The dye is faded at TPC Sawgrass. David Love III wants it back
At the ribbon cutting in 1980, TPC Sawgrass represented something new in golf.
Sculpted in the swampland of Florida and built as the permanent home of The Players Championship, it was modern in passion and debauchery. Its creator, Pete Dye, was already known as a creative sadist, an artist with a knack for dealing with torture.
At Sawgrass, he produced a sunlit torture chamber. The best players in the world did not hide their pain.
Ben Crenshaw likened the building to “Star Wars golf,” designed by “Darth Vader.” JC Snead did some real sh-t. He said the course was “10 percent luck and 90 percent horse manure.”
Such a catch was unheard of. Over time, some of the sharper features of the building were softened. The dye itself makes changes. The green is lowered to accommodate the fast putting time. The look grew cleaner, less intense.
Little by little, the dye ran out.
Davis Love III was hired to bring it back.
Love, a two-time champion turned course builder in his own right, has spent the past few years helping the Tour tweak Sawgrass. His guiding principle is clear enough.
“What I want to see is Pete Dye back on the golf course,” Love said this week. “The green is flat. Some features are gone.”
The flat greens created a second problem: Without an adequate slope to shed water, the putting surfaces can be difficult to stabilize after a rainfall.
Under the guidance of love, some lost features have already been revived.
The tees are set back on a few par-5s. A new addition sprouted on the stout par-4 14th. Last year, on the 6th hole, Uthando oversaw perhaps the most talked about change to date: the replanting of a tree that once lined the fairway. Videos of that project set the internet ablaze.
Not all work has been so great.
“We do very boring things, like making the driving distance longer,” Love said.
But even the most common tasks often touch on the same theme. Extending the range requires digging up the lake and removing a lot of dirt from the entire area. As that happens, Love and his collaborators can’t help but ask more questions.
“When we’re digging a pool at 4 and moving dirt, you have to ask what the long-term purpose of that house is,” Love said. “Should it look like a 1982 photo or a 1989 photo?”
That question has been the focus of this work. Love and PGA Tour officials have combed through the archives, looking for a time when Dye’s vision is fully realized. With love, the answer keeps coming back to 1989.
At that time, the course had received some feedback from early players. Some of the more critical features have been reduced. But the design still carries the visual fear and quirky contouring that makes Dye’s work so unique.
Love recalled asking Dye about the scattershot bunkering at Whistling Straits, one of the designer’s famous designs.
“He told me, ‘Oh, they’re just there to scare you,'” Thanda said. “If you actually look at the fairway, it’s very wide.”
The same philosophy shaped Sawgrass. The paint liked to line the edges of the hole with pitiful distractions — mounds, dumpsters, pot racks — to make players feel suffocated or out of place.
“I just want to see the old look and the scary look back on the golf course,” Love said.
The labor of love continues; not scheduled to be completed until 2028. And there is a limit to what he can do. Today’s realities make full reversal impossible. Today’s Players Championship requires infrastructure that did not exist when the course opened. The galleries are bigger. Television towers and camera platforms require work space.
“That tee box needs to look like that because it’s a big tournament. You need a place for that camera,” Love said. “But once you get off the fairway, especially near the greens, you can have some weird stuff.”
For a man known throughout the game as one of its true good guys, Love now finds himself in the unusual role of restoring a brutal dash of architecture.
Then again, in the Pete Dye lesson, simply being good is never the point.
