Four unique venues hosted THE PLAYERS before 1982
By Vartan Kupelian, PGATOUR.COM Contributor
Editor's note: Everyone knows about the challenging Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass, which has hosted THE PLAYERS Championship (formerly known as the Tournament Players Championship) since 1982. What about the other four venues, though? PGATOUR.COM correspondent Vartan Kupelian takes a look at each one below.
Atlanta Country Club: 1974
J.C. Snead has fond memories of Atlanta Country Club even if the inaugural PLAYERS Championship in 1974 didn't end in his favor.
Snead took a "pretty good lead" of three shots into the last round but faced with inclement weather, frequent interruptions in play and the challenge of Jack Nicklaus, he fell short and finished second.
It didn't diminish Snead's appreciation of Atlanta Country Club, though.
"It was one of my favorite courses," he said. "It was a good golf course, with some tough holes, a couple of very good par 3s."
Snead's sentiments don't surprise Joe Inman, a winner on both the PGA TOUR and Champions Tour who also played in that first Tournament Players Championship and has been a member at Atlanta Country Club since 1990.
"What I say to people all the time -- and I play it all the time -- is that uphill, downhill, left, right, long and short, it's got every kind of golf shot," said Inman, now the golf coach at Georgia State. "It doesn't favor one person over another. It's not just a bomber's course or hooker's course or fader's course. You need an accomplished game to move the ball in every direction.
"It's just always been a really well-designed, fun golf course to play. Challenging, but fun."
Atlanta Country Club is located in the rolling hills of Marietta, just north of Atlanta. It sits in an area known for the ruins of a historic mill that once produced the paper for Confederate money. Sope Creek meanders through the course and the Chattahoochee River flows nearby.
When architect Willard Byrd completed the design, Atlanta Country Club became host of the Atlanta Classic in 1967. The event gave way in 1974 to the Tournament Players Championship. The course has maintained its original instincts over the years -- modifications by Nicklaus, Bob Cupp and most recently Mike Riley have been minimal.
"The greens have been redone a little bit," Inman said. "The biggest difference is that back then it was a pretty long golf course. Now it's not, because of technology. The longest hole is 450 yards. With a steel shaft, wood head, wound ball -- that was some long golf hole."
Atlanta Country Club played to 6,883 yards and par 72 in the first Tournament Players Championship.
Club members include three-time major champion Larry Nelson, while Davis Love III and Bob Tway also grew up playing the course.
Colonial Country Club: 1975
Colonial Country Club has one of golf's most memorable sequences of holes. It's called the Horrible Horseshoe and is comprised of the three most challenging holes on the course.
The Horrible Horseshoe -- named because of the outline of the holes from the third tee to the fifth green -- is a long, grueling stretch that begins at the 483-yard, par-4 third hole, a hard dogleg left around a large tree and bunkers.
Next up is a 247-yard par 3 to an elevated green. Any tee shot that finds the green is a victory.
The 481-yard par 4 fifth hole is the most famous and most difficult at Colonial. The tee shot must avoid a ditch left of the fairway and a river to the right. Even an outstanding drive leaves a long, narrow approach.
"There is a sense of relief when you get through the horseshoe," said Dow Finsterwald Jr., the head PGA professional at Colonial.
"Colonial was the longest par 70 on TOUR. In those days you rarely got a par 4 over 420 yards, and Nos. 3 and 5 were well over, in the 470 range. They were driver and 3- and 4-irons. And it was a 3-wood at the fourth just to be on in regulation."
Colonial is that rare golf course that is universally hailed by the golfers.
"It's a pure ball-striker's golf course," said Lanny Wadkins, winner of the 1979 PLAYERS Championship who will be inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame this fall.
Mark Hayes, the 1977 PLAYERS Champion, is now in the course design and course renovation side of the business and is based in Edmond, Okla.
"Colonial is a real classic golf course, pretty flat and not much movement," Hayes said. "The greens and the bunkering are what made that golf course, in my opinion. Just a very classic design."
Colonial has another important distinction which makes it an icon among American courses. It is known as Hogan's Alley for the success enjoyed there by Ben Hogan, whose home course, Shady Oaks, is just a par 5 down the road in Fort Worth.
Hogan won the first two Colonial National Invitation Tournaments in 1946 and 1947. He returned after the 1949 car accident, which nearly ended his career, to win back-to-back again at Colonial in 1952-53. For good measure, Hogan added a fifth Colonial title in 1959.
It's no mystery why Hogan had so much success at Colonial. It is a ball-striker's paradise and Hogan was the finest. Colonial demands excellence in every phase of the game, especially in shot-making and thinking.
At the 1975 Tournament Players Championship at Colonial Country Club, nobody made better decisions than Al Geiberger. In the stifling Texas heat, Geiberger shot 66-68-67-69 -- 270 for a three-stroke victory over a fast-closing Dave Stockton Sr. Geiberger played his best golf in the heat.
The footnote to history is that, two years later, Geiberger became the first golfer ever to shoot 59 in a PGA TOUR event at the Memphis Classic. It happened on a sweltering Tennessee day.
The course? It was also named Colonial Country Club.
Inverrary Golf & Country Club: 1976
The East Course at Inverrary Golf & Country Club, site of the 1976 Tournament Players Championship, was admired as a solid golf course that was always in top condition.
Designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr., and opened in 1971, it wasn't a particularly tight course. It favored long hitters, and those who favored a left-to-right shot shape were always comfortable there.
Jack Nicklaus, the longest of his generation, won the second of his three Tournament Players Championship titles at Inverrary. Lee Trevino, the most renowned left-to-right player of the time, won Jackie Gleason's Inverrary Classic on the East Course in 1973.
Nicklaus' positive vibes on the course were not an aberration. After his victory in the 1976 Tournament Players Championship, Nicklaus returned to the East Course to win the Inverrary Classic in 1977 and 1978. He had finished second there behind Tom Weiskopf in 1972, which was the first of the TOUR events hosted by Jackie Gleason.
Inverrary featured fine par 3s, including the 201-yard seventh; the par-5 15th, which was the decisive hole in the tournament; and the signature par-4 16th hole.
Inverrary featured large, rolling greens and, typical of Florida courses, plenty of water. The East course, with plenty of room off the tee, put a premium on approach shots. The size of the greens -- some as deep as 50 yards -- made club selection a key.
The seventh hole frequently is involved in conversations about the finest, most challenging par 3s in Florida. From the championship tee, it's all carry to what appears to be a deceptively small green.
After pitching in for eagle in the third round at the 532-yard 15th, Nicklaus hit the green in two in the final round and holed a 30-foot putt for eagle. He played the 15th in 6 under on the way to a 13-under winning total.
"I played it in even par -- he beat me by six strokes on that one hole," said runner-up J.C. Snead, who lost by three shots.
The 16th is a classic risk-reward design. In those days it played to just under 400 yards from the championship tees. The hole was a dogleg right around a lake, so the safe but longer route was the fairway. However, it wasn't unusual to see the long hitters take on the lake to shorten the distance. A hard fade worked there, too.
"It was the kind of hole where you made par and got out of there," Snead said.
Sawgrass Country Club: 1977-1981
They still talk about how hard Sawgrass Country Club played in those early years of what has now become known as THE PLAYERS Championship.
"The pros, every time they come back, always remember how much of a beast it was," said Ed Tucker, general manager and director of golf.
The Tournament Players Championship was contested at Sawgrass Country Club five times, from 1977 through 1981, before moving to the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass. Mark Hayes and Jack Nicklaus won the first two events, each with a 1-over-par 289 score.
Three decades years later, there remains an overpowering image of the Sawgrass Country Club years.
"The wind," Hayes said. "It was just brutal.
"We had several days that were called Black Saturday or Black Sunday. The wind was blowing 45, 50 miles an hour.
"They weren't shooting it up because it was so exposed to the wind. It was pretty hard to get a ball to stay straight on you. The country club course was much tougher, especially the first year when there were a lot of front bunkers. That went away. That's exactly what I remember. I couldn't hit it over bunkers and keep it on the green.
"(It was) just a very scary golf course with several holes that had trouble on both sides, and real strong cross winds. I really liked the quality of the golf course but it was very scary playing."
Topping the "scary" list was No. 5, a modest 418-yard hole by today's standards that runs along the beach of the Atlantic Ocean, where there never seemed to be a let-up in the breezes. It is a hole the golfers still recall vividly if not fondly.
"I used to hit a 1-iron off the tee, and hit it as well as I could, and got it rolling, another 1-iron into the throat of the green -- I couldn't get home," Hayes said. "The wind was always blowing right into you and across. I was trying to hit it three feet off the ground with both those 1-iron shots. I think I made par there every day."
No. 5 deserved its reputation as the hardest par 4 on the PGA TOUR in those days.
The competitors in the Tournament Players Club had a post-round ritual at Sawgrass Country Club. There was a barber's chair in the locker room and as each golfer finished the round, he would be seated in that chair and recite his worst hole of the round to determine the day's worst-ball score.
"Phil Rogers did the counting," J.C. Snead said. "I remember when someone said they made a seven, they were told, 'Get out of the chair, not even close."
So what was the worst ball?
"It was way over 100," Snead said.
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