Ahead of broader work scheduled for 2028, Pete Dye's house of horrors at TPC Sawgrass is getting some of its quirkiness back at No. 12.
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – The banging of hammers, thumping of jack hammers and beeping of forklifts at the Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass signal that March and the Players Championship are right around the corner. Just 55 days until balls will be in the air if you’re counting at home.
As the build-out continues in earnest, there are some subtle but noticeable changes to the home of the Tour’s flagship event at Pete and Alice Dye’s house of horrors. Two-time Players champion Davis Love III was called in to help develop a master plan a few years ago to restore some of the stronger Dye features along with Steve Wenzloff, who headed up the Tour’s in-house design team, Jeff Plotts, TPC Sawgrass director of golf course maintenance and Stephen Cox, a PGA Tour rules official. [Wenzloff and Plotts retired from the Tour late last year.]
Love said the team is studying photographs from the mid-1980s in order to reestablish some of the quirky features that got removed from the course over the years, after players complained that TPC was too hard and bordered on unfair. “Weird shapes, palms in bunkers, and putting back a lot of the contour in the greens that was taken out in the previous renovations when green speeds went up,” he explained.
Two changes should be noticeable to longtime fans of the course , one of which was deliberate and the other not so much. The first is to No. 12, which underwent wholesale changes a decade ago that removed a large mound to a semi-blind short par-4 and converted it to a more strategic, drivable par-4 with water down much of the left side beginning at the green. It added another potentially eagle-producing risk-reward challenge, which was unveiled at the 2017 Players.
“No. 12 needs a lot of study,” Love said. “I liked the original hole but now we have a lake and not a hill.”
A new fairway bunker was installed on the right side this summer, better framing the driving zone while catching stray tee shots that drift in its direction. Wenzloff said having a bunker as a hazard for errant drives at the hole had been contemplated as far back as 2016, when the hole was originally reimagined.
“We opted for the consistency of a recovery from a grassy hollow, thinking it would provide more resistance to scoring than sand,” Wenzloff said. “Through years of evaluating the hole, we concluded it needed more visual balance.”
“I felt like you couldn’t see any sand on the right side of the hole, so we decided to build a bunker in a natural spot up against a couple of palm trees,” Love said.
Added Cox: “It just asks a different question from the tee now. The bunker on the right is more of a sightline bunker, more from an aesthetic standpoint and not to make the hole play necessarily harder.”
They also brought the water back closer to the tee and installed a bulkhead along the edge of the bunker, a move Dye, who died in 2020, likely would have approved of (though he would have pushed to make it even more penal). “Pete wanted to bring the water all the way back to the tee to enhance the visual of it,” Wenzloff said.
The other change is the loss of a major limb to the iconic tree at No. 16, which was a thorn in the side of players playing their second or third shot at the reachable par-5. The limb in question fell down Aug. 21, not due to a storm but rather internal decay. Visually, it's a different look, but its absence likely won't impact the flight of the second or third shot. It may provide better odds of success for those choosing to go low with a chip-and-run shot when stuck in that awkward distance of being too close to the tree to loft it over. Cox said the Tour is having an arborist check the health of the tree and its life expectancy given its strategic importance. Notably, the limb that hangs over the fairway, creating indecision and swatting down its share of misguided shots, remains intact.
Of the loss of the limb, Love said, “we can always move one in there,” and noted he did just that last year as part of a renovation of another Dye gem, Harbour Town Golf Links, site of the RBC Heritage, at the fifth hole to make the second and third shot play like it did before they moved the green.
The Tour’s team has been picking off small projects at TPC Sawgrass each summer to spruce up the Stadium Course – predominantly infrastructure work such as moving a cart path from No. 1 green to No. 2 tee last year – in order to reduce the scope of work in case a larger renovation occurs. That date has been in flux and could change with the involvement of new leadership, but currently has a placeholder of 2028 that isn't far off.
“The majority of the work will be done in 2028 when we ultimately close the golf course down,” Cox said. “We know the lifespan of our greens is coming to an end. Some of our bulkheads are ready to be replaced. We know that we have a short window for doing any major construction work. It’s basically a month in June and we get a lot accomplished during that time, whether it be agronomic-related or competitive enhancements, but for major construction work, it handcuffs us. The plan is to close for a longer stretch in 2028, potentially through October-November and allow enough time that our overseeding goes down to be ready for March.”
Bringing back more of what made TPC Sawgrass unique should be a welcomed addition in the years to come.
“We do seem to be leaning into quirky and some of the bolder Pete Dye features that have been lost,” Cox said.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: TPC Sawgrass's 12th hole gets subtle makeover ahead of 2026 Players
Category: General Sports
