SAWGRASS

The man who St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office said was shot after opening fire on a deputy who approached a stolen pickup truck in the parking lot of the Publix-anchored mall strip shopping mall Wednesday was last seen three days ago when authorities were told he left to go fishing.

Normally, it's the final round of The Players Championship, but weather postponements made Sunday cut day at TPC Sawgrass. The tournament had nearly a dozen golfers in the field with local ties to the area. How did those local golfers fare?

The Players Championship tees off Thursday morning at TPC Sawgrass without the two biggest attractions in the sport, but there's no shortage of storylines as the Stadium Course awaits the best field in golf.

PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan ran the gamut of topics in his Players Championship press conference on Tuesday, addressing things like a rival golf league, embattled golfer Phil Mickelson and the future of the World Golf Hall of Fame in St. Augustine.

While golfers will try and avoid those bogeys at TPC Sawgrass when The Players Championship begins Thursday, babies who are born in local hospitals during the event will get special recognition from the tournament.

After a start and stop and then limited crowds, The Players Championship is back to doing what it does best. The event at TPC Sawgrass is 30 days away and will feel normal for the first time since Rory McIlroy edged Jim Furyk by a stroke in 2019. That feels like an eternity ago.

The Players Championship continues to focus on making it possible for active duty and military veterans to be able to enjoy tournament golf.

Tickets for The Players Championship are finally on sale for the general public.

Tickets for The Players Championship will go on sale next week, with newsletter subscribers getting first dibs on those the tournament announced on Wednesday morning.

That's how it was last week at Bay Hill, when DeChambeau came from one shot behind to beat Westwood with a par on the final hole at the Arnold Palmer Invitational. Westwood, who turns 48 next month, no longer has to go up a few classes to face DeChambeau, golf's fearsome heavyweight. Also four shots behind was Brian Harman, who began his day by holing a wedge for eagle and shot 69. DeChambeau can't blast away at Sawgrass because of the bending tree-lined fairways and water hazards. He also knows from recent experience — seven days ago — that it might not be easy the way Westwood is playing.

The legion of volunteers at The Players Championship are one of the most integral parts of the event. This week, we’re looking at several longtime volunteers who are celebrating tournament milestones in 2021. Herbert had a perfect view of one of those, carded by Paul Azinger in the third round of the 2000 event. AdHerbert spent four years in various volunteer roles before becoming a walking scorer in 1991 and has been in that position since. The ball lands, I hit, ‘shot hit,’ … a laser operator lasers that ball, and you know exactly immediately how far he hit it, 247 yards, and he’s got 185 to go to the hole,” she said.

Fans gather at the TPC Sawgrass course to watch The Players during the 2019 event. JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Tickets came and went for The Players Championship on Tuesday, with the tournament selling out its limited allotment of passes within two hours. The only tickets that remain are for Tuesday’s practice round. The event is March 9-10 (practice rounds) and 11-14 (tournament rounds) at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach. A limited number of pre-sale tickets were made available on Feb. 1 to those who subscribe to the Players newsletter, and those who attended the tournament in 2019 and ’20.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Tickets for next month’s Players Championship are going to be more in demand than ever before. The message from The Players — get those tickets quickly. The Tour hasn’t released attendance totals since 2013, so nailing down an exact number of available tickets is a bit estimation. That would put a 20% attendance at roughly 9,000 per day this year if the Tour based its numbers off that 2013 high. Players tickets are always in demand, especially the Friday and Saturday rounds, so scooping those up early is strongly encouraged by the tournament this year.

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – A dead 14-foot pygmy sperm whale washed ashore on Ponte Vedra Beach on Thursday morning behind the Sawgrass Beach Club. “Pygmy sperm whales are a common strander down here, actually, and they are an offshore species,” FWC marine mammal biologist Nadia Gordon said. “They feed a lot on squid, so when they are found near the shore or on the beach, there’s a problem -- something going on. There’s a reason they are stranding.”During low tide, the whale was removed from the beach. “Our agency will look at the animal, doing an external work up initially to see what’s going on potentially and then, likely, a necropsy to look internally and see what’s going on,” Gordon said.

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – A man discovered inside a stolen vehicle in Sawgrass was “gravely wounded” after firing shots at a deputy on Wednesday, according to the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office. The suspect then locked himself in the vehicle, Shoar said. About 2:15 p.m., Shoar said, a SWAT team used tear gas to extricate the suspect out of the vehicle. “We were lucky, you know, that we weren’t in the parking lot when that was going on, basically, is what I was thinking," Suggs said. Zach Goodall was in the parking lot at the time.

Working with renowned golf course architect Pete Dye, TPC Commissioner Deane Beman designed the Stadium Course at Sawgrass with a selection of short, medium and long holes; both right and left doglegs; and a course where no two consecutive holes ever play in the same direction. With its signature island green on 17, this captures the imagination of golf fans around the world and is consistently named among the world’s top golf courses.

In 1994, at the TPC at Sawgrass in Florida, he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, a record he held until 2008 when it was broken by Danny Lee. The 18-year-old was about to start the first of his two years at Stanford University, where he would win the NCAA individual golf championship in 1996 before turning pro. Hide Caption

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Mayor Lenny Curry helped kick off next week's Players's Championship Wednesday by welcoming the "Gold Man" to downtown JacksonvilleThe Players features the best golfers in the world playing for the richest purse on the PGA Tour. It takes place at Sawgrass from April 10 through the 15. The Championship is expected to bring more than $150 million to Northeast Florida. Curry took part in the spraying of the gold man -- the logo of The Players -- as part of the official countdown of the Players.