Lanny's A Two-time Winner

"I can't wait for Augusta ," said Tom, who may have been speaking for a whole elite group of crowd-pleasers.

In his own summation of the season, Weiskopf used up a good joke—a very good one for him. Sitting in the sun in front of the Sawgrass clubhouse one afternoon, Tom laughed and said, " McCumber could be suspended for giving false hope to a hundred guys who can't play."

There is usually a lot of joking at Sawgrass. After the players have tired of griping about the swamp and the elements, they begin laughing at themselves and the shots they are forced to try to bring off. Their horrid scores become decorations of honor, like dueling scars. They all become Allen Miller trudging up the 18th fairway on the last day of the torment with a white towel tied to a club, waving it in surrender.

In the locker room on Saturday afternoon, the early finishers whooped and howled at the TV screen as it presented Nicklaus and the others chin-deep in the weeds, with the wind making their hair look as if it were going to be torn from their scalps any second. As Jack worked on his 82, Dave Hill and Fred Marti ripped out the title page of a magazine story—How I Learned to Play Smart Golf, by Andy Bean—and taped it to the front of Nicklaus' locker. Before Nicklaus came in, Hill fell guilty about the cruelty of the joke and took it down. He simply handed it to Jack instead. Whereupon Nicklaus taped it to the locker himself. And proudly announced that he had taken only 26 putts for his 82.

Somebody did some math. Wadkins was shooting 76 on Saturday and not losing a single shot to the field. No one could remember if such a thing had happened before, not since Harry Vardon .

"What's unusual about it?" Green said, grinning. "Isn't 76 one under here?"

Wind or not, this area of north Florida is going to be the permanent home of the Tournament Players Championship. Commissioner Deane Beman spent part of his time last week taking people on a trip through some woods. The land was only across the highway from Sawgrass, but the contrast was startling; with its towering pines, palms and oaks rising out of a marsh, it could have been two thousand miles away. This is where the Tournament Players Club will be, and this is where the tournament itself will be played beginning in 1981.

Beman found the land and sold the players on the idea of having their own course, a home for their championship and a headquarters for the office of the PGA Tour . Work has already begun on a par-72 layout designed by Pete Dye , the architect who has created some of the more brilliant new courses of the past few years. There are several good golf designers, Jack Nicklaus among them, but none is better than Pete Dye , and few are as creative. On paper, it appears that Dye has sketched a masterpiece of variety and scenery encircling the clubhouse, jutting occasionally into the open marsh and wind and then crawling back into the tunnels of gnarled forest where the ocean breeze will be temporarily bruised before it lashes into the cashmeres.

Sawgrass and the wind have served their purposes. They attracted attention to the TPC. In a year and a half it will be up to the new course to continue the story. No doubt it will. There is a rare combination of age, charm and uniqueness about the area. What can be wrong with the players having their home and their own tournament somewhere between the Fountain of Youth in St. Augustine and Donald Ross ' Ponte Vedra ? It is a place where both the country and the tour had some beginnings. One thing is sure: the players will be deliriously happy just to get off Sawgrass.