My Day With the PGA at the TPC

Yesterday, Wednesday May 6th, 2009, I spent the day following and watching some of the world’s best golfers practice for the upcoming tournament, The Players Championship. This tournament is played yearly at the TPC of Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra, FL, just south of Jacksonville. The course is in awesome shape! We were there so early we actually got to see the grounds crew still mowing and rolling the greens for the day.

We arrived at the course right when they opened the gates at 7AM and ran to where we knew Tiger Woods was playing and ended up finding him on the 11th tee box. He was playing his practice round with Jim Furyk and Nick Watney.

On the 11th tee, Tiger tried a new driver and drove it short down the left side of the fairway. One of the funniest comments of the day was in the 11th fairway, when Furyk came over to his ball, he picked up Tiger’s short tee shot, threw him the ball and told Tiger to throw that driver away because he couldn’t even out drive him with it.

They really had a lot of fun and joked with each other quite often throughout their practice round. It was fun seeing them on a non-competition day and how they interact without the pressure and seriousness.

On the 13th hole, we got to see the 4th highest paid running back in the NFL, Maurice Jones-Drew following and watching Tiger Woods. Mojo is short, but he is big. That is one guy I would not want running at me. My buddy Justin actually got his autograph, which you can see to the right. All we had was our tickets, so that’s exactly what he used.

After following Tiger to the 16th tee, his group of followers grew to a rather large number so we decided to skip to the 17th and watch some other people try to hit on to the island green why we waited for Tiger’s group to get there.

On the 17th, they had a caddy challenge to see which caddy could hit it closest to the hole. Needless to say, at the time, 15 out of 18 caddies had hit their balls into the water. Maybe they should be hitting the driving range with their pro every once in a while. The island green was playing around 145 yards for the day with a middle pin location. It’s an easy hole to get on the green, but it is mentally tought to not think about the water that circles the green. Reminds me a lot of business and how it can be easy to implement a certain strategy, but sometimes mentally tough because we see the challenges instead of just the goal.

On the 18th hole when I was watching Tiger, I ended running into my cousins and my uncle, which was crazy considering how many people were there.

We then walked around for a little while and watched Nicholas Thompson hit his fairway shot on the 9th. Since we were the only ones watching him and he was going for the green, he was just waiting so I asked him if he was going for it just to be able to talk to him. He responded back that he was and he missed the green. So as he was starting to walk to the green, I told him “Nice try”. That was cool.

As we were walking down the 9th fairway, we saw the baby geese that you see to the right. The parents were very aggressive towards us and wouldn’t let us get close at all. As a matter of fact, the longer I stood there trying to take a picture the more they would start coming at me.

Here are the rest of my pictures from yesterday.

Hope you enjoyed the story and the photos! Got more photos that I will probably just put up on my Twitpic and Facebook profiles. Thanks for visiting.

Tagged as: PGA golfers, The Players Championship, TPC