A
typical TPC is
run by PGA professionals skilled in providing a quality golf
experience. Members of private TPCs have access to other courses in the
network,
while PGA, Champions and Nationwide Tour players relish full
access to
world-class practice facilities. (Vijay Singh, for example,
carries out his
legendary practice regimen at Sawgrass when he’s not on
the road.)
Architecturally, however, the TPC brand has been tainted by
a number of courses
that fail to foster exciting competition and others
that prove unenjoyable for
everyday play.
The
TPC family
was born when the tour purchased 415 acres of “soft marshland”
(translation: North
Florida swamp) in Ponte
Vedra for $1 from a shrewd
developer who later cashed in on surrounding land
sales. Beman’s
original goals were to provide “better viewing and a good test of
golf”
and to accommodate “all those things necessary to put on a successful
tournament.”
After
the TPC at
Sawgrass opened to less-than-glowing reviews, Beman worked with Dye
and
a player advisory committee (Jack Nicklaus, Ed Sneed, Jim Colbert) to iron
out the kinks. Within 10 years of its debut, Sawgrass had been altered
more
times than Cher’s facade, but the
annual home
to the Players Championship is a polished and
stern-but-fair test of golf almost
universally praised by tour pros
today.
Sawgrass
was
originally planned as an exclusive club with 40 charter members, but Beman
instead adopted the successful financial and golf-focused model created
by
then-burgeoning Landmark Land Company (La Quinta, PGA West)—and a
new source of
tour income was born.
In
the early
days, a TPC course had to host a tour event to maintain its licensing
agreement. That once-strict standard was loosened after the Honda
Classic was
moved from the TPC at Eagle Trace in Coral
Springs, Fla., a windswept
Arthur
Hills design that
proved
unpopular with players. Its successor, the Mark
McCumber-designed TPC at
Heron
Bay, met a similar fate and
is
now up for sale.
These
days, a
TPC facility no longer need host an event to retain the TPC name. This
new policy opened the door to several real estate-focused projects that
marketed
the tournament-golf concept, except their developers forgot to
build a golf
course suitable for championship play. At TPCs in
Boston and Potomac, Md.,
for example, tour players received letters in their lockers asking them
not to
publicly criticize design features. It may bear mentioning that,
other than the
Players Championship, Byron Nelson Championship and
Deutsche Bank Championship
(in which funds go to his foundation), Tiger
Woods has played only one tour
event at a TPC course in the past five
years. On the Champions Tour, the SBC
Classic chose not to move from
Valencia Country Club across the street to the
new TPC at
Valencia, which one player says “may
be the worst course in the world.”
