The 17th at TPC Sawgrass: Water Tour-ture
Mike Weir once hit the green right-handed in practice; Vijay Singh did the same left-handed.

But the 17th hole at TPC Sawgrass is nothing to be toyed with when it counts at The Players Championship.

Last year, after missing short putts on 15 and 16, Sean O'Hair, playing in the last group with Phil Mickelson, took aim at the flag on 17.

His shot went straight at the stick, then skipped over the back of the green and into the soup. He made 7, the most recent big-time casualty on arguably America's most notorious hole. O'Hair dropped from second to 11th place.

"It's hard to make something happen on 17," O'Hair says a year later.

Something good, anyway.

Len Mattiace was a shot off the lead at the 1998 Players when, with his dying mother watching from a wheelchair, he made a quintuple-bogey 8.

"It's like having a three o'clock appointment for a root canal," Mark Calcavecchia once said of 17. "You're thinking about it all morning, because you know sooner or later you've got to get to it."

Herewith, then, are the good, the bad and the traumatic at 17.

Credit: Robert Beck/SI