The Players Championship is Finally Finding an Identity in a Trying Week

Demolition derbies, challenging weather and, yes, some great shotmaking have combined to finally give the PGA Tour's flagship event the look of a major, Gary Van Sickle writes.

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla.--No matter what happens now, whether The Players Championship finishes here on Monday, Tuesday or Easter Sunday, we’ll always have Saturday.

That’s the day The Players found its true identity as some kind of cross between a wind-blown, sideways-rain British Open, a demolition derby and Fight Club. (Remember the rule: We never talk about one of those things.)

Pardon my grin, but Saturday at TPC Sawgrass was the golf highlight of 2022 so far. Credit howling winds, preceded by pelting rain and storm warnings, and thick rough. As golfers battled for their scorecard survival, I felt their pain. I also enjoyed watching their pain. Plus, those struggles gave them the chance to show what kind of remarkable shotmaking they can — or can’t — pull off. That line you’ve heard about Justin Thomas having all the shots? He proved it Saturday in a brilliant display during a 69.

Never mind that one TV analyst called for play to be stopped Saturday because the par-3 17th hole was “unplayable.” Or that one competitor who played through it all claimed that the challenging conditions caused a “loss of integrity” to the prestigious tournament.

Sorry, but Saturday is what The Players should look like. Maybe not every day and maybe not that garishly difficult, but close. To quote George C. Scott in “Patton” as the famous general surveyed a body-strewn battlefield: “I love it. God help me, I do love it so. I love it more than my life.”

The Players got truly compelling Saturday in the raging whirlwinds when the first threesome reached the 17th tee. Scottie Scheffler, Xander Schauffele and Brooks Koepka each splashed a shot in the water and looked none too stellar doing it. Thus began a long parade of players in a walk of shame to the drop zone.

The peninsula-green 17th hole was played into unsteady winds with a strongest measured gust of 43 mph. Twenty-nine balls found the water Saturday. Only four had splashed in limited play Thursday and Friday. It might be hyperbole to say the winds created whitecaps on the lake at 17 but the gusts were so tormenting and unrelenting that even a broad-winged hawk in the Sawgrass trees might’ve shook its beak and thought, “Sheesh!”

This number said it all: The par-4 18th, despite the tees being moved up, became a little shop of horrors into northwest winds that limited the hole’s average driving distance to a puny persimmon-like 248 yards.

Pardon my Patton but … I loved it, I loved it so.

For another opinion, let’s try tour player Max Homa’s summation from Twitter: “Today was basically the worst day ever to play a golf tourney at Sawgrass but seemed like the best day ever to watch one. I was very jealous of the spectators.”

Homa didn’t rinse a ball in the drink at 17 or 18 in either of the first two rounds. He made the cut. He also nailed his tweet.

The Players aspires to fifth-major-championship status. It should therefore be a challenge of the ages every time it’s held, like the other majors. The Masters has established its identity. It’s all about tradition and image and azaleas and the world’s most alluring holes and challenging greens. The U.S. Open is about being golf’s sternest test. The British Open is often a battle against the elements and ageless hazards. The PGA Championship is a good setup on a worthy course.

With the right weather in March, The Players can present a mix of both Opens. Perhaps Saturday’s gusts were over the top but the action turned into a moving battle against par in the search to identify the best player.

When The Players moved from March to May in 2007, it came after a long run of wet, spring weather and difficult course preparations that included overseeding, which wasn’t considered ideal for the course’s long-term health. But while the May weather was warmer, if not downright hot, and the winds were calmer, it never packed the same pre-Masters buzz it previously had in March. Let Saturday’s stirring battle against the elements be the last time anyone laments holding The Players in May.

Paul Azinger, a former PGA Championship winner who is NBC’s golf analyst, let this slip during Saturday’s telecast: “It’s nice to see this championship back in March so we can get conditions like this.”

From start to finish, the second round lasted just about 27 hours until it concluded early Sunday afternoon. It’s a drag to have delayed rounds because of weather. This week’s unusual conditions weighed heavily in favor of players such as Tommy Fleetwood, who got a full 18 in Thursday during calm, soft conditions and took advantage of that to shoot 66. The stop-and-start nature of this Players was disconcerting. But that’s part of the price of playing in early March in Florida, where weather conditions could live up to an old PGA Tour slogan, “Anything’s possible.”

This Players edition was earlier than most March events. I know this because a million years ago in the 1990s, if you wanted to talk with Fred Couples after his round, you had to go to the players’ locker room. That’s where Fred could be found, plopped down on a couch and watching NCAA basketball tournament games. He was always congenial and willing to chat golf as long as the game on the screen wasn’t in the midst of a nail-biting finish. There was conference tournament basketball this week but not the big one, the NCAA tournament, which didn’t announce its pairings until Sunday night.

Jon Rahm, the world’s No. 1-ranked player, caught the good side of The Players draw but he wasn’t as big a fan of the weather-related scoring carnage as I was. “I’m one of those who believes that if this wasn’t The Players Championship, we would not have played yesterday,” Rahm said Sunday. “I don’t know if they should have.”

Even the British Open once halted play in 2010 because it got too windy. Balls were moving on the green. That’s the year Louis Oosthuizen won his only major. Too much wind or too much rain can be a bad thing.

“Anytime you’re talking to me on a Saturday, it’s usually not a good thing,” said Sawgrass superintendent Jeff Plotts as he gave a media briefing about course conditions following Friday’s heavy rains.

It has been a strange and trying week for players. As it should be. The late Pete Dye, the architect of TPC Sawgrass, had a biography titled, “Bury Me in a Pot Bunker.” Which was funny because as a truly original designer ahead of his time, that’s exactly what Dye tried to do to golfers who dared play his tracks — bury them. And they loved the challenge he threw at them.

The Players found its identity this week. It matches a T-shirt on sale in the merchandise tent that features a drawing of the 17th green complex with a warning: Be very afraid.

Now that’s a slogan worthy of a major championship.