An ace on the par-3 17th hole at the famous island green. This time, it was Aaron Rai on Saturday during the third round of the Players Championship in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.
On Thursday, Hayden Buckley hit one. Rai did it in similar fashion, hitting his shot about 15 feet past the front left pin before it spun back and into the hole.
“Felt at a very good number with my gap wedge,” Rai said. “Hit it great, looked great in the air and very pleased to see it go in. That was an incredible moment.”
It’s the first time in Players history there has been two holes-in-one at the 17th hole in the same year. It’s the third one in the past two years, with Shane Lowry making one in a similar location during the third round last year.
On Saturday, the par-3 17th was playing 122 yards. Here’s a look at everyone who has hit a hole-in-one on the 17th in Players history.
2023: Hayden Buckley, 1st round; Aaron Rai, 3rd round 2022: Shane Lowry, 3rd round 2019: Ryan Moore, 1st round 2017: Sergio Garcia, 1st round 2016: Willy Wilcox, 2nd round 2002: Miguel Angel Jimenez, 1st round 2000: Paul Azinger, 3rd round 1999: Joey Sindelar, 1st round 1997: Fred Couples, final round 1991: Brian Claar, 3rd round
The ace put Rai to 6 under thru 17 holes. He also birdied the par-4 18th hole after a great approach shot to finish at 7-under 65 and 9 under for the tournament.
“It was a little bit of a blur,” Rai said. “I saw it go in, and then I looked to the left to almost see, is it real and I saw almost the crowd’s hands in the air.
“In the second after that, I looked to the right towards my caddie and he came running at me. So it happened very fast, but it feels very vivid now that I’m even talking about it and remembering some of those images. So I couldn’t quite believe that it happened, but very, very special. Very special. Something I’ll always remember.”
Buckley was the first in Players history to go ace-birdie on 17 and 18. Rai became the second, but he was the first to finish birdie-ace-birdie.
The PGA Tour media guide doesn’t list a lucky number for Lucas Herbert. But it’s safe to say it isn’t 5.
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — The PGA Tour media guide doesn’t list a lucky number for Lucas Herbert.
But it’s safe to say it isn’t 5.
Five trips to the water turned into a pair of quintuple bogeys Friday, turning the Australian golfer’s debut at the Players Championship into a five-alarm fire. He finished with a second-round 85 to follow his opening 82, a total score of 23 over par.
According to Players Championship media guide records, Herbert’s 167 is the highest two-round score for a player missing the cut since Mike Brisky shot 170 in 2000. It wasn’t immediately clear how many other players, if any, had two quintuple bogeys in one round at the Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass.
Though the conditions were largely favorable for the first two rounds, the course still inflicted a few disasters. None felt the sting worse than Herbert, who already brought up the rear after Thursday’s opening round. Friday was no improvement.
At 17, his eighth hole of the day, the water gobbled up Herbert’s first two approaches to the island green, short on the first, long on the second. Playing five from the tee, he hit the rough left, chipped on and two-putted for an 8.
Only nine players have made a higher score at the 17th at the Players, the most recent being Byeong Hun An’s 11 in the first round in 2021.
It got worse, and weirder, for Herbert at the 379-yard par-4 fourth.
The trouble began with an errant tee shot into the left rough. He found water, and took a drop. And again. And again. By the time it was over, he wound up with a 9. The record-worst score at No. 4 is Phillip Hancock’s 12 in 1985.
That wasn’t the end of Herbert’s headaches. At No. 6, he reached the green in regulation but four-putted for a double bogey. At No. 7, a sudden gust blew a chip right back down the hill to his starting position. Result: another bogey.
A cloud seemed to hang over two-thirds of Herbert’s playing group during the week, including a sextuple-bogey 10 from Aaron Wise at the 18th on Thursday.
Herbert’s week underscores Sawgrass’s many pitfalls that lurk even for accomplished professionals. He previously appeared at the Players in 2022, making the cut but ending in a tie for 68th with a 7-over 295. He stands 51st in the Official World Golf Ranking.
The brilliance of the 17th hole is that players can make anywhere from eagle to double bogey and flip the script.
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – In the final round of last year’s WM Phoenix Open, Sahith Theegala arrived at the tee of the 332-yard par-4 17th hole at TPC Scottsdale with a share of the lead.
Shadowed on both sides by the imposing hospitality structures – the Bay Club and The Cove – the rookie took aim at the green and thought he was about to be rewarded for his derring-do. He struck what he later tabbed a “perfect” shot until his ball bounced left and was gobbled up by the water, which rings the left side and back of the peninsula green. And just like that, his hopes of winning his first PGA Tour title sunk with it.
“As long as it’s another yard right, I think that’s perfect. If it kicks straight, it’s good. Kicked left into the water there,” he said in the aftermath of finishing in a tie for third, one stroke out of a playoff eventually won by Scottie Scheffler.
Theegala has had a year to digest how close his tee sot came to perhaps joining 65 others that kicked on to the putting surface at 17 in 2022, marking the sixth consecutive season with more than 60 tee shots finding the green. Instead, his was the final of 62 balls in last year’s tournament that ended up swimming with the fish. What is it they say about time healing all wounds?
“I don’t think it’s something you ever get over,” Theegala said of his unlucky bounce at 17. “I don’t actively think about it but it’s always going to hurt. I hit a good shot, it just wasn’t the right shot I suppose.”
Theegala isn’t the only one to stand on the 17th tee and realize its make-or-break time with the title on the line. And that’s the brilliance of the hole – players can make anywhere from eagle to double bogey and flip the script. While the par-3 16th hole has become iconic for good reason, the 17th lives in its shadow and is grossly under appreciated.
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From Kyle Stanley recovering from a prickly lie to hold on for the title in 2012 to Rickie Fowler losing the tournament with water balls in 2016 to Brooks Koepka pitching in from a brutal lie 45 yards right of the green, it’s 17 that has become pivotal to determining who hoists the trophy on Sunday.
It also has its place in history as home to Andrew Magee’s hole-in-one, which remains the only ace on a par 4 in Tour history. In case anyone dares to forget it, there is a plaque recognizing the feat.
A marker near the 17th tee box at TPC Scottsdale honors the first-ever hole-in-one on a par-4 in PGA Tour history, made by Andrew Magee in 2001. (Photo by Golfweek)
On Thursday morning, the Thunderbirds will host a ceremony at the 17th tee to celebrate Tom Weiskopf, a 16-time winner on the Tour, including the 1973 British Open, and TPC Scottsdale course architect, who died in August at age 79 from pancreatic cancer. A second plaque will be installed in the ground at the tee box, where Weiskopf made the drivable par 4 fashionable again. Since building the 17th hole here in 1986, Weiskopf went on to include at least one on all 74 courses he designed, and five of them have one on each nine.
“I feel every great golf course should have a reachable par 4,” the plaque reads, and below that it says, “Welcome to the 17th hole.”
He said The Old Course at St. Andrews was the source of his inspiration, noting there are four drivable par 4s – Nos. 9, 10, 12 and 18 – but never on the same day, depending on the wind.
“They are hard to build,” Weiskopf told Golfweek in 2020. “I always looked at it as two par 3s in the length of what you’re playing. You have to challenge the layup as much as the tee shot. That’s the hard balance. I think only maybe a third of the time they came out proper with good strategy.”
Weiskopf, indeed, got this one right. Koepka, who won the WM Phoenix Open twice before he departed for LIV Golf, went so far as to call 17 at TPC Scottsdale the best drivable par-4 on Tour.
“It can be very difficult. You’ll see guys make double, no problem,” he said. “I’m a big fan of that hole. I love it.”
Weiskopf’s plan to build 17 as a drivable par 4 nearly was overruled by then-PGA Tour Commissioner Deane Beman, who opposed the concept.
“The only time we got into a verbal confrontation was over 17. I said, ‘I don’t care what you say I’m going to be right.’ He didn’t think the players would like the hole at all,” Weiskopf recalled.
Xander Schauffele reacts to his tee shot on the 17th hole during the third round of the 2022 WM Phoenix Open at TPC Scottsdale. (Photo: Patrick Breen/USA TODAY Sports)
Last season, there were 533 par-4s played on Tour and the 17th at TPC Scottsdale had the 59th easiest scoring average (3.847).
Since 2003, Keegan Bradley has found the putting surface 13 times off the tee, most of any player in the last 20 years, while Rickie Fowler has found the water a tournament-high 11 times. For Fowler, it’s been a love-hate relationship. He hit not one but two tee shots in the water – the first long in regulation and the second left in a playoff – at 17 to lose to Hideki Matsuyama in 2016.
“In regulation, it sucked because I hit the shot I wanted to and it happened to catch the down side of the one little knob. Long wasn’t in play unless it landed on the ski slope, but that’s what happened. Just a bad break at the wrong time,” he said. “In the playoff, I ended up turning a 3-wood over a bit too much.”
But he got his revenge in 2019, playing the hole in 4 under, tying for the best performance on the hole by a winner, on his way to victory.
Water left often forces players to bail out to the right, but if they get too close to the bunker, the next shot, a downhill chip running towards the water, is no picnic.
“I like that you have to think where the pin is located,” said Tony Finau, noting that the back-left hole location is one of toughest the pros face all year.
17th hole at TPC Scottsdale (ShotLink era)
• 8,161 total tee shots
• 948 ended up on the green (11.6 percent)
• 685 ended up in the water (8.4 percent)
• 38.54 percent: chance of making par or better after hitting a tee shot in the water
Finau held a two-stroke lead with two holes to play in 2020, but chunked his 3-wood off the tee into a bunker, made par and got caught by Webb Simpson, who birdied the final two holes to force a playoff and won with a birdie on the first extra hole.
“As soon as you say 17, I’m like, ‘ooh, I wish I could have that one back,’ ” Finau said. “I’d like to have a chance to win there and hit it on the green this time. Hopefully it can happen this year.”
BROOKLINE, Mass. – The opening scenes in what would later become perhaps golf’s greatest storybook ending, a fascinating tale that has resonated for more than 100 years, were set in what can only be called a perfect setting.
Across the street from The Country Club, founded in 1882 and one of the five founding clubs of the U.S. Golf Association, Francis Ouimet grew up in the modest, six-room, 1,500-square-foot home at 246 Clyde Street.
Looking out the window of his second-floor bedroom, he woke to a view of the 17th hole of The Country Club, which he would walk across to get to school and where he would later caddie and fall in love with the game.
And then, at age 20, he became a folk hero and changed the path of the game’s history over the sacred ground outside Boston.
In authoring arguably the biggest upset in the chronicles of golf, Ouimet took down Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, the two best golfers of the time, to win the 1913 U.S. Open in a playoff at The Country Club that drew up to 20,000, mostly blue-collar workers each round.
After winning the 1913 U.S. Open, Brookline’s Francis Ouimet (rear) credited his caddie, 10-year-old Eddie Lowery. Ouimet later dedicated this photo, writing over Lowery’s towel, “This is the boy who won the 1913 Open.”
And as it turned out, it was at the 17th where two of Ouimet’s biggest moments unfolded. In the final round, Ouimet, an amateur who had to be talked into entering the championship by his friends, came to the hole nicknamed “The Elbow” trailing by one shot. At the time, the dogleg-left hole was playing to 275 yards. After reaching the green with his approach, Ouimet made a long birdie putt to tie for the lead and joined Vardon and Ray in an 18-hole playoff the following day after making par on the 72nd hole.
In the playoff, with Ray out of contention, Vardon trailed Ouimet by one when the group arrived at the 17th tee. Vardon tried to cut the corner and wound up in the lone bunker that bears his name. Ouimet found the fairway. Vardon had to lay up and made bogey while Ouimet made birdie again for a three-stroke lead.
Ouimet polished off his startling win on the final hole.
The game exploded across the land. And the 17th took root as the course’s pivotal hole, later home to more magical, game-changing moments to decide championships. If history is prologue, the penultimate hole on the scorecard – which will play out to 373 yards this week for the 122nd U.S. Open and now features four bunkers on the left of the fairway bend and numerous mounds – will play a crucial role in the outcome.
“It’s unique,” reigning PGA champion Justin Thomas said. “Unlike a lot of holes out here that are pretty self-explanatory off the tee, it’s just am I going to hit a driver or am I going to hit a 3-wood, whatever it is? That hole presents a lot of opportunities of different clubs off the tees.
“Especially with how a lot of guys are playing nowadays. A handful of guys are probably going to hit driver, try to hit it right in front of the green. Or if you get a helping wind, maybe the tee is up, you can knock it on the green. But then again, I’m sure the rough is going to be nasty up there to where you get opposition. It’s tough, and then it’s, like, do you lay up? Do you lay up to a good number?
“It’s a hole that you can have a two-shot swing on it pretty quickly for it being a pretty short, easy hole, but it’s really just going to be how you want to attack it or approach it once you get to that point, especially come Saturday and Sunday.”
Julius Boros poses with the trophy after winning the 1963 U.S. Open at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. Next to him is Francis Ouimet, the 1913 U.S. Open champion and honorary chairman of the tournament. (Photo: Associated Press)
When the U.S. Open returned to The Country Club 50 years later, the 17th was decisive in Julius Boros’ victory. In the final round, Arnold Palmer missed a two-foot putt that put him two strokes behind the leader, Jacky Cupit, who a few holes later made double bogey after an errant drive. That led to a three-man playoff, with Boros joining them the next day. Boros birdied the 17th in the final round and again in the playoff to win the national championship.
Twenty-five years later, the third U.S. Open at The Country Club featured more histrionics. After taking the lead with a 25-foot birdie on the 16th in the final round, Curtis Strange three-putted the 17th from 15 feet. He saved par from a greenside bunker on the 72nd hole to force a playoff with Nick Faldo.
Strange made a knee-knocking four-footer for par on the 17th to secure his victory in the playoff for the first of his two consecutive U.S. Open wins.
Curtis Strange and his wife Sarah kiss the U.S. Open Championship trophy at the 1988 U.S. Open at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. (Photo: Peter Southwick/Associated Press)
And then there was the 1999 Ryder Cup at The Country Club. Facing a four-point deficit entering singles play, the Americans staged a ferocious comeback that was capped for victory on the 17th hole.
That’s where Justin Leonard, who was 4 down earlier in his match against Jose Maria Olazabal, holed a 45-foot putt that set off a premature, frenzied celebration as the U.S. team flooded the green despite Olazabal’s chance to make his putt and keep the match going.
After the green was finally cleared, Olazabal missed his putt and the U.S. won.
Nineteen-year-old Sergio Garcia played brilliantly for Europe that week; he is one of three players in this week’s field to have played in the 1999 Ryder Cup, the other two being Jim Furyk and Phil Mickelson.
“It’s not overly long, and you have a wedge to the green. But the green is always tricky,” Garcia said. “But it always feels if you hit a decent shot to the green it always feels you have a birdie putt because the green is small.
“It’s tricky, the two-tiered green, especially if it gets a little firm, like it was in the Ryder Cup, and then the back pin is very difficult to get to. There’s a very small area to land your ball and if you hit it too hard it can easily one hop over the green, and then you have a difficult up-and-down.
And if you fly it on the bottom, trying to skip it up there, it’s tough to get up the slope. But that’s the beauty of all the old designs. The greens are small, and the areas where you have to hit the ball are very tiny and you have to be very precise.”
Chances are another eerie moment or two will take place on the 17th hole this week. It will be the latest entry to the legend Ouimet ignited in 1913.
“That’s what’s so good about golf is the history and the tradition and these stories,” McIlroy said. “The fact that he grew up just off the 17th hole here, and we’re still talking about it to this day over 100 years on. That’s so cool.
TPC Sawgrass still poses its share of challenges, but its iconic 17th hole is the Mona Lisa of one-dimensional golf.
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – The 17th at Sawgrass is the Mona Lisa of boring holes, but it tested something we seldom see now: imagination.
Too often, professional golf—in particular the strain presented on the PGA Tour—tilts toward the one-dimensional, not only in the repetitiveness of individual stroke play but in the consistency of course conditions that envelop players every week like a comfort blanket intended to minimize blubbering.
What variety there is exists mostly in the questions asked hole by hole, and even that has been diminished in the modern power game as players bludgeon courses into submission rather than seduce them in the manner of yore. The Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass still poses its share of nettlesome challenges for the best players in the world, but its iconic 17th hole is the Mona Lisa of one-dimensional golf.
That’s not to say it’s a wholly lousy hole. It’s indisputably entertaining, which is no small matter when it comes to fan engagement, dramatic theater, merchandise branding and hospitality sales. It’s daunting too, a necessary stress test in the closing stretch of tournament play. In normal circumstances, it’s not particularly difficult, even for recreational chops (it’s the shortest hole on the course and the green is huge). But No. 17 is woefully lacking in the one aspect that makes a golf hole truly interesting: options.
Unless you consider “live vs. die”” to be a real option.
Great golf holes offer a choice of routes that depend upon a player’s skill, confidence or courage. On 17 of the holes at TPC Sawgrass, a poor swing leads to car crash golf—injurious, but offering the possibility of recovery. But the penultimate hole at Pete Dye’s creation is plane-crash golf, where a poor swing is fatal. That’s why the least interesting hole here was the focus of attention when high winds buffetted the Players Championship, producing more squealing splashdowns than a kid’s water slide.
In a game of numbers, some of those we witnessed at Sawgrass felt like golf seen through a funhouse mirror, and it made for one of the most beguiling days in recent memory on Tour. Sure, weather conditions on Saturday were extreme, but it took that extreme to expose just how much torpor has been induced by the norm.
Among the spectacles that were awesome to behold in whipping winds were Brandel Chamblee’s mane and Justin Thomas’s 69. JT’s caddie, Bones Mackay, told me Sunday morning that it was among the top-five rounds all-time he has ever carried for, a captivating mix of sublimely flighted shots and clutch putts, all while knowing he had been diddled by the draw.
Twice during his round, Thomas hit pitching wedges 185 yards, while delivering a glorious 5-wood into the 18th green from 193 yards. His scorecards show two 3s on 17, but numbers don’t do justice to the situation. “When you have a 7-iron on that hole and it’s into off the left, it’s a lot more fun when someone tells you a story of them doing it versus you have to it,” he said.
Playing alongside Thomas, Rory McIlroy also hit 7-iron to the 17th, landing it on the front of the green 123 yards away. Asked afterward how far he normally hits that club, he replied: “185. It’s crazy.”
One group ahead, Brooks Koepka had hit an 8-iron into the 16th that flew 205 yards in the air. He turned around and struck the same club into the wind on 17. It flew 105 yards, coming up well short of dry land. He just laughed.
“It was 138, and I hit 118 front, which is really the only number we were kind of looking at,” said Dustin Johnson. “I hit a pretty good 8-iron with a low draw.” Pressed on how far that shot would usually travel, he said 165 yards. “It was kind of a chip,” he said with a shrug.
The 17th demanded a creativity that is somewhat lacking in its design, something beyond stock shots with stock clubs. Even with that, reward wasn’t assured. Koepka saw his playing partner Scottie Scheffler punch a 6-iron to the back pin, which ended up rinsed over the green. “You flight it low enough like Scottie did, the grandstands, the screen, everything in the back, you almost flight it too low and the wind doesn’t touch it,” he said. “It’s a tough one.”
Tough, but not unfair. Players who spoke after Saturday’s shenanigans unanimously said the set-up was difficult (brutally so) but had not crossed the line, a gracious sentiment that is so often denied the USGA.
The essential nature of the challenge was best summed up by Keegan Bradley, who drew a stark comparison between two 9-irons hit in his round. On the 12th, it was from 95 yards. Four holes later, the same club flew 206 yards. “To me there’s no yardage,” he said. “It’s just the trajectory of your ball, whatever club you can get to fit that window, that’s the shot.”
And that’s why the third day (albeit just the first and second rounds) of the Players was so wildly engaging. Every week the PGA Tour tests execution, but Saturday at TPC Sawgrass tested both execution and imagination—and many who are well-equipped for the former were found lacking in the latter.
Bubba Watson shapes his shots more than anyone on Tour and carded a stout 68. That could make one wonder why his imaginative approach hasn’t translated to a better record in the Open Championship, since links golf ought to be an inviting canvas for an artist of his caliber. But Sawgrass was very soft and Watson’s ball mostly stopped where it landed, whereas he has proven poorly wired for the fickle bounces of the ground game overseas.
Golf is a capricious game and it’s impossible to legislate chance out of it. Tournament organizers have no interest in guaranteeing equality of outcome, but they cannot even ensure equality of opportunity. In course conditions, sure, but Mother Nature’s writ overrules that of the PGA Tour’s chief referee, even in Ponte Vedra Beach. Whoever wins the 48th Players Championship—presumably on Monday—he might reflect that the most crucial stretch of his week was spent in a hotel room, sheltered from the less favorable side of the draw. Any victory will be hard-earned, but there’s no shame in hoping the eventual champion was among those faced and aced a test that is administered all too infrequently these days.
Billy Horschel: “No. 16 is super, super easy; 17 at Honda is a (bleeping) tough golf hole.”
Grayson Murray pumped his fist, tossed hit hat into the air and threw his ball into the grandstands.
It was two years ago and Murray had just made a hole-in-one on the challenging 17th hole on the Champion Course at PGA National, using a wedge from 151 yards, and the crowd was in an uproar.
Visions of the most famous party hole in golf? Not quite. But the 17th at Honda maybe is the closest thing to the rowdiest, loudest, most party-hardy hole on the PGA Tour, the 16th at the WM Phoenix Open.
“It’s almost impossible to replicate what they have there,” Daniel Berger said about the 16th hole at the TPC Scottsdale where the Phoenix Open is held.
“They do an amazing job at the Honda with the grandstands and the whole atmosphere, but because of the challenge it presents, the final four holes, the Bear Trap, it’s different.”
And I’m sure they want to replicate all of it. Certainly not the scene from two weeks ago when Sam Ryder’s hole-in-one during the third round at the Phoenix Open from 124 yards resulted in something you will never see anywhere else on Tour. Beer, soda, water and every other kind of liquid refreshment filled the air before hundreds of cans and cups holding those drinks landed on the course, many on the green.
“Today was wild,” Brooks Koepka said that day following his round.
Golfers agree, the 16th at the Phoenix Open is a unique experience that will not be cloned. The difficulty is not the hole, which typically requires a wedge or 9-iron over a mini-desert floor with no water, typically no wind and onto an expansive green. The biggest challenge is not falling into a prickly cactus on the walk from tee to green.
But it’s the coliseum-like feel from the enclosed stadium seating that sits more than 17,000 fans who are drinking, chanting, booing very loudly when a tee-shot misses the green and erupting when the ball comes close to the pin. And absolutely losing it when it finds the cup.
Golf etiquette is out the window on this hole. And don’t expect any response when raising those “QUIET” signs.
“It’s more like being at a football game for that one hole,” Denny McCarthy said. “We don’t get to see that very often so it’s fun to play.”
When it comes to everything inside the ropes (or the grandstands), there is no comparison to No. 17 at Honda. The hole is far more challenging with winds that can come from different directions and a shot that has to carry water most of the way to a postage-stamp-sized green angled from the tee box. Recently, the PGA Tour gave golfers some relief, eliminating the back tee box that required a 4- or 5-iron from about 190 yards.
Rickie Fowler plays a shot on the 17th hole during the first round of the 2022 Honda Classic at PGA National Resort And Spa in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. (Photo: Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images)
“When you’re back there with a 5-iron, you’re just praying you get it on the green,” Rickie Fowler said.
Now, the tee box will play about 155 yards for two rounds, and 165 to 170 yards for the other two. That still can require a 7-iron.
All of which makes attempting to turn Honda’s No. 17 into a Phoenix No. 16 Light a bit tricky. Golfers like the interaction, to an extent. They like the stadium seating, which this year at Honda will be expanded around the tee box to a double-decker.
At Phoenix, they acknowledge and accept the cheers and jeers and some throw golf balls into the stands or even swag bags, and go out of their way to interact with the fans — for that one hole. Pat Perez raised his cap and took a bow as he was being booed for missing a putt two weeks ago.
“(No. 16) doesn’t ever get quiet,” said Michael Thompson, the 2013 Honda Classic champion. “At least 17 at Honda has a chance to kind of calm down and gets quiet.”
Andrew George, the Honda Classic tournament director, knows the event has to be mindful of the golfers when it comes to creating a more fan-friendly atmosphere on the hole.
“The fine line is making sure we’ve protected the player interest by moving the (stands) back a little bit, by recreating the tiering system on the seating (behind the tee box) to make sure those who are watching the golf have that opportunity, and those there for the social scene are tucked back a little behind the crowd,” George said.
“It’s constant improvement.”
That back tee box was eliminated when golfers determined it was too close to the hospitality suites.
“When you build an arena like that and try to create that same atmosphere as they have at Phoenix. … It shouldn’t be that way because it’s a hole that is so much more challenging and so much more demanding,” Billy Horschel said.
“No. 16 is super, super easy, 17 at Honda is a (bleeping) tough golf hole.”
Jack Nicklaus, who redesigned the Champion Course, believes more fan interaction is good for the sport. In fact, the Hall of Famer would like to see more of it.
“It’s worked in Phoenix,” Nicklaus said. “I wish the game of golf wasn’t so. … ‘Be quiet.’ From the start, if you just let people talk, no golfers would be bothered, they’d play and it would be like any other sport.
“When I was playing, I was concentrating on what I was doing and I never really heard the gallery anyway. If you’re focused on what you’re doing, it shouldn’t bother you. If you’re susceptible to listening to everything, it makes it difficult for you.”
“I’m bummed it didn’t happen on the weekend. But it was pretty awesome,” said Clark.
KIAWAH ISLAND, S.C. – How’s Wyndham Clark rolling?
On Monday, the first alternate learned he got into the field for the 103rd PGA Championship when two-time PGA winner Vijay Singh withdrew.
On Tuesday, playing the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island for the first time, Clark took to the tee on the terrifying 223-yard 17th hole where the petite green is guarded by water on the right and two deep waste areas on the left. On his first swing, he made a hole-in-one.
“It was a pretty surreal shot,” Clark told Golfweek.
Clark had seen multiple posts from players on Twitter and Instagram showcasing the difficulty of the hole. Seeing the hole for the first time, it didn’t take long for Clark to realize how arduous the par 3 could be. And the backup on the tee was another indication of the grueling challenge.
Using a PXG GEN4 4-iron, Clark sent his Titleist Pro V1x to the sky.
“It was blowing 20-plus (mph),” Clark said. “I just set up and the wind was in from off the right. I hit it perfect and it was going right at the flag. And in the air, we were all like, ‘Drinks on you,’ ‘hole-in-one,’ blah blah blah. And then it lands, and it started rolling and it goes in.
“I’m bummed it didn’t happen on the weekend. But it was pretty awesome.”
But not pretty expensive.
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“There were like 700 people out there and if I had run up a bar tab, I would have to finish top 20 this week to get my money back,” he laughed.
It was Clark’s third hole-in-one on a regulation-sized golf course; he’s had 20-30 on par-3 courses. His latest ace, however, did not alter his view of the hole.
“It’s one of the toughest par-3s I’ve ever seen, one of the toughest holes I’ve played in all of golf,” he said. “You look at it from the tee you know you can obviously miss it left but that’s a tough spot and if you miss it right or come up short, you’re in the water.
“We got to the green and my caddie said, ‘Go put balls in the bunkers on the left because that’s where we’re going to be. He was joking but he knows hitting the green during the tournament is going to be an incredible shot.”
No. 17 at Kiawah Island is a long (like, uber-long) par 3 over water. Here’s what players had to say early week.
KIAWAH ISLAND, S.C. – Off in the distance some 230 yards is a sliver of emerald safety that gives slight comfort to those who will be staring down potential tragedy during the 103rd playing of the PGA Championship.
It’s the putting surface at the end of the par-3 17th hole on The Ocean Course at Kiawah Island, Pete Dye’s masterpiece hard by the Atlantic that, while eye-popping, is a wind-swept, treacherous walk on a tightrope, or as Lee Westwood said of the layout, it’s a thrills-and-spills kind of place.
This week, the course could play out to 7,876 yards, making it the longest in major championship history by more than 100 yards, and the 230 yards on the penultimate hole protected by water on the right and two deep waste areas that look like bunkers on the left could prove the most pivotal of all.
“Seventeen is the ultimate test of nerve,” 2013 Masters champion Adam Scott said. “It doesn’t matter when you’re playing it. If it’s three weeks ago or this Sunday coming down the stretch, it’s a long par 3 over water.
“I don’t know how holes get more difficult than that.”
The Puttview yardage book for Kiawah Island Golf Resort’s Ocean Course (Courtesy of Puttview)
If blame is to be assigned for the cruel outcomes over the years on the 17th, it would be directed toward Alice Dye, an accomplished architect herself and a top golfer who always had her husband’s ear. It was her idea as the course was nearing completion for the 1991 Ryder Cup to add the watery graveyard.
“There wasn’t going to be a lake on the 17th but Alice felt we needed a dramatic element at this point,” Dye wrote in his autobiography. “Since players of Ryder Cup caliber can handle bunker shots with ease, to make a realistic challenge, we dug an eight-acre lake that stretches from the tee to the offset green, which runs away from the player diagonally to the right.”
The hole exploded in the minds of golf fans when The Ocean Course made its tournament debut in the 1991 Ryder Cup dubbed the “War by the Shore.” It played out like a dark alley in a horror flick as players fell victim to the confrontation time and time again.
Johnny Miller said on the telecast that year the hole was so intimidating that a player could choke while playing a practice round alone. David Feherty, who closed out Payne Stewart in Ryder Cup singles play on the 17th, said he’d never seen anything like it.
“The hardest hole in the history of the universe,” Feherty said of the 1991 version of the 17th. “It was 270 yards and nowhere to go. Water to the right and these mine shafts on the left they called bunkers.”
Ian Woosnam of the European team plays out of the bunker on the 17th hole during the Final Day Singles of the 1991 Ryder Cup at Kiawah Island in South Carolina. (Photo: Stephen Munday /Allsport)
Mark Calcavecchia had one of golf’s infamous meltdowns in his crucial singles match against Colin Montgomerie. Calcavecchia was 4 up with four holes to play but lost the 15th and 16th. He looked safe to win after Montgomerie hit his tee shot on 17 into the water.
Calcavecchia, however, hit a shank into the lake and then missed a 3-footer for bogey to lose the hole. He also lost the 18th and only earned a halve. Thinking he cost the U.S. victory, he went to the beach and broke down in tears, then started hyperventilating and needed medical attention. His health improved as the U.S. won the match.
Twenty-one years later, The Ocean Course held its first major with the 2012 PGA Championship and the par-3 17th wasn’t much easier. The field averaged 3.303 strokes on the hole that week, making nearly as many double bogeys or worse (28) than birdies (31). It ranked in the top-10 of most difficult par-3s that year on the PGA Tour.
And now it’s making another start turn this week.
Expect more carnage.
Well, maybe not from Wyndham Clark. The first alternate who got into the field Monday when 1998 and 2004 PGA champion Vijay Singh withdrew, had never seen the course before playing a Tuesday practice round. At the 17th, he took out his 4-iron and sent the ball skyward and made a hole in one.
As for most all others, the 17th was not kind.
Using a 2-iron on Tuesday, world No. 4 Xander Schauffele hit a tee shot that found the water. Using the same 2-iron, he hit his next tee shot to 2 feet.
“I think that kind of sums up the hole in all honesty,” he said. “When you’re hitting a long iron into wind and it’s struck properly, it should hold its line and its flight. If you don’t, it’s going to go way offline and not hold its flight.
“You’ve really got to muster up some courage coming down the stretch and depending on where they put that tee box, it’s going to be really tricky.”
World No. 2 Justin Thomas took to Twitter and Instagram to show his go at 17.
“220 hole, 198 cover, into a 15ish mph wind … what y’all hitting? I flighted hold cut 4 iron … into the water. It looked pretty though!” he wrote with the accompanying video documenting the shot.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CO_Jh5TBlDk/
World No. 3 Jon Rahm muscled up when he got to the 17th.
“I smoked a 2-iron to just carry it over the middle of the green over the water,” he said. “Extremely difficult. That’s all I can say. Any time you have 230 yards into the wind over water into a narrow target, it’s just not easy.
“I’m hoping we don’t play it back there every day.”
So does Kevin Kisner.
“Lord hope that we’re going to play a tee up,” Kevin Kisner said. “(Tuesday) we played it at 202 from the front edge of the back box, so we were trying to hit a 235-yard shot over water to an area about 13 yards wide.
“I tried to hit a 7-wood; was unsuccessful. That’s not a very easy shot into the wind. Depending on where they play it and where the flag is, I think you have a range (of club selection) from 5-iron to 3-wood.
“Sounds fun, doesn’t it?”
The 17th is part of a closing stretch that’s just downright mean – the 466-yard, par-4 15th; the 608-yard, par-5 16th; the 17th; and the 505-yard, par-4 18th. It’s an unsympathetic finish which demands the winner to call on all his talents.
Which is the way it should be, said European Ryder Cup captain Padraig Harrington, who won the 1997 World Cup here with Paul McGinley.
“If you want to hit the green on 17, you’ve got to be brave,” said Harrington, who hit 5-wood into the wind on Tuesday at the 17th. “There are a lot of great holes here. I do agree if I was designing the golf course, a championship golf course, I would have a real stern test at the end because you want a true winner, and a true winner is going to have to hit the shots at the end and really take them on.
“You can’t have a soft finish in any shape or form. Nobody would have won this tournament until they’re through the 71st hole, that’s for sure.”
TPC Sawgrass is a closed for now, but the 36-hole facility, which is in pristine condition for tournament week, won’t stay empty for long.
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PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — TPC Sawgrass is a closed and it’s an eerie place following the cancellation of the Players Championship after the opening round of play on Thursday.
“Driving in here today, it’s sort of eerie, right? There’s no one around,” said Rory McIlroy, who came to clean out his locker.
But the 36-hole facility, which is in pristine condition for tournament week, won’t stay empty for long. In an e-mail to its membership, TPC Sawgrass general manager Derek Sprague confirmed that both courses – The Players Stadium Course and Dye’s Valley Course – will resume regular business hours, including all food and beverage operations, as originally scheduled on Tuesday, March 17.
“Golf reservations is open regular hours all weekend to take tee time requests or changes only,” Sprague wrote. “We are experiencing high call volume so please leave a message if we do not answer and we will return your call as soon as possible in the order in which it was received.”
Operating hours
Dining operations: 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Practice grounds: Tentative opening hours. Last bag 5:30 p.m., close 6:30 p.m.
Golf shop: 7 a.m. – 6:30 p.m.
“For your safety, we respectively ask that you do not come to the club until Tuesday in order for our vendors and employees to work as expeditiously as possible to be ready for opening on Tuesday,” Sprague said.
