Deane Beman was the visionary — about the tournament, the golf course and the home base for the PGA Tour.
But the former Tour commissioner who launched The Players Championship nearly 50 years ago at the Atlanta Athletic Club on a stifling hot Labor Day weekend had help.
Members of his small staff back then, local golf enthusiasts from the First Coast business scene who had already helped the Greater Jacksonville Open become a staple on the PGA Tour's Florida Swing, developers who saw the potential for the Ponte Vedra area as the home of The Players and the Tour, one mad scientist of golf course architect, the best players in the world, the fans who have watched them and an army of volunteers -- they've all done their part in making the tournament one of golf's biggest worldwide events.
It was one thing to bring The Players Championship to the First Coast. It was another thing to sustain it.
And here it is: The Players Championship is being played for the 50th time, March 14-17 at the Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass with the strongest top-to-bottom field among PGA Tour events, playing for the richest purse in golf, and in front of a worldwide TV audience that reaches more than 200 countries.
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of The Players, here are 50 people who made a difference, in bringing the tournament to the First Coast, keeping it here, and building it into the iconic sports event and week that it has become:
The commissioners
Beman was the second PGA Tour commissioner since the players broke off from the PGA of America in 1968. The four major championships were operated by other entities and he believed the PGA Tour should have a championship it could call its own: The Players.
"I saw no reason why the PGA Tour, one of the most important organizations in the game, should not have its own significant championship," Beman said. "It would represent the Tour's contributions to building golf in the world."
The tournament rotated the first three years, from Atlanta to Fort Worth to Fort Lauderdale. Beman believed that March would be the ideal time — allowing The Players to be the first huge event of the year — but wanted a permanent site, as Augusta National is for The Masters.
Beman retired in 1994 and Tim Finchem took over. Finchem continued building on the legacy his predecessor established, bringing in the World Golf Ranking as a criterion, which increased the pool of international players in the tournament and was unafraid of bold moves, such as taking the tournament to May for 12 years.
Current Tour commissioner Jay Monahan has solidified the tournament and the PGA Tour headquarters as First Coast fixtures, presiding over the completion of the PGA Tour's Global Home, the move of The Players back to March, and bumps in the purse to ensure it will be the richest prize in pro golf.
It's also personal for Monahan: He was the executive director of The Players from 2008-2010.
The First Coast connections
Beman settled on the First Coast as a site for the tournament largely due to the success of the Greater Jacksonville Open, which was played from 1965-1976, at Selva Marina, Deerwood and Hidden Hills.
The Players Championship would need strong attendance, local sponsorships and hospitality and a vibe, a sense in the community that it was a can't-miss athletic and social event. The GJO proved it.
John Tucker and John Montgomery were Southern Bell executives and members of the San Jose Country Club. Along with San Jose member Wes Paxson Sr. and Timuquana members Jack McCormack (Atlantic Bank CEO) and Lester Varn Jr., Florida Publishing Company president Bob Feagin and Seaboard Coastline Railroad CEO Prime Osborn (which later became CSX and owned the Florida Times-Union), they were the dreamers and the money men that got the GJO off the ground and thriving.
When Beman played in the GJO and later attended the tournament as commissioner, he realized the area was hungry for big-time sporting events and would be supportive of his notion to bring The Players and the PGA Tour headquarters to the First Coast.
"It's my guess that if John Tucker and his friends hadn't started the GJO, we would have never come here," Beman said.
The developers
The first person to see the potential of the Ponte Vedra area was James Stockton Jr., who broke ground for what became the Sawgrass Country Club and its surrounding residential development in 1972. The golf course was built in 1974 and three years later was targeted by Beman, who wanted to buy the course and use it as the Tour's permanent home for The Players.
Beman couldn't work out a deal with Atlantic Bank, who by then had taken ownership of the property.
In retrospect, Beman said being rejected by Atlantic Bank was for the best.
"In the end, the alternative was the better deal," Beman said.
Enter Paul and Jerome Fletcher, who had purchased more than 5,000 acres on the west side of A1A. They developed part of it, with some modest homes and a golf course called Thousand Oaks but when Beman couldn't buy Sawgrass, they stepped in and sold 417 acres to the Tour for $1 — retaining the development rights.
The rest was history. Beman got his course and site for both The Players and the Tour headquarters and the Fletchers made a fortune off development.
It was one of the best deals for a buck on both sides in history.
Pete Dye designs a classic
Beman had an idea for a spectator-friendly golf course. While playing in The Masters and other courses as an amateur and PGA Tour player, he noticed how difficult it was for many people in a gallery to see the golf.
He had an answer: "Stadium Golf."
It was revolutionary and involved moving a lot of dirt to make spectator mounds on almost every hole for people to get good vantage points.
For such a revolutionary design, the Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass, Beman called on a revolutionary architect, Pete Dye.
Beman had already seen what Dye did with a coastal property that was heavily wooded, with wetlands and marshes. Dye designed the Harbour Town Golf Links on Hilton Head Island, S.C., which quickly became one of the favorite stops on the PGA Tour.
"Our property and the Hilton Head property were very similar," Beman said. "Pete designed a fantastic golf course there and I believed he could do the same for us."
Dye saw the potential and discovered, much to everyone's delight, a vein of sand buried under the muck and mud. The sand formed the foundation for the spectator mounds and was especially abundant around the 17th green.
Dye's wife Alice, a two-time U.S. Women's Senior Amateur champion, suggested the area around the green be filled with water. Hence — the Island Green.
Also instrumental in the construction of the property were project manager Vernon Kelly and construction supervisor David Postalwaith who at the time was an independent contractor who worked with Dye before.
"When I saw the property my first thought was that Pete lied to me," said Postalwaith, who is retired and living near Raleigh, N.C. "He said it was just a flat piece of land with a lot of sand. The woods were so thick and the property was so wet that it was one of the hardest projects I ever worked on. The place was thick with snakes, moccasins and rattlers. I had a new Jeep that we drove through there and I came back with both mirrors ripped off and it was almost totaled."
Postalwaith became the first director of agronomy at the TPC Sawgrass after it was built, left after two years and helped build eight more TPC courses.
The Tour support staffwere unsung heros
The PGA Tour staff in the late 1970s numbered around a few dozen. Beman declined to single out the ones who made the biggest impact in the move to Ponte Vedra Beach, saying they all worked equally hard to make The Players and the move to the First Coast happen.
But several were the most prominently mentioned by their peers and observers at the time.
The TPC Sawgrass was not only the home of The Players but the facility and others in the TPC Network to follow are considered the home courses for Tour members. Pete Davison, a life member of the PGA of America, was the first general manager and head professional at the TPC Sawgrass and later became the head of Tournament Players Clubs worldwide.
The TPC Sawgrass couldn't survive on one tournament a year. It was a resort course but needed private membership. The man who was charged with making that happen was former PGA Tour player Bob Dickson, who was the first director of marketing.
Dickson went to countless meetings of service clubs such as the Rotarians, Elks and Kiwanis, plus other golf clubs and head pros and GMs to talk about the vision the Tour had for the TPC Sawgrass the other 51 weeks of the year.
The best players in the world were going to demand the best conditions in the world. The longest-tenured TPC Sawgrass director of agronomy was Fred Klauk, who nurtured the fairways and greens for 25 years until his retirement in 2008. Klauk not only had to keep private members and resort guests happy but 144 PGA Tour players every year — some of whom were convinced every divot in the fairway had their name on it.
Among the Players Championship executive directors, Matthew Rapp took the hospitality and social scene to another level when he held the position from 2010 to 2016. Rapp downplayed the "fifth major" designation often assigned to The Players, once saying, "We don't want to be like four other golf tournaments ... we want to be the Kentucky Derby, the Daytona 500, the Indianapolis 500, a week of activities surrounding an athletic event."
Rapp brought food trucks to the course, expanded the food and beverage choices in other venues and ensured that most of the high-end hospitality areas sold out well in advance of the tournament.
The players: Jack Nicklaus with the kick-start
The money attracted the PGA Tour elite to The Players. That ensured the field would be elite year after year.
But they had to perform for the tournament to take off.
Jack Nicklaus helped by winning the first Players in 1974 at the Atlanta Athletic Club, then in 1976 at Inverrary, and in 1978 with the second Players held at the Sawgrass Country Club. He still holds the record for the most Players titles and winning three of the first five gave the tournament instant cachet.
When the tournament moved to the Stadium Course, Jerry Pate, with his fabulous shot-making (with his orange Wilson ball) and his leap into the pond at No. 18 — after pushing Beman and Dye in — kickstarted that era. Hal Sutton and Fred Couples won the next two, showing that the Tour's young stars had the nerve for Dye's devilish design. Sutton and Couples would go on to win one more Players each.
Sandy Lyle of Scotland became the first international winner and the first to win in a playoff at the Stadium Course in 1987 and the following year, Mark McCumber captured the hearts of local fans when a native-born kid from the Westside set the scoring record to win.
Greg Norman set the 72-hole scoring record in 1994 that stands to this day (24-under 264), Couples in 1996 and Davis Love III in 2003 share the record for the lowest final-round score by winners with 64s, and in between David Duval joined McCumber with a Westside product winning his hometown tournament in 1999.
Since Tiger Woods burst on the scene in 1996, any tournament he won got more credibility and he captured Players Championships 12 years apart, in 2001 and 2013.
Love said competing in The Players was a matter of pride.
"When Jack Nicklaus wins it the first time ... there is a desire for other players to win it," said Davis Love III. "When I saw Fred Couples win it, I wanted to win it. Now, everybody wants to win it."
The media saw the potential, then told the stories
At the time the PGA Tour was considering moving to Ponte Vedra and morphing the GJO to The Players Championship, media support was important.
The Tour already had the backing from the upper echelons of the Florida Publishing Company with Feagin (Tucker later left Southern Bell to replace Feagin and later was hired by Beman to be The Players executive director) but support on the ground came from Times-Union managing editor Fred Seely, sports editor David Lamm and columnist Greg Larson.
Beman didn't always agree with their takes and opinions. But Jacksonville was trying to land an NFL team at the time and getting the PGA Tour and The Players was seen as having the same impact to getting a pro sports franchise.
"I think we had a pretty good balance of not being a bunch of homers but we did recognize that having The Players and the Tour here was going to be great for the community," Seely said.
Seely and Lamm came from golf writing backgrounds in North Carolina and Larson was an avid golfer.
"We had all been around the PGA Tour and we all understood what a great tournament looked like," Lamm said. "The Players was going to be tremendous for the area as a whole."
ABC aired The Players in the early years, followed by CBS. NBC has been the rights holder since 1988. Two of the most innovative sports producers in history, World Golf Hall of Fame member Frank Chirkinian with CBS and Tommy Roy at NBC, instantly recognized that Dye's golf course, with 18 scenic holes winding through Florida marshes, pines and oaks, would always be the star of the show.
Production values at the par-5 16th hole, the Island Green at No. 17 and the brutal par-4 18th created memorable moments — the great shots and the intense pain when the shots weren't so great, or even disastrous.
The announcing talent also helped boost the tournament in the public eye, led in the CBS days by legendary duo Pat Summerall (who had a home nearby at Marsh Landing) and Hall of Famer Ken Venturi.
After NBC took over, the classy, smooth Dick Enberg was the first lead announcer, with the equally polished Dan Hicks inheriting the role in 2000 to the present. Johnny Miller gave caustic but accurate commentary on the nerve-wracking experience players went through at the Stadium Course and Gary Koch gave the tournament its iconic call with his "Better Than Most" on Tiger Woods' putt at No. 17 in the third round of the 2001 tournament.
The volunteers labored behind the scenes
John Tucker didn't want one person serving as the tournament chairman for long periods. Recognizing that there were many organized hard-working people in the business community who loved golf, he set the tone by serving as the GJO chairman for the first year in 1965, then turned it over to Paxson, who yielded to Montgomery and so on, a process that has continued to this day.
The theory: installing a new chairman every year, drawing from the First Coast business community, meant a new set of clients, contacts, business partners and friends who could be urged to buy tickets and corporate hospitality.
Their year served, they joined the Honourable Company of Past Chairmen, or the "Redcoats," known for their red blazers. They also form the committee to determine The Players' charitable recipients and then scatter across the area every fall to present the checks.
With more than 2,000 volunteers annually helping stage The Players, and 66 men and women who have served as chairs, it seems impossible to single out one. But one family can be singled out: 2024 Players Chairman Lee Nimnicht follows his mother Anne Nimmicht (1997) and his uncle Ed Nimnicht (1978) in leading the volunteer force which has made The Players among the most organized and best-run tournaments on the PGA Tour.
Anne Nimnicht has also been a past chairman for the Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf in 1998 at the World Golf Hall of Fame and the Korn Ferry Tour's Winn-Dixie Jacksonville Open. She is believed to be the only person to chair events on the PGA Tour's three major circuits.
Others in supporting roles ...
Billy Detlaff, a former director of golf at the TPC Sawgrass, also was the first tournament director for the Junior Players Championship when it became part of the American Junior Golf Association schedule in 2007.
Players champions Justin Thomas and Scottie Scheffler and stars such as Patrick Cantlay, Brooks Koepka and Jordan Spieth got their first exposure to the Stadium Course at the Junior Players and numerous younger pros have cited the Junior Players as whetting their appetite to one day compete in The Players.
"You go into that locker room, you see all the memorabilia and you're like, 'Man, I really want to get to The Players and try to achieve some of those same things," said Will Gordon, who competed in his first Players Championship last year.
Detlaff also founded the TPC Storytellers, a group of volunteers who offer fans tours of the TPC Sawgrass clubhouse and the Stadium Course.
Paul Mahla was the barber to the stars. When the tournament was at the Sawgrass Country Club, players gathered around his chair for a haircut and to shoot the breeze. His chair later became iconic because in the 1979 Players, when wind resulted in only two under-par scores on the weekend, pros sat in the barber chair to rehash the carnage.Today the chair sits in the players-only locker room at the TPC Sawgrass clubhouse.
Country superstar Tim McGraw performed at the first Players Championship Military Appreciation Day in 2010, starting a tradition that has become the highlight of the week until the competition begins on Thursday. McGraw was originally going to do a set of only several songs, but stayed onstage for more than double that, and chatted, signed autographs and posed for pictures with members of the military and their families before and after the gig. McGraw also has ties to Jacksonville — his mother went to Parker High School.
The Weatherman — whether it's your favorite TV or radio news meteorologist or the PGA Tour's staff meteorologists, they are a key part of every Players week. Last year was the 38th time there has been a weather delay at The Players, with a mix of rain, storms, fog and freezes delaying the start of a round or interrupting it. When that happens, invariably a round is suspended because of darkness.
There have been eight Monday finishes in tournament history, the last in 2022.
When The Players arrives, everyone, from fans to the Tour stars, has one eye on weather reports.
And the 50th person to make a difference in the success of the Players: any random First Coast fan, representing those who have flocked to the tournament since 1977, creating legendary traffic jams on A1A, clogging parking lots and watching the best players in the world.
The Tour hasn't released attendance figures since 2013, when more than 173,000 fans were there for all or part of the week, but based on that figure, close to 8 million fans have come to The Players in the 46 years it has been on the First Coast.
Take a bow if you've bought a Players ticket. It wouldn't be a party without you.