JUPITER, Fla. — There's no end of opinions about the 137-yard 17th hole at the Tournament Players Club in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. For a second take on the hole this week, we turn to Nick Price, the winner of three major tournaments, two Canadian Opens and the 1993 Players Championship. He spoke about the controversial hole and made some observations about the course over breakfast yesterday at a local spot.
"It's a terrifying golf shot when there's any kind of wind," Price, 51 and now a Champions Tour player, said of the tee ball at the 17th. He was glad not to be at the Players, where the wind blew hard yesterday in high heat and where the arduous conditions are expected to continue this weekend.
The wind, which architect Robert Trent Jones calls an "invisible hazard," causes serious difficulty at the 17th hole because of the island green. Price thinks the hole provides great theatre, which is what the course's architect, Pete Dye, wanted, but that the green design is problematic.
"Let's say a guy hits a good, positive shot [with spin] and the ball pitches a yard from the crest [that runs across the middle of the green] and it comes back against the collar," Price explained. "Another guy just gets it over the water [a fat shot, and without spin] and he stays on the green. That's where sometimes that green is so brutal."
Price and his late caddy Jeff (Squeeky) Medlen examined the green closely to come up with a plan for the shot from the tee.
"There was one spot I always aimed for," Price said. "Squeek and I worked out where the dead middle of the green was. I think it's about 16 or 17 yards into the green, on the widest part. That's where you have to hit it."
Players have had trouble finding the right spot this week because of winds gusting to 50 kilometres an hour. Conditions on the green were a bit more manageable yesterday than during the first round because officials applied more water. Still, Price said, a few greens are always firmer than the rest because of their locations. That makes hitting them and putting on them a tricky and risky business.
"Four, 11, 17 and 18 to a degree are always the firmest and fastest greens," Price explained. "They're more exposed than the greens in the trees. They're not protected."
Nor are the players, at least from the anxiety that the wind combined with the 17th hole's design generates. Tiger Woods isn't at the Players because he's recovering from knee surgery, but his observation that the 17th would make more sense in the overall design if it came earlier in the round is worth pondering.
"Exactly," Price said, agreeing with Woods. "But then you'd lose the theatre effect."
One year, surely, somebody will come to the 17th with a lead of two strokes or more, make a big number and blow the tournament. That could happen tomorrow. It's always possible.
"I'm pretty sure they'll change the hole one of these days," Price said. He quickly came up with a list of some of the bad things that have happened at the hole. Call the list When Bad Things Happen to Good Golfers.
For one particularly nasty story, there's Len Mattiace's experience on the final day of the 1998 Players. He was a stroke out of the lead and made 8. Mattiace lost a playoff to Mike Weir in the 2003 Masters, and now he's trying to find his game on the Nationwide Tour.
"He hit a really good first shot there, too, but it pitched over the back and into the water," Price said. "That was cruel."
Stephen Ames didn't use the word cruel or treacherous or anything similar after nearly flying his ball into the hole on Thursday and seeing it bounce as if off a Ping-Pong table and into the water. He double-bogeyed the hole. Ames thought the entire course was a problem.
"It's too [expletive] hard," said Ames, the 2006 Players champion, meaning, one assumes, hard as in firm. Ernie Els, meanwhile, triple-bogeyed the 17th hole after dunking his tee shot and said the hole should be blown up. Ames and Els parred the 17th yesterday. Els shot 71 and is at 143, while Ames made seven birdies and shot 68, for 142, four strokes behind leader Kenny Perry. They'd take pars on the 17th this weekend.
"Apart from 17, it's an incredible test of golf," Price said of the course.
As for the 17th hole?
"Pretty brutal," he concluded.
Just watch this weekend. It won't be pretty, but it's likely to be brutal.
