At the ribbon cutting in 1980, TPC Sawgrass it represented something new in golf.
Carved out of the Florida swamp and built as a permanent home of Players Championshipit was modern in ambition and unapologetic in temperament. Its architect, Pete Dye, was already known as a creative sadist, an artist with a knack for dealing with abuse.
In Sawgrass, he produced a sun-drenched torture chamber. The world’s best players did not hide their pain.
Ben Crenshaw compared the layout to “Star Wars golf”, designed “by Darth Vader”. JC Snead did some verbatim. The course, he said, was “10 percent luck and 90 percent horse manure.”
Such a quarrel did not go unheard. Over time, some of the sharper features of the layout softened. Dye himself made adjustments. The greens were toned down to suit the era of blazing putting speeds. The look became cleaner, less imposing.
Little by little, the Ink faded.
Davis Love III is hired to bring it back.
Love, a two-time Players champion who has become a renowned course architect himself, has spent the last few years helping the Tour transform the Sawgrass. His guiding principle is quite clear.
“What I want to see is Pete Dye back on the golf course,” Love said this week. “The pits have become flat. Some of the features have disappeared.”
Flatter greens have created a secondary problem: without enough slope to shed water, putting surfaces can be harder to harden after it rains.
Under the guidance of Love, some lost elements have already been revived.
The tees are pushed back on some par-5s. New fill has sprouted on the par-4 14th. Last year, on the 6th hole, Love oversaw perhaps the most talked-about change yet: the replanting of a tree that once overhung the fairway. The videos of that project set the internet ablaze.
Not all the work has been so dramatic.
“We’re doing really boring things, like making the driving distance longer,” Love said.
But even mundane tasks tend to touch on the same topic. Expanding the range requires digging a lake and moving large amounts of dirt across the property. As this happens, Love and his associates can’t help but face other questions.
“As we’re digging out the lake at 4 and moving the dirt, you have to ask what the long-term purpose is for that bunker,” Love said. “Should it look like the photo from 1982 or the one from 1989?”
This question has become central to the project. Love and PGA Tour officials have combed through archival photos, searching for the moment when Dye’s vision was most fully realized. For Love, the answer keeps going back to 1989.
By then, the course had already absorbed some early player feedback. Some of the more severe features had been softened. But the layout still carried much of the visual intimidation and whimsical contouring that made Dye’s work so distinctive.
Love recalled asking Dye about the scattered bunkering at Whistling Strait, another of the architect’s popular designs.
“He told me, ‘Oh, they’re just there to scare you,'” Love said. “If you actually look at the freeway, it’s pretty wide.”
The same philosophy shaped Sawgrass. Dye liked to clutter the edges of a hole with nerve-wracking distractions — mounds, waste areas, pot bunkers — so that players felt squeezed even when they weren’t.
“I just want to see the old look and the intimidating look on the golf course,” Love said.
The labor of love is continuous; it’s not scheduled to be finished until 2028. And there’s a limit to what he can do. Today’s realities make a complete reversal impossible. Today’s players’ championships require infrastructure that did not exist when the course opened. The galleries are bigger. TV towers and camera platforms need space to operate.
“This May box has to look like this because it’s a big championship. You need room for that camera,” Love said. “But once you get out on the fairway, especially around the green, you can have the weird stuff.”
For a man known throughout the game as one of its bona fides, Love now finds himself in the unusual role of restoring some architectural atrocity.
Then again, in a Pete Dye course, just being good was never the point.
