Most TPCs have been designed to fit the modern player’s target-golf approach. But Fought believes unpredictability is what creates exciting golf. “Why should the hole have to fit the player’s shot?” he asks. “The players are concerned about getting from point A to point B in the least amount of strokes. They don’t want any distractions and they don’t want any unpredictability.”

Fought also says TPCs need “a couple of places to watch three or four holes. Having a few little intimate spots is so interesting. Just look at Amen Corner and everything that goes on there.”

“It would be cool if somebody could build a TPC where they could use natural contours to fit the spectators in with natural features, so that it’s not this constant series of dug-out holes with ridges up the sides,” architect Dana Fry adds. “They are just so overbuilt. They’re not really places where I would want to play golf. With few exceptions, you’re not going to learn a lot about golf design when you experience them.”

Fry floats an intriguing idea: What if Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw built a TPC? “They would probably build a course that wasn’t 7,500 yards,” he says, “and they would put some interesting green contours in front of the players.”

But could the PGA Tour ever hand over design chores to some of the modern game’s more provocative designers? “I don’t know if they’re open-box people,” Fry concedes.

Still, Weed believes the tour has all the inspiration it needs to build more intriguing TPC courses in the future. “They need to just go back to those initial three [Sawgrass, Scottsdale, River Highlands] and see they had a formula that worked and set them apart,” Weed says. “And they’d realize that the concept was phenomenal and ahead of its time.”