As a spectator, the island* green on the 17th hole at TPC Sawgrass has the most obvious appeal of any golf hole in the world. I don't know if it's the best hole, I'll let others litigate that. But I am a simple man...pretty flowers, glistening water, and an opportunity to see the pros rinse one. Sign me up.

As an appreciator of seeing pros rinse one (or four), I'm going to go into the data to see the worst stuff that has happened on the iconic 17th hole. Seeing good players hit bad shots is fun.

I pulled in as much data as possible on the 17th hole to see what we could find worth talking about. First up, ran across this post about Koepka struggling on 17. He's one of the best players ever, so I figured we were probably grading on a curve as to what constitutes "having his number".

Folks, we were not grading on a curve. Koepka is awful on the 17th hole. He unfortunately made the mistake of saying "I don't know if there are stats on it" within digital earshot of Garbage Time Sports. So let's dive in.

Koepka's struggles with the 17th become apparent & hilarious when thrown on a chart. Here we compare Brooks with some big names on 17. One of the rare line graphs where you want to be going down. And Brooks looks like Enron pre-whatever-happened-there-in-2001.

Adam Scott just gets better with age. Score to par on 17, general hotness, and swing speed - he got to 189 in fake, simulator golf the other day! And he has my favorite swing on tour. Smooth as silk.

Back to Koepka. Here we plot the field's pre-tournament make cut probability this week combined w/ career average on 17. Two major outliers are apparent here: Brooks being on a graphical island green of his own and the Eric/Erik contingent tearing this hole up.

And a look at his performance by year:

Here are pictures of Some Guys who have better career averages at 17. See how many you can get right (answer key below):

• Hal Sutton: 2.5 average (-5 total)
• Colt Knost: 3.6 average (+4 total)
• Mark Calcavecchia: 3.2 average (+6 total)
• Phil: 3.2 average (+11 total)
• Johnson Wagner: 2.7 average (-7 total)
  • No surprise - guy is great with the wedge (or 9i I assume) in hand

Not pictured but great name:

• Dudley Hart: 3.2 average (+4 total) - I am like 80% sure this guy also wrestled in WWE with his brother as a tag-team duo.

Worst 17 Performances by Year

Here we pull the worst of the worst each year. Aaron Rai made a hole-in-one in 2023 so I don't think he gives a shit about being on this list - I wouldn't.

GTS Inside The Ropes Coverage: At the 2009 Quail Hollow/Wachovia Championship, Woody Austin, the 2001 honoree on the list above, hit a pretty mid tee shot on a par 3 that led to a bogey and murmurs to himself "I'm the worst damn golfer out here. I don't deserve to be here".

As a below average high school golfer, overhearing this comment gave me the fuel I needed to stop practicing & give up on getting better. Funny now to see Woody come back into my life all these years later thanks to his 2001 dud of a performance.

Worst Individual 17 Scores

Bob Tway with a 12 after rinsing 4 balls on 17. He still made $17,760. Big respect to PGA tour for paying him $17k after that.

Big disrespect to the PGA Tour for posting this video on their official YouTube channel 16 years after his blowup. Imagine you screw up at your job. You accept responsibility, grow from the experience, and develop a healthy relationship with failure. Then your boss comes back 16 years later and posts a video about how awful you were at your job. This is one of the most disrespectful things I can remember an official league posting about one of their players. To be clear, though, the video is incredible and I highly recommend watching it.

The 17 Tracker

We built a tracker to go into more detail than anyone asked for on the 17th hole (or any other hole) this week. You can see who is due up soon to see if there's anyone coming up you'd like to root against.

You can also look up the biggest numbers throughout the week, which countries would be leading the field if this were the olympics, and performance by player.

I'm a bit surprised to see 17 playing as the 3rd hardest hole this week. My dad's friend Ed played the course a decade ago and told us "it's not that hard of a hole". Shouldn't have believed him, that dude can stripe the ball. Ed better than Koepka confirmed.

Shout out to Brooks for making par yesterday though. Let's see if he can keep it up through the rest of the week.

Other Sports Stuff

Team Italy was at it again Wednesday night with some beautiful antics. Each time a player hits a home run, they take an espresso shot when they get back into the dugout. Vinnie Pasquantimo hit three of them in their win over Mexico.

How can you not be romantic about baseball?

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— Mike Barton (@fantasygeniusmike.bsky.social) March 12, 2026 at 1:17 AM