Taking TPC SAWGRASS to the cutting edge

The legendary tales of how the famous Florida course was created now seem tame compared to what’s been achieved in the past year—and what lies ahead may prove to be the best story yet.

by Joe Barks (editor@clubandresortbusiness.com)
August 2007
 

AT A GLANCE • Year Established: 1978 • Employees: 250 • Clubhouse Size: 77,000 sq. ft. • Annual Golf Rounds: 75,000 • Management Staff: Bill Hughes General Manager Billy Dettlaff National Director of Golf Steven Jones Director of Food & Beverage Fred Klauk Course Superintendent Matt Borocz Head Golf Professional Edye Wright Director of Special Events & Catering Rick Shoemaker Director Revenue Management—Clubhouse Emily Sisson Director Business Development Special Online Exclusives PDFs •Main Floor Conference and Banquet Room Facilities •Meetings & Events Brochure •Upper Floor Conference and Banquet Room Facilities *Note: Right click & select save as on the links above.

Tiger Woods had an impressive new backdrop to size up when he took aim from the 18th fairway during this year’s PLAYERS championship.

Instrumental figures such as Deane Beman, Pete Dye, Vernon Kelly, and Pete Davison were reunited for the discussion, and the nostalgic conversation (highlights of which were later published in Sports Illustrated) covered much of the familiar lore from when TPCSawgrass was built in 1978: buying 417 acres of swampland for $1; fighting off huge water moccasins while building the course; bringing in goats to eat the underbrush and carve out the bunkers.

All of this is the stuff of legend, and it all stood up well in the retelling. And for those participating in the roundtable, as well as those who read their reminiscences, there was still a sense of genuine amazement that the creators were able to build a course at all, let alone one that successfully established the concept of “stadium golf” and quickly grew to iconic status through its signature island green and other special trappings golf fans have come to love over years of televised tournament coverage from the facility.

An Even Better Story
At the same time these original TPCSawgrass legends were being retold by their creators, though, a different team of equally determined people was bringing a new story in the club’s history to a close. And if anything, this tale is perhaps even harder to believe and may already qualify as legendary, even in the current era of can-you-top-this club and resort renovation projects.

Here are just some of the highlights of what this second group of TPCSawgrass visionaries set out to do:
• Heavy cranes and bulldozers were rolled out onto the famous island green, so it could be completely skinned and reconstructed.

In the 14 months between the 2006 and 2007 PLAYERS championships, TPC?Sawgrass’ original “landed spaceship” clubhouse was replaced with a new “Mediterrean Revival”-style building (above) that, at 77,000 square feet, is 40 percent larger than the White House.

• Through a process that involved (just to cite a few figures) removing 26,000 tons of topsoil, backfilling with seven miles of sand, installing 19 acres of sod and laying 22 miles of underground pipe, TPCSawgrass’ entire Stadium Course—now known as THEPLAYERS Stadium Course— was rebuilt to install a state-of-the-art, computer-controlled drainage system and ensure year-round firmness and consistency. (The Stadium Course is currently used for a little more than half of TPCSawgrass’ 75,000 annual rounds, with the remaining rounds played at its Dye’s Valley Course.)

• TPC Sawgrass’ original, very-’70s, shake-roof clubhouse—once described as looking like a “landed spaceship”—was completely demolished and replaced by a 77,000-sq.-ft., Mediterranean Revival-style building.

• But to help retain as much of TPCSawgrass’ original appeal and character as possible, and avoid the strip-mined look that often accompanies major renovations, some 100 mature trees from the property were painstakingly removed, stored and then replanted.

• Perhaps most worthy of legendary status: All of this and much more (including eight additional new buildings) had to be accomplished— and was—under an unyielding, 14-month timeline. Those who pulled it off say projects with this scope would normally take two and a half years to complete. But at TPCSawgrass, there was zero wiggle room; it all had to start as soon as the last putt dropped at the end of the 2006 PLAYERS Cham-pionship in March of that year, and be finished by the start of the 2007 tournament, which was moved back to May (its new, permanent spot in the PGAschedule).

“By January 2007, most people still didn’t think we were going to make it,” reports Michael Johnson, the Vice President of PGATOUR Design &Construction Services who was the maestro of the massive effort (see pg. 24). “We were sketching alternative plans for temporary facilities and tents to use during the [2007] tournament.

“We were still tweaking and testing the air conditioning, chillers and pumps and working 24/7 the entire week of the [2007] tournament—but we came in on time and on budget [$32 million for the clubhouse, $65 million for the entire makeover],” Johnson adds. “It was by far the most significant challenge I’ve ever had in 25 years of doing projects like this—but also the most well-received.”

David Pillsbury, who put his considerable energies behind the TPCSawgrass transformation after becoming Chief Operating Officer of PGATour Golf Course Properties in 2004 (see related story), offers his own succinct assessment of why this latest story to emerge from the once-snake-filled swampland qualifies as instant legend.

“I tend to have expectations that aren’t reachable,” Pillsbury says. “What was accomplished here exceeded mine.”

TPC Sawgrass also got a new and expanded pro shop with its new clubhouse—and, with a boost from the introduction of a new PLAYERS Championship logo, saw shop sales soar well ahead of already-ambitious budget targets as soon as the doors opened.

Universal Benefits
As the new facility was beginning to get its “normal” legs after THEPLAYERStournament, the TPC Sawgrass staff gave these snapshots of what the project has already done for each part of the club’s operation, and what further benefits are expected:

• Golf Course—After installation of the new subsurface aeration system, Course Superintendent Fred Klauk can now use a computer in his office to do whatever’s needed to keep PLA-YERSStadium Course greens fast and firm—either by pulling moisture out of the surface, or pushing oxygen up through it, if it gets too hot and dry.

Fairway drainage has also been improved markedly, after the removal of six inches of organic material through all 18 holes, the addition of all of the new sand and sod, and drainage that was installed every 20 feet. The refurbished course also features a new strain of Bermuda grass that Klauk says is more durable.

“It’s almost like a prescription athletic turf now,” Klauk says of the course’s ability to drain. “We’ve already had it put to a couple of real tests and it came through wonderfully. After one storm dumped two and a half inches of rain in 40 minutes, we were still able to ride the course half an hour later. If that had happened before, we wouldn’t have been able to mow fairways for three or four days. Now, we can mow the next morning.”

TPCSawgrass’ golf marketing peo-ple are now preparing for a much more even and extended flow of the peak golf season because of the PLAYERSStadium Course’s new character. Klauk, who’s been TPCSawgrass superintendent for 21 years, will adjust maintenance routines accordingly.

“We’re not going to need to interrupt play to overseed now, and we’ll do more topdressing, to help keep any organic material from building back up,” he says. “We’ll also go to smaller and lighter-weight aeration equipment, because of all the sand that went in.”

• Food &Beverage—“Our whole food and beverage operation has evolved more than anything [because of the renovation],” says TPCSawgrass General Manager Bill Hughes. “You could say we were never really in the banquet business before. Now that the new clubhouse is open, we’re projecting huge business in just the first half-year.”

The new clubhouse’s interior is designed to help larger events spread out more easily—and throughout its two floors, displays of paintings and archives capture the already-rich history of TPC Sawgrass and THE PLAYERS Championship.

Edye Wright, who’s been at TPCSawgrass for 10 years and is now the club’s Director of Special Events &Catering, says it’s “a totally different ballgame” because of what she can now offer to potential event sponsors.

“Before, we could maybe handle 240 people, if we were lucky. Now we can handle 540 with no problem and 700 or more if we use a lot of balcony and outdoor space,” she says.

“But it wasn’t just a problem with a group’s size before,”she adds. “We really didn’t have much to offer to anyone—no view, old furnishings, not even a separate elevator to the main banquet room; [guests] had to take the service elevator, too. For me, it wasn’t difficult at all to see the old building go down. I was certainly ready for a new chapter.”

The buzz surrounding the new clubhouse led to a flurry of event inquiries well before the reopening, but given the tight timeline of the schedule, Wright says, “we couldn’t take the chance of booking something until we were sure we would be done.” But once it was clear the schedule would be met, a wedding was booked for the first weekend the new clubhouse was open, and the TPCSawgrass catering operation hasn’t stopped moving since.

“The response has been phenomenal,” says Wright. “And the time we had [during the renovation] really gave us a chance to start all over with a clean palette and think about what we wanted to be. We rewrote not only our [banquet] menus, but also our advertising and marketing pieces and our brand standards.

“Now we have a clubhouse that matches the strong brand we’ve always had because of the fantastic golf course,” Wright says. “And there are so many more options that we can offer to guests who are looking for different venues that highlight features of the clubhouse—the staircase, the back lawn, the front balcony.”

(To see the floor plans and site map of the new clubhouse and grounds, go to www.clubandresortbusiness.com).
Heading the culinary operations at the new TPCSawgrass is Steven Jones, brought in as Director of Food & Beverage last fall from the TPCJasna Polana, a private club in Princeton, N.J. Jones will eventually have three dining rooms operating in the building (a steakhouse concept won’t open until the fall), in addition to a pub adjacent to the members’ locker room. (TPCSawgrass now offers two categories of social memberships, in addition to the Associate and Dye’s Valley Course memberships that are available for golfing privileges.)

Already, Jones reports that TPCSawgrass is averaging 200 lunch covers a day and also seeing good response to dinner offerings, especially when promoted through new programs such as wine dinners, themed chef evenings, or live music events.

“With the previous clubhouse, there was no dinner activity at all,” Jones says. “People didn’t want to stay around, except maybe for a couple of cocktails while they totaled their scorecards. Even people from [the nearby Sawgrass Marriott Resort &Spa] went back to the hotel instead of staying here to eat.”

All that’s changing rapidly now, as Jones is developing concepts ranging from Traditions, an intimate fine-dining restaurant where a jacket is requested, to a “lively, fun martini bar” that’s been attracting locals in a wide range of ages—“from their late 20s to their late 50s,” he reports.

He’s also making sure the menu choices are wide-ranging, too, with an emphasis on freshness, flavor, quality and unique upscale presentations, even on the casual side. For example, he says, “We make a phenomenal 10-ounce burger that we grind our own meat for. We serve it on rich buttered challah bread with shoestring fries in a terracotta pot, with a tremendous homemade onion chutney.”

Marketing—A spectacular new clubhouse to go with an upgraded golf course that already ranks among the most popular in the world is a marketer’s dream. So it’s no surprise, now that the new doors have opened, that the TPCSawgrass marketing department has kicked into overdrive.

Of the many innovative ways the TPCSawgrass story and experience is now being promoted, the most unique—and certainly priciest—is the new PGATOUR Player Exper-ience package, offered in partnership with the neighboring Sawgrass Marriott Resort &Spa.

From the old clubhouse’s “chalk outline” (above LEFT) to the complete scalping of the signature 17th island green (FAR RIGHT), TPC Sawgrass’ makeover was certainly extreme. But the club also went to the trouble (and expense) of carefully removing, storing and then replanting 100 mature trees, to help mix the best of the old back in with the new.

Ranging from $1,200 to $1,500 per person, the packages are targeted at “everyday golfers” who want to taste the pro tour player’s experience and gain exclusive access to players-only areas and amenities. (Dedicated hosts announce, “Are you ready to live the life of a PGATOUR player?”)

But you can also access a lot of what’s special about TPCSawgrass for free. The property is populated by volunteer “docents” (storytellers) from the community who are trained to provide assistance or information to anyone who looks like they need it—or want it—including impromptu guided tours of the archives and memorabilia tastefully arranged throughout the clubhouse.

“We have so many people from all over the world who just stop by now on their way through the area, or even go out of their way to come up while they’re at Disney World, because they want to see ‘the famous 17’ or other parts of the property,” notes Tim Hawes, Senior VP of Retail Licensing for the PGATOUR. “And because we have so many people from the surrounding community who are proud of what we’ve done here—not just in the past year, but over the past 30 years—to help put the Jacksonville area on the golf map, [the storyteller program] just seems like a natural way to bring everyone together and bring it all to life.”

And to keep the legends growing.