Perfection, But At What Price?
You Might Be Surprised At What Goes Into Preparing For A Tournament
"Why can't my course look like that?" you might say. Well there's a reason for that. You'd have to trade 51 so-so weeks just for that one week of greatness.
"A major championship, like the PGA, is something you prepare for two or three years out," explains Rick Wise, former course superintendent for the PGA of Americas' four courses at the PGA Village in Port St. Lucie, Florida. "You start making changes that early based on what the PGA or the Tour wants. They come in and look at tees, bunkers, trees, the way the course plays. At Sahalee (site of the 1998 PGA Championship) they took out 400 trees. It's a three-year project going into a major championship."
The conditions that you see at a major championship or a PGA Tour event cannot be duplicated for a long period of time. The stress conditions for the turf are the main concern. Not many greens have the ability to handle being double-cut to 1/8-inch for one week, much less day after day, week after week. The higher a grass is cut, the healthier it is. Unfortunately the pros prefer a fast hard golf course.
When the Tour swung through Florida in 1998 the state's courses were plagued by El Nino. The unusually wet winter made growing grass difficult. Doral, Herron Bay, Bay Hill and the Stadium Course at the TPC were perfect examples of stressed turf. The courses were in fantastic shape for the PGA Tour's events in March. Unfortunately, the clubs had to overseed as many as six times to get the lush green grass that we saw on television. Just a couple of months later the courses were in shambles. The grass had stressed out and died, and not enough time had been allowed to get the summer grasses grown in. The clubs basically sacrificed the course conditions for the next two to four months to have pristine conditions for their PGA Tour stops.
Wise lived on the edge at the PGA's courses. "I prefer a fast golf course," he says. "We try to keep faster conditions, be it greens or fairways. We have to be real careful with our maintenance program."
He does this by carefully managing his fertility levels, watering, and grass lengths.
When the annual Assistant Professionals Championship comes to town, Wise and his staff start preparing 30 days in advance. They try to get more growth in the fairways, to create a tighter lie for the ball. The roughs are grown longer and thicker and more definition is created between the fairways and rough.
"Better players like a fast tract," Wise explains. "They like the greens to be fast, fairways to be firm and tight. That's the way they like them. So we try to create that type of scenario for that particular week."
Pros like tight fairways because they tend to pinch the golf ball. This means that they hit down and through the ball, invoking a lot of spin. Average golfers tend to pick the ball, which is difficult from a tight lie.
Besides stress on the turf, there is another reason that we don't see tournament conditions on our courses every day. Conditioning of the course has a lot to do with the speed of play.
At the PGA Village, the North Course's greens are kept slower than those on the South Course. This is because the North Course has much bigger greens with many undulations.
"If I cut those greens to stimp to a 10," says Wise. "I guarantee you the average round just went up 30 minutes.
When you set a course up with 'tournament' conditions, you slow down play. If you put a touring professional on the fastest greens at any of our courses, chances are he'd leave every putt well short. Wise says the greens at PGA are below 10 on the stimp meter. A Tour-cut green is usually between 10 and 12. If you had six or seven three-putts, how fast would you be playing?
"We can control the speed of play by controlling the speed of the golf course," states Wise.
The PGA hosts around 180,000 rounds of golf each year. If Wise and his staff set up the course every week like they do for the Assistant Pros Championship, that number would drop below 100,000. The heavy rough, fast greens and hard, tight fairways would take their toll on the stress level of the average golfer, creating longer rounds. Fewer rounds also mean less money coming in. This creates a need to charge more for golf and we all know just how thrifty we are when it comes to golf fees.
Northern courses have an advantage over southern courses when it comes to maintaining conditioning. The northern courses receive the brunt of their business during the summer, during the growing season. The course is outgrowing the wear. Southern courses see the most traffic in the winter, when grasses are more dormant and sunshine is less prevalent. Wise has to prepare his courses during the growing season to deal with the heavy traffic come wintertime.
"It's important that we be healthy going in," Wise explained. "We have to protect it (the course) during the season or we end up with a really worn tract."
Grasses differ tremendously from up north to down here. Northern courses have bent grass greens and fairways, bluegrass and ryegrass roughs. Most of these cannot take the heat and rainfall of the Florida weather.
Most of the preparation that you see in the fall, which may be a little inconvenient play wise, is very important to increase the health and vigor of the turf. If the course isn't at its optimum going into the busy season, the course could see a bad winter. Couple this with a bad winter for growing grass and a superintendent could face huge problems.
If you were to go to Augusta National during the summer, you'd probably lose your lunch. Not only are the flowers no longer blooming, but the grass is brown and not growing in the summer heat.
In my hometown some private courses close down for the summer. Seminole Country Club in Jupiter closes for the summer, rather than have play on a less than perfect tract. Wayne Huizenga even closes one of the country's most elusive and private clubs, The Floridian, for the summer months in anticipation of the grow-in that comes after having a perfect course in the spring.
The idea for a course superintendent is similar to that of the Touring pro. Just as the player wants his or her game to peak at just the right moment, a superintendent wants course conditions to peak for the week or two that surround the championship.
So the next time you watch a tournament on television and find yourself salivating to play that beautifully manicured piece of golf heaven, stop and think for a minute. Would you be willing to trade months and months of not playing or playing on a terrible track just for that one or two weeks of perfect golf? Or do you like the balance that your local course superintendents have striven to create? Personally I like playing a couple of times a week, all year round.
62nd Senior PGA Championship
This week, for the first time since 1940, the oldest major in Senior golf will be held outside the state of Florida. The Ridgewood Country Club, an A.W. Tillinghast designed course, in New Jersey will host the best Senior golfers in the world this week.
Last year the PGA of America announced that it was going to take its greatest senior event on the road. From 1982 until 2000 the PGA held the Senior PGA Championship at its national headquarters at PGA National Golf Club in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.
It was during the 1979 edition of the Championship at Turnberry Isle in North Miami that informal meetings were first held among golf's elder statesman to explore the concept of a senior circuit. In 1980 the Senior PGA Tour was born.
By putting the event on the road the PGA hopes to visit many of the great historic and traditional golf courses around the country. Many of the country's finest old courses which once set the stage for many of golf's greatest moments, will once again relive them and create new ones.
Stammer's Golf Archive
Editor's note: James Stammer is a freelance writer living in Florida. He has played golf for better than a quarter-century. To reach James, e-mail him at jstammer@yahoo.com.
