By Ron Green Jr.
In 1974, when “The Way We Were” and platform shoes were all the rage, the Tournament Players Championship came to life at Atlanta Country Club on a typically sultry Labor Day weekend in Georgia.
There was no such thing as a stadium golf course. Pete and Alice Dye had yet to get their first look at the swampy northeast Florida flatlands that would one day assure their golf design immortality. Deane Beman was less than a year into his new job as commissioner of the PGA Tour, replacing Joe Dey.
Like many grand achievements, what is now known as the Players Championship – or just the Players to many – began with good intentions but an uncertain future.
All these years later, the 50th Players Championship has grown into one of the game’s most important and influential events, its history painted by both the place it now calls home – the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach – and the people who have been characters in the evolving story.
All of what will transpire at the Stadium Course this week and the accompanying swirl of anticipation that brings the PGA Tour back to its own backyard started in a different place and a very different time.
Thanks largely to its setting, which includes one of the most dynamic finishing stretches in tournament golf and perhaps the most famous hole in the world – the par-3 17th – the Players has never achieved major-championship status, but it has done the next best thing.
It has created its own standalone category. There is no other event quite like it, with its outsized purse, its best-in-class player field and its history, which has given the game some of its most memorable moments such as “better than most” and “be the right club today.”
“The decision was made in 1973 to have a players championship. I was on the board as a player director at the time, and I told Joe Dey that every big organization in golf has a championship of its own,” Beman recalled recently in a phone interview. “I said the PGA Tour had existed since the 1930s, longer than the Masters had been in existence, and we don’t have our own championship, but we should.”
Dey sold the idea to the tour’s board. When Dey retired in early 1974, Beman, who had won his fourth PGA Tour title less than a year earlier, found himself in his new role as commissioner in charge of building on the creation for which he had pushed.
Like the U.S. Open, the Open Championship and the PGA Championship, Dey envisioned the Tournament Players Championship being played at a different venue each year.
Dey selected Atlanta Country Club to host the first event (replacing Atlanta’s annual tour stop in 1974) and slotted it near the end of summer. By that point, the year’s four major championships had been played, and it came at the end of an important stretch of events.
Three weeks earlier, Lee Trevino had won the PGA Championship at Tanglewood Park in North Carolina. Dave Stockton won the Sammy Davis Greater Hartford Open the following week, and Johnny Miller won the Westchester Classic immediately before the inaugural event in Atlanta.
Beman was already intent on building the tournament into something special.
“The players are resolved to make this tournament the fifth major championship,” Beman said in Georgia’s Rome News-Tribune newspaper. “It is their championship and they are extremely proud of it, and they are going to work to make it a truly great championship. The players felt that they didn’t want to recognize their own championship any less than the other major championships.”
The tournament offered a $250,000 purse – only the World Open in Pinehurst and the Jackie Gleason-Inverrary Classic – paid more in 1974.
The other big reward was a 10-year exemption on the PGA Tour for the winner, something that previously had gone only to major-championship and World Series of Golf winners.
“Giving that 10-year exemption gave it instant credibility,” said Lanny Wadkins, who won the 1979 Players Championship at Sawgrass Country Club. “Back then, you had to make the top 60 to be exempt and, if you twisted an ankle or something, you could miss six weeks and not make the top 60, so that was a big, big deal.”
When Jack Nicklaus won the first Tournament Players Championship, coming from three behind on Sunday to beat J.C. Snead, it was as if the event had been anointed.
In 1975, the Players was held at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas – again in the late-summer heat – and Al Geiberger was the winner.
Beman wasn’t satisfied. The heat was a problem, and the event felt like an afterthought, following the year’s major championships. So, he decided to play the tournament early in the year. In late February 1976, Nicklaus beat Snead again, at Inverrary in southeast Florida, for his second win in three starts.
“I decided the Players at the end of the season in August would never be able to assume any identity. The British Open and the PGA were all happening around then. It didn’t make any sense to me,” Beman said.
“I decided it should be the first important tournament of the season; that’s why I moved it. The players liked the championship because it had the biggest purse of the year [except for the limited-field World Series of Golf], but it didn’t mean anything else to them except the money.”
Beman wanted the tournament to have major-championship status, but it never happened.
“The LPGA Tour has five majors, the [PGA Tour] Champions has five majors, so there is precedent for it,” Beman said.
In its fourth year, Beman brought the Players to Ponte Vedra Beach and Sawgrass Country Club, a penalizing golf course made more challenging by spring winds off the nearby Atlantic Ocean.
Unlike Dey, Beman wanted the tournament to have a permanent home and believed he had found it with a five-year agreement to play at Sawgrass. It was part of the commissioner’s plan to buy Sawgrass Country Club, and he thought he had the deal done.
The tour would pay $1.8 million, Beman said, to get the course and all that came with it, including an option to buy beachfront property on both sides of the club.
“At the board meeting to purchase it, one of the players said to the rest of the board – remember the tour had never purchased anything more than an expensive IBM Selectric typewriter – that it would be nice to wait until we held the first tournament there,” Beman said.
“Everyone said that was a great idea, and we put off buying it. Between that point and the tournament, a developer came in and bought the whole thing from the banks that owned it and wiped us out.”
Undaunted, Beman had found his spot. He just needed the property. With the real estate market in bad shape, Beman persuaded the owners of a 4,000-acre plot of land across State Road A1A from Sawgrass Country Club to sell him 415 acres for one dollar.
More than four decades later, the Stadium Course is one of the most famous courses in the world, the Players Championship has a $25 million purse and the PGA Tour is anchored on what was a desolate piece of Florida real estate.
“I’m extremely proud of what we created with the Players Championship and the development of stadium golf and the TPC Network,” Beman said. “It has to be worth a billion dollars. We got it for one dollar and built a billion-dollar business out of that.”
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Top: Deane Beman poses with site plans for the Stadium Course during construction at TPC Sawgrass.
PGA TOUR ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES