PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. -- Mostly, players have raved about the summertime-flavored setup at the Players Championship.
After a sweeping course makeover before the tournament was played last year, the fairways and greens are firm and fast, and TPC Sawgrass was surrendering a smattering of good scores Thursday to those who had their games truly dialed in.
But some offered dissenting views after the first round, including 2006 winner Stephen Ames, who dropped a profane review of the course setup on a PGA Tour employee stationed near the scoring area.
Ames had nearly holed his tee shot on the fly on the par-3 17th, only to watch the ball bounce about six feet in the air and straight into the water hazard that surrounds the green. Afterward, he was asked how close the tee shot came to going in the hole on the fly.
Ames, who shot 74, held up a thumb and forefinger. As for an assessment of how the course played, he selected a different finger entirely, if you catch our drift.
"I have said all along, with the changes, this course was going to be borderline," he said of its fairness factor after the 2007 revisions. "And that's exactly what it is. The balls don’t even make pitchmarks on the green, they're so hard."
A handful of other players saw shots on the 17th carom off the green and into the water, including Matt Kuchar, whose ball bounced twice on the green, and still plopped into the lake.
Ames said his approach shot on the 18th landed 50 feet short of the pin, yet rolled all the way off the back of the green. As he stomped away from the scoring area, Ames spotted a tour employee and let loose some steam.
"It's too &*%$#+ hard," Ames said, within earshot of several reporters. "Go ahead, keep building courses like this."
