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PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – There’s a good chance golf fans watching the Players Championship this week will hear that Pete and Alice Dye’s Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass is the first course built from the ground up to give spectators the best vantage points and the best on-site experience when watching tournament golf.

But 18-time major champion Jack Nicklaus, like so often, can set the record straight.

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“Muirfield would have been the first course designed for a stadium situation, he told Postmedia on Wednesday. ”And then I expanded on that in Toronto with Glen Abbey.“

Nicklaus explained that his complete vision for tournament viewing at Glen Abbey actually never came to fruition.

“It never really functioned the way I wanted it to function,” he said. “We had a centre clubhouse and everything was around the clubhouse, and then a ring around the clubhouse and then an outer ring. And that’s where you were supposed to walk, and that way you’d get to see golf in so many different directions.”

As for the debate over turning Glen Abbey into a real estate development, Nicklaus has a soft spot for the course but isn’t interested in getting into the middle of it.

“They’ve been talking about that for 10 years,” he said. “Times change. It’s my first golf course by myself, but if it happens, it happens. I’m not going to politic for it one way or another.”