Links Magazine | The Best Of Golf

Tunnel of Champions
After a change of shoes, I take a quick tour of the Champions locker room and “the players’ lair,” a lounge with a billiards table, tall leather chairs, card tables and a couple of flat screens that local residents Vijay Singh and Jim Furyk like to frequent. But there’s little time to relax. Hugh leads me out the back door, down the stairs and through the “Tunnel of Champions,” a ground-level passage lined with black-and-white photos of past winners.

This is the same route players take to the course—even when it’s not tournament week, it seems. I pass former player Mark Carnevale, who is returning from a practice session. On the wall just before exiting the tunnel is an inscription: “Through this tunnel pass the greatest golfers in the world competing for the right to be called THE PLAYERS Champion.”

No reporters or fans asking for autographs are waiting as I emerge from the tunnel into the bright Florida sun. However, my caddie, Andrew Sobolewski, greets me, wearing an Augusta-like jumpsuit with my name Velcroed across the back.

He leads me to a spot on the range that also is designated with my name—a service never accorded me when I used to go to the crowded range at Rancho Park in Los Angeles. An instructor from the Tour Academy drops by during my warm-up session to help me with my swing. Taking a lesson is probably not the best idea before heading out on one of the most difficult courses in the world, but as an inveterate tinkerer, I can’t resist hearing what he has to say about my takeaway.

Armed with an official Players yardage guide, I’m ready to go. Although I have never played the course, I feel very familiar with it because I have seen it so often on television. After the Masters, the Players is probably my favorite tournament because of the familiarity and back-nine drama.

Clearly, that was former PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman’s goal when he set out in the mid ’70s to make the Players a fifth major. After he failed to purchase Sawgrass Country Club, located across Highway A1A and host of the tournament from 1977 to 1981, brothers Jerome and Paul Fletcher sold him 415 acres of swamp filled with alligators, poisonous snakes and wild boar for $1. They shared his vision of a first-rate, fan-friendly course for the tour’s showcase event the public could also play.

Beman liked what Pete Dye created at Harbour Town Golf Links in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, and hired him to design a balanced course that wouldn’t favor any style of play. It was also one of the first courses built with spectators in mind, not an easy task given that the land had an elevation of just 18 inches. But Dye used the muck dug from creating a number of lakes to build the stadium mounding and course contours. In fact, he did so much digging that the intended height of the mounds tripled in size to 30–40 feet.

One unintended byproduct of all the excavation gave the course its signature hole—the island green 17th. Dye had originally planned to have a small lake to the side of the green, but the area around the green site contained the best sand to use on the rest of the course. Before long, three-quarters of the land was gone and the idea of an island green flashed in his mind.