Welcome to the House of Pain: the Wind-Whipped 17th Hole Saturday at the Players Championship

The infamous water-surrounded par-3 swallowed 29 balls and baffled the PGA Tour's best on a day with gusts up to 35 mph around TPC Sawgrass.

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla.—Welcome to the 17th hole at the Players Championship. Or as it played out Saturday, The House of Pain.

Winds whipped at 35 mph and changed gears and directions quicker than a Formula I race driver. Here’s your short version, "The House of Pain for Dummies":

The first man on the 17th tee Saturday was Scottie Scheffler, who won last week’s Arnold Palmer Invitational. He put a good swing on a short iron, watched it uneasily and saw it land on the top tier, where the pin was located, and bounce over the green and into the lake. Bogey.

The next man up was Xander Schauffele, your Olympic gold medalist. His shot faded and came up short and right of the green. Splash. Bogey.

Our third contestant was Brooks Koepka, who said a few weeks ago that the 17th green was his nemesis hole. Can you guess the result? Splash. It was his 10th ball in the water at 17 in his relatively short career. He actually laughed, probably at the capricious ridiculousness of it all. Double bogey.

Three up and three down. The 17th hole was like watching Sandy Koufax mow down the expansion 1962 New York Mets. I don’t know which of these three world-class golfers played the part of light-hitting Marv Throneberry. Maybe all of them. It was a tough day at 17. It was a tough day on every hole at Sawgrass but the 17th was probably the most discouraging.

“It’s luck,” Koepka said to describe how shots turned out at 17. “The problem is the grandstands in the back. You flight it low enough, like Scottie did in the first round, and the wind doesn’t touch it. It’s a tough one.

“I hit 8-iron. It hit a gust. There’s nothing you can do. That was my first shot of the day and I thought it was blowing the hardest. On 16, I hit 8-iron and flew it 205. On 17, I hit it 105.”

Koepka was among the unlucky late-early tee times who got to play the 17th twice Saturday. He found the water again the second time, hit it to 41 feet from the drop zone, then three-putted for a triple bogey. So if you’re wondering how Koepka shot 72-81, now you know. Schauffele posted 73-78 and Scheffler, who hit it in the water at 17 in the second round, too, shot 70-76.

The House of Pain inflicted a lot of hurt. There were 29 balls in the water compared with four Thursday and Friday. Still, 29 seemed like a low number given outlandish conditions that prompted Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee to tweet in mid-afternoon, “Play should be stopped. The 17th is unplayable.”

That comment led to a volley of tweets, including one from European Tour player Eddie Pepperell, who is not in the field this week: “No, Brandel, they shouldn’t. From where I sat, it’s pure entertainment.”

Chamblee replied, “I’ll give you it’s entertaining but that shouldn’t be the sole criteria. This tournament went from being a contest of skill to largely a matter of chance because of one hole, the 17th. This is the worst possible scenario.”

This is what you get when you play a big tournament on a Pete Dye golf course with water everywhere. A missed shot in a major championship might wind up in thick rough or trees and force a punch-out and lead to a bogey. At Sawgrass, and a lot of other Dye tracks, an errant shot finds the water. It’s a penal outcome. And that’s how the late Dye became jokingly-not-jokingly known as the Marquis de Sod.

Saturday, the 17th was the center of the action. A huge crowd lined the lake; it wasn’t the wall-to-wall galleries seen on some past weekend rounds but it was a crowd with energy. After the first group, the fans caught on how difficult it was to find the green and when a player succeeded, he was greeted with a loud ovation. Those who missed got sympathetic groans.

A pair of spectators from Ireland who said they spent nearly three hours watching the 17th on Saturday could remember only two threesomes in which all three tee shots finished on dry land. “And we only saw one birdie all day,” said Ruairi (pronounced Rory) O’Neill. “This is the wildest weather out here in at least a decade, maybe more.”

Only two birdies were recorded at 17 in the second round, which stretched from Friday into Saturday and, ahem, will reach into Sunday.

Added O'Neill's buddy, Paul McCarthy, “It’s been wild watching the crowd, too. That hillside over there (he pointed toward a sloped section behind the drop area) is like an ice rink. We’ve seen a lot of people fall on their keisters.”

Many tour pros did, too, in a manner of speaking.

Tour player Chesson Hadley played the 17th late in the afternoon as the temperature continued to drop from the 60s into the 50s. He had just birdied the previous two holes and was on a roll.

“So I was first up and we had 117 yards to the front,” Hadley said. “I never hit a full shot today, I never hit a shot that wasn’t flighted. I tried to hit this super chippy 8-iron, and I hit it just the way I wanted to. I hit it solid and, I don’t know if I caught a gust, it’s blowing 100, and it went straight up in the air. I bet it was going backwards at the end.”

The ball splashed short of the green and Hadley slapped his thigh in disgust. After the round, Hadley, a former Georgia Tech star, was asked what was the toughest tee shot on the course. “Really? It’s blowing 100 in my face on 17!” he said. “So yeah, 17.”

Hadley finished with a bogey at 18 to shoot 74. He was at 2-over par and tied for 55th when play was called as dusk fell Saturday.

Pass the pain. Former U.S. Open champion Justin Rose polished off a nice opening round of 69 but in the second round, he made three bogeys on the back nine before he reached the 17th. He first tee shot drifted right and short and splashed in the lake. He looked up at the flags on the grandstands in disbelief that he’d come up short. Then he went to the drop area and watched his pitch careen over the back portion of the putting surface into the lake. Again, he looked stunned. It led to a quadruple-bogey 7 and a 79.

Sepp Straka, the recent Honda Classic champion, had moved up to third place late Saturday when he arrived at the 17th. He missed the green left with his first try and missed the green short-ish and left from the drop area. He also made 7 and shot 74.

It was a wild and memorable day at 17, no doubt about it. Rory McIlroy, a former No. 1 player in the world, watched his shot at the 17th just barely make the putting surface.

“I hit a pretty good 7-iron and it pitched on 123 yards,” McIlroy said. Asked how far that club normally goes, he answered, “My 7-iron? 185! It’s crazy.”

The strangeness at 17 included a late-afternoon appearance on the back of the tee box by Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence, recognizable by his long straight locks. How did he get on the back of the actual teeing ground inside the ropes? Celebrity power, presumably. He posed for some pictures for photographers, then posed for a few more with a female friend. Then he made a club-less practice swing, the equivalent of playing air guitar, laughed and went back behind the ropes.

The other highlight of the day, according to my two new Irish acquaintances, was when an osprey vaulted out of the large tree on the island near the famed peninsula green—it’s not an island green no matter how many times they say it on NBC—dived into the lake and came out with a large fish.

“That was the biggest cheer we’d heard all afternoon,” said Rauri O’Neill.

As the osprey gained altitude and rose to about 20 feet above the lake, it dropped the fish, which plummeted back into the water.

“That was an even louder cheer!” O’Neill exclaimed.

In the final tally, a lot of strokes were lost Saturday at the 17th hole. And also one fish.