In the late 1970s, Deane Beman wanted a home. The Players Championship, the one event owned by the players on the professional tour, had been moving from place to place: Atlanta, Colonial, Inverary, then a few years at Sawgrass Country Club, whose owners had no wish to part with their property. So the commissioner turned to Jerome and Paul Fletcher, local landowners in Ponte Vedra Beach, and they sold him 415 acres of swamp and wooded wetland for a single dollar. It was a nominal price for ground that promised very little. There was almost nothing there to love. It was flat North Florida wetland, with less than two feet of elevation above the water table anywhere on the property. Pete and Alice Dye were asked to build a stadium course, designed with spectators in mind so that fans could see the professionals play. The brief was strict in its fairness. No player and no style was to be favoured. There would be short, medium and long holes, doglegs bending both ways, and a routing in which no two consecutive holes ran in the same direction. What the Dyes did with flat land was dig. Lakes were cut for strategy, and the fill pulled from them was shaped into movement in the fairways and into mounds for the gallery. At the opening holes of each nine and the last three coming home, viewing areas rose as high as thirty feet so that thousands could watch without obstruction. A swamp became a landscape by being hollowed out and piled up, the water and the earth trading places. The 17th came out of that same trade. A small pond beside the green kept growing as more sand was extracted, and it was mainly thanks to Alice Dye that the island green became a reality. The water crept around until it surrounded the putting surface entirely. It became the most infamous par three on the property, born of excavation and finished by someone who knew when to keep digging. The course opened late in 1980, and it opened to sharp criticism. When the Tournament Players Championship arrived in 1982, the professionals deemed it too tough. Jack Nicklaus missed the cut. So did Arnold Palmer and Gary Player. And yet Jerry Pate, playing an orange golf ball, shot 67 in the final round and won by two strokes, then threw Beman and Dye into the lake at the 18th and dove in after them. That is the place in miniature: resented and celebrated in the same week, the architect soaked by the man his course had rewarded. Five years later Dye and Pate, with Bobby Weed, designed the Dye's Valley course at TPC Sawgrass. The course has undergone many revisions since, and it has kept collecting champions. Sandy Lyle won in 1987, the first non-American to triumph here. Fred Couples, Steve Elkington, Hal Sutton, Davis Love III and Tiger Woods each won more than once. The event was called the Tournament Players Championship until 1988, and it has come to be known as the unofficial fifth major. Walk it now and the trees make it feel sprawling, though it is actually intimate. Greens and tees cluster into small hubs of activity, a routing meant to serve the spectator, just as Beman envisioned from the beginning. Stand on the 15th tee and you are a mere 250 yards from the moat-guarded Global Home of Golf. Between the 16th and 17th there was once a spectator peninsula, and it is gone, along with some of the old spectator mounding. Something was lost with them, a little of the crowd that the course was first built to hold. That is TPC Sawgrass: a dollar's worth of swamp, a pond that would not stop growing, and a course the players first found too tough and then kept coming back to.