The Ides of March were not good for Julius Caesar. He was assassinated, remember? But one particular Monday in March has held a special appeal for me on and off for almost 40 years. It’s the day I leave London, often dreary, grey-skied and damp, and fly to Jacksonville, Florida, for the Players Championship. The transatlantic trip makes for a dramatic climatic change.
One year I remember a Sunday morning game of golf at my club in London with dampness underfoot and a nip in the air. Two days later I was hitting shiny balls on the practice ground of a golf club near TPC Sawgrass, where the turf was firm, the sky blue and the temperature in the mid-70s.
My first visit was in the mid-1980s when it was known as the Tournament Players Championship. Since then it has changed its name to the Players Championship and has moved from March to May and back again. The course has altered but not beyond recognition. The old clubhouse has been replaced by a Mediterranean palace. The practice ground – “the range” in American lingo – has been widened and lengthened. Nearby now stands the massive headquarters of the PGA Tour, in a handsome glass building that is in startling contrast to the low-slung, brown buildings that were the tour’s previous offices. You could have passed by them with scarcely a second glance.
One year, walking out to watch play during a practice round, I noticed greenkeeping staff on the ninth green. Not one or two but more than one dozen. Some were mowing the green, some tidying the edges of the bunkers, others raking the sand and still more trimming the whiskery fringes of the green.
It was part of golf’s annual great seduction – the PGA Tour’s attempt to make its annual championship on a fiendishly designed course one of the game’s majors. Though this was an uphill task, one lost count of the number of times one heard: “It’s the fifth major championship, isn’t it?”
Answering that question in 1999, Tiger Woods replied: “No. Which is the one you want to win – 10 Players Championships or six Masters? I think any player would say the Masters because you can draw comparisons with the great ones who have played the game from the Hogans, the Nicklauses, Watsons and Nelsons.”
Around this time Sandy Lyle was asked the difference between the Players and the Open Championship. “About 115 years,” he replied drily.
Defending the Players he had won in 1998, Justin Leonard said in ’99: “The British Open is close to 130 years old and has the title of being a major. The Players does not. Therefore there is no reason to compare apples to oranges. This is a helluva orange, probably the best orange you could have, but it is not a major.” Soon after this it became accepted that if there was to be a fifth major championship it would have to be held outside the U.S. where there were three already.
One year, seeking a story for The Times (of London) for which I was then golf correspondent, I sought an interview with Tim Finchem, the PGA Tour commissioner. No sooner asked than granted. After lunch on the Sunday I was ushered into his office where I noticed a magazine article detailing his recent travels. “That looks good,” I said. Glancing at it, Finchem replied: “That’s not good ink. You’re good ink.”
One year he sat jacketless, leaning back in his chair, occasionally swinging his feet onto the desk. Another year, after a trip to Italy with his daughter, he told me about a restaurant in Rome that specialised in offering different types of water. Yet another year he and I were walking back from lunch in the Commissioner’s Suite when I asked him if he was working on anything in particular in his golf swing.
He stopped and answered quickly. “If I can’t play for two weeks, when I come back it takes me about 40 minutes to conjure up the way I was supposed to be thinking about what I’m doing … it’s awkward.” With a grin he added: “The typical woes of the average player.
“I have my moments. I played quite well for three or four weeks last summer,” he continued. “I had a career round, a 67, out in Colorado. I played 36 holes that day, shot 83 in the morning and 67 in the afternoon. How do you figure that out? It’s all between your ears.” He started laughing at the incongruity of it all, shaking his head. “I don’t know about this game. I just don’t know.”
For a moment perhaps the most powerful man in golf looked both smitten and confused by the game, just like the rest of us.
Jay Monahan, who succeeded Finchem as commissioner in January 2017, continued the tradition of Sunday afternoon conversations. Tall and burly, Monahan is an easy administrator to be around, not like the sports chief who, it was said, regarded journalists with as much enthusiasm as a lamppost does on seeing an approaching dog. There is warmth and affection in his voice when he talks of the influence Susan, his wife, has had on him and their pride in their two daughters. He is the sort of engaging Irishman with whom you could enjoy a beer in a noisy bar in Dublin.
In my earlier trips, I and other British journalists put up at the Sea Turtle Inn on Atlantic Boulevard, within yards of the ocean. That was an attractive corner of town, with a Starbucks for breakfast coffee, a restaurant that remained open until late at night, a secondhand bookshop and the modest Seahorse Motel where some of my colleagues stayed. For years my birthday fell about the time of the Players and several times I celebrated it with lip-smacking fish at the Dolphin Depot on Jacksonville Beach. It has gone now.
We left the Sea Turtle when we discovered why we couldn’t make reverse-charge (collect) telephone calls from our rooms to our offices in London. It seems the owner had not been paying his municipal rates.
So we moved south to the Holiday Inn Express on Beach Boulevard where the room doors clanked loudly as they shut and if you were overlooking the sea and left your window open at night you were lulled to sleep by the sounds of the ocean flowing and ebbing a few feet away from you.
And now another Monday in March is upon me. Another week in Florida. Another feast of golf with most of the world’s best present. To be in the U.S. at such a time in politics and in golf is a privilege. So is to be at the Players Championship, my 38th.
E-MAIL JOHN
Top: TPC Sawgrass' 17th hole during the second round of the 2024 Players Championship
Ben Jared, PGA TOUR via Getty Images