PGA TOUR players are always asked about this menacing golf course, TPC Sawgrass, which grows bigger teeth and more claws when the wind blows. What’s harder, 17 or 18? Is the 16th easy? What holes are sneaky hard?
The thinking man’s golfer, Patrick Cantlay, said the 17th hole is weather dependent.
“If the wind's blowing it's really tough, and if it's not usually you have a good birdie look there,” Cantlay noted.
He said the way it looks, the finish is almost like a made-for-TV tournament event.
“With 17 almost anything can happen if the wind's really blowing,” Cantlay noted. “Eighteen's one of the hardest golf holes we play all year. And it happens, too, they happen to end consecutively like that. So, I think that's what makes it so exciting.”
Somewhere Pete Dye is laughing.
Masters champ Scottie Scheffler said that because everything you see on TV seems larger than life, when he came to play TPC Sawgrass for the first time, he was surprised to find that the greens were normal sized. He was a youngster at the time, 10, 11 or 12.
“I would say most challenging for me would probably be 18,” Scheffler explained. “I'm a guy that usually likes to fade it off the tee, and there's a big lake on the left side there. So, I usually will try and hit 3-wood so I can actually draw it around. That way if you do make a mistake and it goes in the water, I can actually drop up there versus if I'm trying to fade a driver and I pull it, I basically have to reload.”
He said the second shot is no picnic either because it looks like you can hit right at the flagstick, but if you get close to the left side of the green it will actually roll into the water.
“The finish out here is so tough to beat, with it being 16, 17, 18, all great risk-reward holes,” he added.
Pete and Alice would love his comments.
Collin Morikawa, who won two majors early in his career, said that the 17th was the most challenging for him last year, but of course, that was when it was blowing a gale for everyone.
“I think we make it harder than what it sometimes really is,” Morikawa said. “It really is a 140-yard shot roughly, and if you just hit the middle of the green, most likely you're making par every single time.”
Morikawa loves the 16th. He called it awesome.
“It's inviting because you can hit a really good driver, and for me it doesn't narrow up too much so I can kind of still hit my cut even though the trees are on the left,” he explained. You can hit a really good second shot and set yourself up for eagle, or if you miss it a little left, you might be trying to save par. So, 16 is just a nice hole, especially to prep into 17.”
Former PLAYERS champ Justin Thomas said the 18th is a really hard hole.
“I mean today it's in and off the left,” he said about the wind on Tuesday. “It doesn't get much more uncomfortable than that tee shot when it's like that. It's hard to hit less than driver and have less than a 5-iron in when it's soft like this.”
But he also likes 13, the par 3 at the far end of the golf course.
“I think it's a very sneaky, cool, little par 3,” he said. “The wind can kind of swirl back in that little tunnel almost where the tee is. But if you hit a good tee shot, if you get it kind of in the right section of where the pin is, you can have a really good look at birdie. But you can also make 4 or 5 in a heartbeat there.”
Jon Rahm said, in his opinion, it’s tough to beat the 16th and 17th.
“It's sort of like their own version of the Amen Corner,” he said. “The hardest, I think, by far usually tends to be 18, at least in my mind. It's a tough tee shot where you don't really have a bailout. You just have to suck it up and put it in the fairway.”
That's exactly what Pete had in mind!
