Players 2025: Tour pros shouldn’t fear the new/old tree at TPC Sawgrass’ sixth hole. Here’s the data to prove it

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That tree on the sixth hole at TPC Sawgrass, the one getting almost as much air time as Rory McIlroy in that Optum ad? Don’t tell anyone, but it’s not in play. Not for the ball flight of any tour pro competing this week at the Players Championship.

The controversial tree, 15 yards ahead of the front edge of the back tee box on the 411-yard par 4, looms like Giannis Antetokounmpo, waiting to swat down unlucky shots like some kind of overgrown miniature golf hazard. It perfectly encapsulates original golf course architect Pete Dye’s belief that the real key to a hole’s design was getting in the golfer’s head. He once summarized his design philosophy this way: “Life is not fair, so why should I make a course that is fair?”

Well, it was more often the case that Dye’s courses appeared to be unfair. That’s exactly the intent with the sixth hole’s reclaimed design, orchestrated by two-time Players champion Davis Love III and Jeff Plotts, TPC Sawgrass director of agronomy. The project involved moving and replanting a 500,000-pound oak that was pulled from nearby woods. Confronted with the newly reinstated tree, which replaces the original that was felled by disease in 2014, competitors at the Players during Thursday’s first round were hitting all sorts of knockdown shots, stingers and cutoff slices to avoid clipping an overhanging limb, which is just 30 feet in the air and 30 yards in front of the tees used in the opening round. The new/old distraction even led Matt Fitzpatrick to call it “the dumbest tree I’ve ever seen.”

Turns out, though, the hazard is really only mental. We asked the team at Foresight Sports, makers of the Quad Max launch monitor, the same device that dozens of top tour pros swear by, to crunch the numbers, and well, a tour player is only hitting that branch with an extremely bad mis-hit. Based on a number of typical launch scenarios with a tour-level 3-wood, Foresight’s team estimates “at 30 yards from the tee, a tour player’s typical 3-wood ball flight is most likely to be between 15 and 20 feet high.” Even from 40 yards, the highest a cleanly struck 3-wood might get is barely 25 feet. Again, by a tour player. Not some chop on a buddies trip. And tour players do not miss their launch windows by 10 feet at 30 yards.

But that’s science and logic. Fear, particularly on a course designed by Dye, the original tree planter, overwhelms all kinds of critical thinking. And that’s just what we saw in Round 1. Per some digging by Golf Digest’s Jamie Kennedy, Thursday’s performance in front of the new tree reflected a dramatic shift toward higher scores, compared to last year’s first round (which featured a similar pin position). Despite players averaging nearly 20 yards longer off the tee than a year ago, they were playing the sixth hole worse roughly three quarters of the way through the round. Notably:

Fairways

Accuracy dropped from 74.8 percent (sixth easiest) to 56.8 percent (seventh hardest)

Greens

Dropped from 71 percent (seventh easiest) to 42 percent (second hardest)

Scoring

Went from 3.92 (fifth easiest) to 4.23 (third hardest)

Somewhere, Dye is smiling. And probably wishing that overhanging limb were just a bit lower.

https://twitter.com/jamierkennedy/status/1900304990616367523

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com