Old TPC Sawgrass?

[Tom Bacsanyi]

I stumbled upon this photo that appears to be TPC Sawgrass during the "scruffy" period.  Can anyone verify?  Which hole? It's from this article in the GSR (Ben Crenshaw on maintenance):


http://gsrpdf.lib.msu.edu/ticpdf.py?file=/1990s/1994/940526.pdf

[Pete_Pittock]

Looks like 15. I played there in its second year and don't remember that look. Will see if I have old pix

[Robin_Hiseman]

I reckon that's 10.

[Anthony_Nysse]

I reckon that's 10.

Its #15. #10s waste area is on the left side.

[Robin_Hiseman]

Sorry. Not #10. Don't know why I put that. Yes, it's 15.

[Kyle Harris]

This looks like the 1st.

15 it is, forward tee is not a peninsula on 1.

[Greg Stebbins]

The picture below this one in the article is #1 west at Ridgewood.  The trees are a little thinner these days but the airspace is still really tight.

[Anthony_Nysse]

This looks like the 1st.

15 it is, forward tee is not a peninsula on 1.

#1 also had permanent wood stands around it until the early 1990s; rough was a sandy scrub grass around the tee complex.


Love seeing the old pics of TPC.

[Tom Bacsanyi]

I have a conspiracy theory that the PGA Tour has eradicated all traces of the first iteration of TPC.  Swept down the memory hole in a 1984ish plot due to the controversy.  It's up to us to preserve any evidence for posterity.  Ok, I'm going too far.  Anyway, there has to be a nice collection of photos somewhere.  Tom Doak said he had a bunch on slides but I haven't seen them posted anywhere.

[Tom_Doak]

I have a conspiracy theory that the PGA Tour has eradicated all traces of the first iteration of TPC.  Swept down the memory hole in a 1984ish plot due to the controversy.  It's up to us to preserve any evidence for posterity.  Ok, I'm going too far.  Anyway, there has to be a nice collection of photos somewhere.  Tom Doak said he had a bunch on slides but I haven't seen them posted anywhere.

Oh, yeah, I have a lot of pictures of it.  There were a couple of greens changed even before the first tournament in 1982.


It was hard to recognize the photo above because it felt like half the holes looked like that.  The other half had water or waste bunker left off the tee 😀

[Peter Pallotta]

Fascinating. Thanks for posting.
And to think there are people, many of them, who remember the past as it actually was.
To my untrained eye, Mr. Dye sure knew his Pine Valley and Pinehurst both. But if you didn't know about the old TPC (and I didn't), you would've thought his main inspiration was Disneyland.
(And oh, didn't more than a few architects in turn use *that* as a model post 1984...)

[Matt Kardash]

Tom, your goal in life should be to bring the TPC back to this.If a designer can ever bring the course back to this it would probably be the best thing ever for golf and design. Since the course is so high profile and the home to the tour, it would be seen seen as such a symbol for change.