Web Exclusive: Blades of Glory

A trampled golf course is never as bad as it looks in the threadbare aftermath of a big tournament

Last month, Cherry Hills Country Club welcomed the 2014 BMW Championship, the final leg in the Fed Ex Cup playoffs. It marked the 12th national tournament held at the club since the 1938 U. S. Open.

The event left the course threadbare in many areas, thanks to the construction of dozens of grandstands, television towers and other structures; tens of thousands of spectators trampling the turf; and golf carts zipping hither and yon for a whole week or longer.

Cherry Hills wasn’t the first Colorado club to host a big-time golf event. The Solheim Cup came to Colorado Golf Club in 2013, and the PGA Senior Championship before that, in 2010. The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs hosted U.S. Women’s Opens in 1995 and 2011 and the U.S. Senior Open in 2008. And The International at Castle Pines Golf Club was an annual stop on the PGA Tour from 1986 to 2006.

But the ravages of a tournament do not last as long as someone seeing the Monday-morning aftermath might think.

“I always say, grass is an amazing plant,” says Fred Dickman, course superintendent at The Broadmoor for the past 17 years and veteran of two major championships. He may get another dose of it if The Broadmoor again hosts the U.S. Senior Open in 2018, as seems likely.

BEHIND THE SCENES

Most spectators who flock to a major golf tournament probably give little thought to the challenges facing the course superintendent and his crew before and after the event. And they have no idea what happens immediately after a champion is decided.

But for behind-the-scenes professionals, such moments are a welcome and, ultimately, satisfying challenge. 

Photo: Grandstands on the 17th hole at the BMW Championship, Cherry Hills

Photo: Aerial view the 17th hole at Cherry Hills

“My first reaction is nervous excitement,” says Tony Hartsock, grounds superintendent at Colorado Golf Club. “I think, ‘Now I’ve got to prepare this for the world stage.’ But it’s never a dread. I welcome it. I could do a million of them and be just fine with it. It’s hard work; it’s extra work. But it’s very rewarding.”

Says The Broadmoor’s Dickman:  “I know that after hosting a couple of these tournaments, it’s made me a much, much better superintendent.”

Hartsock has been in golf course grounds management for 38 years. He has a degree in horticulture/turf grass management from Iowa State University. He’s been at Colorado Golf Club since 2005, when the course was under construction.

The son of a golf pro in Highland Park, Ill., Dickman, after getting a business degree at Indiana University and working for a few years in an office in downtown Chicago, missed golf so much that he applied to Arizona State University to study agriculture. He wound up working on the first golf course at The Phoenician Resort in Scottsdale in the mid-’80s, and stayed until he moved to The Broadmoor in 1997.

Both will tell you that each national golf event is as different as the USGA (guardian of amateur golf in America) and the PGA Tour (the entity that oversees the circuit of weekly top-level professional tournaments around the country). Factors such as weather, time of year, size of the gallery and age of the course will influence the impact of a given tournament on a given course, as well as how quickly a course recovers.

PAINS IN THE GRASS

They also know firsthand that each event’s peculiarities are distinct.

Imagine building a grandstand on a putting green, or directing hordes of golf fans to walk through native areas that golfers are never to enter in search of an errant shot.

“The way our 18th green is on the Broadmoor East Course, we don’t have a lot of room around the clubhouse,” Dickman explains. “So we set up the grandstand on the practice green and create a tunnel underneath the grandstand for the golfers to get from 18 green to the clubhouse.

“No one would believe that a putting surface would survive and come back. It is literally the color of brown walls after a hundred thousand-plus people tramp over it for a week, and it’s hidden from the sun and not watered.

“But it does come back.”

When Colorado Golf Club was preparing to host the Solheim Cup, Hartsock and General Manager Marshal Brereton were concerned about the damage large galleries could do to the native areas bordering literally every hole. Where else could people walk?

Brereton, who has been involved in four Westchester Classics on the PGA Tour, three Champions Tour events, a U. S. Open at Hazeltine in Minnesota, two of Cherry Hills’ championships in the ‘80s and the two events at Colorado Golf Club, recalls a unique conversation prior to the Solheim Cup last year.

Photo: Colorado Golf Club Grounds Superintendent Tony Hartsock (left) and General Manager Marshal Brereton (right)

“I was meeting with our landscape contractor, Michael Hupf,” he recalls, “and I told him of my concern about the native, how 120,000 people would trample it. I wanted to know how long it the recovery time would be.

“He said, ‘Marshal, it’s going to be better.’ He said, ‘Your native grasses are going to come out better.’

“I said, ‘Why?’

“He said, ‘Imagine a herd of buffalo going across the prairie and just pushing, trampling, that seed right down into the turf. When they’re gone, it will come back stronger.’

“And that’s what happened. The next year (2014) was a banner year with the native and wildflowers,” he says. “No question. It’s been noticeably richer, more robust. The flower blooms have been incredible.”

A few faint spots in the grass, barely visible, are the only remaining evidence of the Solheim Cup grandstand that was built next to the 13th green at Colorado Golf Club.

ROUGH PATCHES

Not every area of a tournament course recovers on its own, though.

Crosswalks— those areas where patrons cross fairways after players have completed shots and are making their way to the next— are inevitably worn almost to the point of nothing but dead grass.

“Crosswalks are one of the areas we get on right away,” says Dickman, “because the hospitality area generally are in the rough and out of the way, so they aren’t going to affect play as much. Crosswalks are pretty much toast.

“We have our aerators ready to go, and we punch all of those areas. We do a lot of reseeding; aerate and seed the next day.”

That formula is common in virtually every situation, whether it’s fairways or other areas.

Photo: Grandstands on the 15th fairway at the BMW Championship, Cherry Hills

Photo: Aerial view the 15th hole at Cherry Hills

“The hospitality areas are going to take some time,” Dickman says. Hospitality areas have floors, which means the grass gets no light for weeks.

“You’ll have grass anywhere between six and eight inches long because it hasn’t been mowed,” he says. “And it hasn’t seen any light, so it will be that real ugly, pale yellow.

“We’ll go in there and basically scalp everything down as low as we can. Then we’ll go in and aerate and reseed those areas.”

RECOVERY SHOTS

Keith Schneider, general manager at Castle Pines Golf Club the last 10 years and head golf pro for 23 years before that, saw all 21 of The International tournaments.  He says the goal all those years was to have the course back to normal in seven to 10 days.

That speedy turnaround began before the champion was even decided.

“When Sprint was the title sponsor, they had a nine-hole outing Sunday evening,” Schneider recalls. “They would play the front nine, because if there was a playoff, it would be on the back nine.

“Our crew, after they set up the golf course on Sunday morning, would get a couple hours rest. And as soon as the last group would tee off, we would follow them, taking down the ropes, hole by hole. After the champion was named, we could tear down the back nine.”

Most golf courses following a major tournament look as though it will be months, if not years, before they fully recover. Not so, say the experts.

“I’d say in two weeks we can pretty much have the golf course looking like it never had a tournament,” Dickman says, echoing other estimates. “If we get our seed down and get everything aerated, that seed will start germinating really quickly.”

Thanks to the agronomic expertise of Director of Grounds Mike Burke and his team, the Cherry Hills members almost immediately had their course back to the way it was. They didn’t even have to cede it for the highly prestigious Smith-Cole pro-am that takes place every fall. 

From an aesthetic standpoint, it doesn’t even look like a tournament had taken place. “If your golf ball lands right on one of those impacted areas, I’m sure you could tell something happened there,” says The Broadmoor’s Dickman. “But everything will look pretty normal. Grass is an amazing plant.”

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