With victory secure, Jerry Pate knew the stage was set for one of the most raucous celebrations in the history of the game.
Pate's ball had avoided the lake guarding the 18th green at THE PLAYERS Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass. With only a short birdie putt standing between him and victory in the 1982 THE PLAYERS Championship, Pate knew he was headed for the water instead.
He pushed both course architect Pete Dye and PGA TOUR Commissioner Deane Beman into the lake as penance for the punishing course they had introduced as the permanent home of THE PLAYERS. He then followed them into the water.
CBS commentator Vin Scully called it "perhaps the wildest moment in the history of any professional sport."
It was the culmination of both a groundbreaking week and an impressive career cut short by injury.
The 1982 PLAYERS was the first conducted at the Stadium Course. Dye’s radical design changed golf course architecture but also was criticized for its severity.
Pate overcame Dye's visual deceptions with the same ball-striking and optimistic demeanor that helped him win the U.S. Open six years earlier. The gregarious Floridian was 28 when he won at TPC Sawgrass. It was his eighth career win, but a shoulder injury suffered later that year curtailed a career that seemed headed for the World Golf Hall of Fame.
With the Stadium Course's latest renovation being one of the storylines at this year’s tournament, it seemed appropriate to tell the stories from the wild week that put TPC Sawgrass on the map.
PGATOUR.COM gathered recollections from Scully, the Hall of Fame broadcaster; noted architect Tom Doak, who was interning for Dye in 1982; and several TOUR players, including Pate.
Read below about Pate's stolen 5-irons, the time Dye called TOUR players "chicken," and the player who paid off the mortgage on his motorhome with his winnings that week.
Pate's final-round 67 was the day's low score, and one of just two Sunday rounds under 70. Birdies at 17 and 18 gave him a final score of 8-under 280 and a two-shot victory.
Walking down the 18th fairway, he stared into a television camera and made his post-victory plans known to the national audience.
Pate informed Dye of his plans two days earlier, telling him, "I'm going to make you famous."
As Pate waited for the final groups to finish, CBS director Frank Chirkinian tried to heighten the drama by showing footage of an alligator swimming in a lake.
Scully was familiar with the alligator at No. 17, having seen it earlier in the week when he went to take a peek at the island green.
It wasn’t just the wildlife that made for a wild week. Dye’s design was unprecedented.
Roger Maltbie, who now calls THE PLAYERS for NBC, finished fifth in 1982 despite making quadruple bogey at the eighth hole. With his ball sitting next to a bunker’s sheer face, “I came up with the brilliant idea, totally tongue in cheek, that I would straddle the ball and try to play it backwards between my legs back into the bunker,” Maltbie said. His ball hit him instead, leading to a two-shot penalty.
"The areas around the greens, the bunkering, so on and so forth, could provide some really awkward shots that nobody practiced," Maltbie said.
The Stadium Course was meant to give the highest reward to players who pulled off their shots, while severely punishing any misstep. Players who flirted with hazards off the tee were rewarded with easier approach shots. The course wasn’t excessively long, allowing a variety of players to contend. Fairways curved in both directions, requiring players to shape their tee shots.
"I wanted to build a course that brought out all the shots of these great players," Dye told reporters that week.
He played in the pro-am with defending PLAYERS champion Raymond Floyd, who shot 66 despite a double-bogey at the final hole. The low round gave Dye optimism that the course would be well-received.
“For a significant championship, they’ve built a unique course that makes you perform at your optimum or you don’t get anything,” Floyd said.
Dye heard an equal number of compliments and complaints during the practice rounds leading into the Stadium Course's debut. That changed once the tournament began. The tournament’s scorekeeper, Dom Mirandi, told a reporter that he’d never written so many 8s in his life.
“The verbal assault against our new creation hit like a stake in my heart,” Dye wrote in his autobiography, "Bury Me In a Pot Bunker."
Peter Jacobsen, who now calls the tournament for NBC alongside Maltbie, finished 27th that week.
TOUR players are creatures of habit, though, and the Stadium Course may have been too revolutionary, Dye later admitted.
"Looking back, I realized that the radical design of the (Stadium) Course was too new for the TOUR professionals," Dye wrote in his autobiography. "They had never seen anything like it."
The Stadium Course’s playing areas weren’t the only revolutionary part of the course.
Large spectator mounds gave unobstructed views of the action. The course was laid out to create hubs of activity, where fans could see multiple holes at once. And, to give spectators something entertaining to watch, the finishing holes were designed to induce drama.
It was the first course created specifically for fans. The $500,000 purse at the 1982 PLAYERS, the largest in PGA TOUR history, also raised the stakes.
Some of the Stadium Course's viewing mounds were more than 30 feet tall. Dirt walkways and seating areas were carved into the hills, which were covered in lovegrass.
Pete Davison, the club’s first head pro, suggested that spectators wear jeans to the tournament. “There was lovegrass and dirt everywhere. It was raw,” he said.
The mounds at 17 and 18 drew big crowds "as fans cheered the successful shots and groaned with those players who splashed a ball in the water," Dye wrote.
Bryant's tee shot illustrated the do-or-die nature of the island green. He was one shot back when he arrived at 17 on Sunday, but knew he couldn't aim at the flag. A miss would be too costly for the winless 27-year-old. The second-place check was more than he earned the previous year.
“There is no tomorrow for him. I think you’re looking at a young man who needs some money, too, so he can’t really throw away second prize,” Ken Venturi said on the telecast.
He was right, which is why one spectator gave such an exuberant reaction to Bryant's successful approach shot.
Bryant tied for second with Scott Simpson. The $45,000 check ensured his TOUR card for the following year and paid the mortgage on the motorhome he used to travel the TOUR, a Holiday Rambler.
Pate received some extra insight into how to handle the Stadium Course when he played it with Beman during the course’s grand opening in late 1980.
"He told me to ride in the cart with him and he was going to tell me how to play the golf course," Pate said. “He said if I listened to him I’d win the tournament, and sure as hell I did."
Beman told Pate to play aggressively off the tee, even though Dye designed the tee shots to intimidate players. The fairways were actually wider than they appeared.
Pate used that advice to his advantage.
That was his approach shot into the 18th hole in the third round. Pate hit his 5-iron into the water left of the green.
A day later, he used the same club to hit his ball within 3 feet of the hole.
To this day, Pate still has several sets of clubs missing an iron. His 5-irons are popular targets, and for good reason. His two biggest victories – at the 1976 U.S. Open and the 1982 PLAYERS – were culminated by 5-iron shots that he knocked stiff.
Pate won his U.S. Open at Atlanta Athletic Club. The 18th green there is guarded by water, as well, and Pate was accused of hitting his approach shot left of where he was aimed. If there were any skeptics at TPC Sawgrass, he had his retort ready.
Doak is one of today’s top golf architects. His designs are included on lists of the top 100 courses in the world and in the United States. In 1982, he was a Cornell senior who interned for Dye. The 1982 PLAYERS Championship fell during Doak’s spring break, so he flew down to Florida to watch the tournament with the course’s designer.
The attention the new course was receiving helped bring a new focus to the craft of golf course architecture. It also influenced Doak’s future work, inspiring him to not shy away from controversy nor to fear veering from the norm, he said. He watched as Dye observed players competing on the new Stadium Course, unflinchingly accepting their criticism.
“I heard it from both (Dye and Beman) that they really wanted to build a golf course that tested the players and showed how good they were,” Doak said. “I don’t think the players really expected it to be nearly as hard as it was. I remember one of Pete’s quotes from the week was something like, ‘If I was a player I’d be mad at me, too,’ so I don’t think he was caught off guard (by criticism).
Among the players who missed the cut were Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino, Ben Crenshaw, Lanny Wadkins, Fred Couples and a 69-year-old Sam Snead.
When Dye went into the locker room after being thrown into the lake, a new pair of pants was waiting for him, as were two TOUR players who wanted to ask questions about the new course: Tom Weiskopf and Ed Sneed, who knew Dye from Ohio. Doak was there, as well.
Sneed had a question about the 13th hole, a par-3 with a large swale bisecting the green. Sneed and his playing partner hit tee shots that landed within 2 feet of each other. The other player's ball caught the slope and rolled toward the hole. Sneed’s bounced onto the back tier of the green, leaving him a long, difficult birdie putt.
“Ed said to Pete, ‘I just think the golf course puts too fine a point on it. We’re not good enough to hit it within 2 feet of where we’re aiming,’” Doak recalls. “I thought it was a really good question.
Pate was a showman. He first leapt into a lake in 1981, after winning in Memphis. He wasn't afraid to mix it up with the galleries, and he played an orange ball just to be different. That sunny disposition prevented him from being flustered by Dye's tricky new course.
“I probably had a different style of playing,” Pate said recently. “People used to get mad at me. I wasn’t as comical as Chi Chi (Rodriguez) or Fuzzy (Zoeller), but I liked to talk to the gallery. I grew up in a big family, six kids, so we always chatted it up. I’ve always been a talker, kind of like Peter Jacobsen. My style was to always have fun when I played. I was just blessed to be a pro golfer. I didn’t even think I was going to be a pro golfer until I was 20 years old. I was studying to be in business at Alabama. I thought I was going to go work in the Coca-Cola business with my dad.
Pate may have been known for joking around, but he was quickly compiling a serious resume. The 28-year-old had won seven times, including a major, before the 1982 PLAYERS. It would be his last PGA TOUR title, though.
A shoulder injury shortly after the win hampered the remainder of Pate's golf career.
He had multiple surgeries on his left shoulder, and was never the same player. One top-10 apiece in 1983 and 1984 were the final two of his career.
Said Jacobsen: “I don’t think people really saw the best of Jerry Pate. He was one of those phenomenal young players coming out of college. He was the type of player who was perfect for TPC Sawgrass because he had all the shots. He could drive it straight, he could create shots with his approaches and he had a wonderful short game."
The Stadium Course has been renovated several times since that first PLAYERS. The changes started that year, softening some of the slopes on and around the greens.
Tee-to-green, the layout is similar to when the Stadium Course debuted. Dye's design still is known for its democratic nature, not favoring any single type of player. The large rewards for executing a shot, and penalties for a mistake, mean players must be on their game. It's the reason there aren't many players who consistently contend on the course.
Said McCumber, “You know who it favors? Whoever is playing the best that week. You cannot play well on that golf course if you’re just long or just have a good short game. It’s going to deliver you the best player. it doesn’t care what your background is, what your natural attirbutes are. Did you play the best that week? Then you’re going to win."
Venturi may have phrased it best during the telecast for the 1982 PLAYERS.
The Stadium Course has done that, starting with one wild week in 1982.