Who owns sawgrass golf course

For the first time, spectator viewing was given full consideration in the design and layout of a golf course. The site was a North Florida wetland, flat and heavily wooded.

Dye had noted that there were no more than 18 inches of elevation above the waterline anywhere on the property. Key locations were designated around the 1st and 10th tees and at the 9th, 16th, 17th and 18th greens, where strategic viewing areas were built. These would be large, gently sloping mounds up to 30 feet high.

From these vantage points, for the first time in golf, thousands of spectators would have unobstructed views of tournament play, similar to being in a baseball or football stadium. An unexpected by-product of the lake construction was the island green at the 17th hole.

What was originally designed as a small pond near the green continued to be dug for the valuable sand base found in that area. After the excavation work, nearly all of the area around the green was surrounded by water. He found a golf course at Sawgrass Country Club that was a natural fit for a premium world-class golf tournament.

Seay went on to partner with golfing legend Arnold Palmer to design and build more than golf courses worldwide. Seay opens with a traditional short par-4 that lays there in its beauty all for the golfer to see including the flagstick on the green. Then he begins to challenge the golfer by limiting the vision of what is in front of them by hiding the greens from the tee on the dog-leg right par-4 second, the par-5 dog-leg left fourth and the dog-leg-right par-4 fifth holes.

The presence of the ocean is introduced quickly with the roar of the surf clearly audible on the second tee. The fourth green is only a 9-iron shot from the sandy beaches of the Atlantic Ocean. To befuddle the golfer even more amidst the unpredictable ocean breezes Seay routed the East nine in a counterclockwise fashion and the West nine in a clockwise fashion.

While each nine goes out and returns to the clubhouse area the golfer never arrives at a point of comfort with the magnitude or direction of the wind. I heard that he hated budgets — that he was somebody where once his creative juices started flowing so did the cheques. So I was going to have an impossible job. But there was never a cross word with Pete Dye. Of all the name architects I worked with, and I was fortunate enough to work with all of them, Pete Dye was, frankly, the easiest.

He just loved golf. Pete would notice him or Alice would notice him. Nobody would ever know about it because it was all done anonymously. That happened numerous times.

In terms of their talent, Pete was going through the railroad tie phase back then and we had a lot of railroad ties out there. You had to do something to add drama to a flat piece of land. Pete created these different elevation changes and then the railroad ties maintain those artificial elevation changes. Clearing the way for the course and constructing it was not easy work. Aside from the oppressive heat, Kelly and his team found the land to be home to all kinds of wildlife….

Pete would come to the golf course almost every week and we would walk the work that had been done. This was early in the process and the surveyors had done these cut lines with machetes and they were only wide enough that you could walk through them. The underbrush was so thick out there that, in order to walk off the path, you had to have a machete yourself and cut through the palmetto forest.

I was in front, Dave Postlethwait — construction superintendent was behind me and Pete was at the back of the line. When I get on a golf course I walk the land. I walk the land every week.

So you boys better get used to this. Toughen up. About that time I saw something on the ground that was just different to everything else. It was a little different pattern. It was a rattlesnake. I almost stepped on it. I backed up real quick and I hit David and David backed up and hit Pete.

He stretched from one end of the palmetto cut line to the other. He was moving across the opening. He woke up and crawled up in the middle of the path. Normally we would have had a machete or a Pusher, which is like a small hatchet, and we could have killed him or at least shooed him off. We were just walking along empty handed.