyn Lott and Larry Nelson. After Lindsey and Trivisonno signed their scorecards and began walking toward the locker room, a TOUR official greeted Lindsey and escorted him to the media center.

"That was my first experience meeting with the press," Lindsey said. "Believe me, that was one of my few. I had a really good first round and was a stroke out of the lead but ended up barely making the cut. Typical."

That's what the new course could do to players. It could give, but it could also take away. "The back nine just ate my lunch," Trivisonno added about his misadventures on his final nine Thursday. He finished with a 4-over 76, followed by a 6-over 78 in the second round (the same score Lindsey put together) that left him well outside the cutline. "But I hit 9-iron on 17 both times, knocked it on the green and walked away with pars both days," Trivisonno said laughing about how he played the famous par-3 island hole, choosing to look on the bright side.

Those two days were the sum of Gary Trivisonno's experiences at TPC Sawgrass. He wasn't there to see Pate win the first PLAYERS Championship at the place. He was already back in Pensacola by the time Pate tossed Beman, the TOUR commissioner, and Dye, the course's designer, into the lake on 18 after his victory, before jumping in himself. It was one and done for Trivisonno, who never played in THE PLAYERS again. He is essentially a footnote in history to what has become one of the most important tournaments in golf. But it's a moment Trivisonno relishes, even if it's something very few especially the listeners of WTAM know.

The talk show host is giving away a free bucket of range balls to the first caller with the answer to this question: Who won the first PLAYERS Championship held at TPC Sawgrass?

Trivisonno leans back in his chair and smiles. "It's Jerry Pate. Hey, I gotta ask something they at least have a chance of answering correctly."