The 17th at TPC Sawgrass: Water Tour-ture

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.

In 2007, 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.