From the desk of GCM

Diving into the history books

In the June issue of GCM, I authored a story about superintendent Craig Currier (pictured here in blue), the crew at Bethpage (N.Y.) State Park and their efforts in preparing the Black Course for the 2009 U.S. Open (Read it here). In that story, I wrote a statement that identified Currier and Paul Jett, CGCS at Pinehurst (N.C.) No. 2 as the only "working superintendents" to have hosted multiple U.S. Opens at the same course. The entire paragraph read:

"(Currier's) also embracing his inclusion in the select group of working superintendents who have hosted multiple U.S. Opens at the same course, a club that currently includes just one other member — Paul Jett, CGCS at Pinehurst (N.C.) No. 2, who hosted in 1999 and 2005 and will host again in 2014."

The phrasing in that paragraph was carefully considered. My first stab at it identified Currier and Jett as the only two superintendents to have ever hosted multiple Opens at the same course, but I quickly decided that wouldn't work because I simply had no way of proving whether that was the case or not (I suspected it wasn't). But I did know that they were the only supers who were still on the job that had pulled off that feat, so I specifically narrowed the description to "working superintendents." Even considered going with a more restrictive description like "currently working superintendents," but decided the latter would suffice. "Working superintendents" it was.

A big thanks to the Wayzata (Minn.) CC crew!

Recently I was in Minneapolis. We have an upcoming story written by one of the assistant supers at Wayzata CC, so I stopped by the course to take some photos.

I quickly found out that it's a fun-loving, competitive crew at Wayzata CC. Assistant Adam Beers told me he kept a foosball table in his garage, and was something of a foosball expert. Now, keep in mind, Beers had already been giving me a hard time about being from Big 12 country. So I asked him what style of foosball table he had -- a butcher block, or a tornado?

"Tornado," he said. "Oh," I replied. "That's not a real foosball table." (I owned a butcher block-style table for years, and will stand by that comment. There's no such thing as THREE goalies!!!)

That comment sparked a challenge at just about every bar game we could come up with. The one we settled on? Lawn darts at assistant Michael Cauley's house, which is near the course. (Of course, we settled on a sport I'd never played before. But, being the bar-sports jock that I am, I figured, "no problem.")

Storm report

While on a recent trip to Moline, Ill., for a retirement party for a friend, Dave Fearis, GCSAA's director of membership, heard about some major storm damage that happened just south of the area in Coal Valley, Ill. His friend Troy Shattuck, a 22-year GCSAA member and superintendent at Oakwood Country Club, said they received a hail storm the week before that produced 2-inch hailstones. One of the hailstones even broke a bone in the hand of one of the crew members. The top photo shows what it did to the greens. Look close to see how extensive the damage was.

A friend of mine lives about an hour southeast of Oakwood CC in Elmwood, Ill., just outside of Peoria. The same storm must have hit her area because the entire town was out of power for three to four days. There was significant damage to her driveway, home foundation, garage door and the backyard. To the right is a photo of her backyard...

Her lightpost...

And the town square...

Any other superintendents out there in the area whose courses sustained damage from the storm? Send us your pictures! E-mail me at ddevictor@gcsaa.org. 

GCM on your phone?

The gear-bound geek heads here at GCM are all atwitter (yes, Auntie Mabel, that's one of them social network puns) about the new generation of iPhones -- the iPhone 3GS -- as well as the the new lower prices on the older 3G models. Kelly Neis of our staff tells the painful story of her brother, who was in line to get the 3GS before the store opened, putting the new phone in his pants pocket, going home and changing pants, only to realize that he hadn't taken the thing out of the pocket. You know the rest -- his wife did laundry, and yes, his hours-old iPhone 3GS did the detergent dance.

Kelly tells us the story as she is looking at her new iPhone, which, of course, we're all comparing with our iPhones. The point being, we all seem to have the things, whether they're iPhones or some other mobile device. Pair up that fact with the impending launch of a digital version of GCM delivered on your computer -- more about that coming soon -- and you have the intriguing  possibility of having a digital GCM not only on your computer, but delivered to you on your phone. Some magazines are being delivered to mobile devices now.

So, the question is, how do you feel about that? Would you be interested in receiving GCM over your phone or other mobile device? Let us know by commenting on this post or sending me an e-mail at ehiscock@gcsaa.org. Auntie Mabel may not be interested, but Auntie Mabel isn't a GCSAA member. Let us know what you think. 

Winning the U.S. Open

 Every Wednesday viewers of ESPN’s "SportsCenter" vote for the “most memorable image” of the week in sports. It should be no surprise that this week’s winner was a photo of two crew members in full rain gear standing on an apparently flooded green at Bethpage during the U.S. Open. The photo was taken by Matt Slocum for Associated Press.

GCSAA’s CEO, Mark Woodward, has a unique appreciation for the scene at Bethpage. Not only was Woodward at Bethpage for the Open, but he was also golf operations manager for the city of San Diego last year when the U.S. Open was held at Torrey Pines and fully understands the complexity of hosting the event.

At an all-staff meeting at GCSAA headquarters in Lawrence yesterday, Woodward said that the real winners at the U.S. Open were Craig Currier and the maintenance team at Bethpage, who received more publicity than any golf course management staff in the tournament’s history. Woodward said that the bad weather highlighted the importance of the superintendent’s role, and he also praised the generosity and hard work of the many volunteers from neighboring golf courses who came to assist at Bethpage even though their own facilities were experiencing identical conditions. In a GCSAA press release sent out last Tuesday, Woodward said, “To accomplish what the golf course management team did under Craig is amazing and inspirational. They are a credit to the profession, the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, and the game.”

Despite having an incredibly rough week that required nearly superhuman effort by the entire golf course management team, Currier’s response to conditions at the Open was, “I want another one.” Spoken like a true superintendent.

Can you believe...

...that July is almost here!? It's surreal to me how soon July will be here and 2009 will be half over. July contains several blips on my radar -- Fourth of July holiday and a day off work (woo hoo!), the first issue of GCM to be available in a digital format (the publications staff got a preview of this the other day and it looks fantastic), a handful of birthdays, the last day for Dee Hoffmeier, GCSAA's longtime manager of conference education, who's retiring, the first-year anniversary of Mark Woodward as our CEO and the first day on the job for our new COO, Rhett Evans. Whew, busy month.

Yet another noteworthy July event is Play Golf America's Family Golf Month. The month-long program sponsored by the PGA of America aims to offer affordable family fun -- throughout July, participating golf facilities will offer activities tailored to fit the needs of all family members, young and old. Some examples include a free 3-hole family scramble at Pine Forest Country Club in Summerville, S.C.; family fun nights for $6 a person at Bridger Creek Golf Course in Bozeman, Mont.; and a drive-in movie night and teen pool party at The Peninsula Golf & Country Club in Millsboro, Del.

Safari Golf Course, Chanute, Kan.

I got a nice e-mail from former GCSAA staff member (and 2009 U.S. Open Pick 'Em winner) Kyle Kreighbaum this afternoon. Seems that his interaction with you supers and your business had some effect on him. I say that because he and Brian Dick, another former GCSAA staffer, now own/operate Safari Golf Course in Chanute, Kan. (More on this in a second.)

Kreighbaum (pictured left, doing his best 'tough golfer' look) told me that he chose Glover to win the Open because he "didn't want to pick any big names for the Open." He also noted that this strategy "worked out pretty dang good!"

For his deft picks, Kyle wins the official U.S. Open program and a stylin' new GCM golf shirt to sport while working at Safari GC. Thanks to everyone who entered! We'll do another pick 'em for the PGA Championship at Hazeltine in August, so please enter that one when the tournament gets here.

So, back to Safari... K-Bomb and BD (Brian Dick), as we call them, are indeed two friends of mine. I've played a few rounds of golf with both, K-Bomb would join us for the local Chinese buffet on occasion, and BD was on my city league basketball team. From having an occasional post-game beer with Dick, I knew he liked the idea of working on a golf course someday.

Chanute is located about two hours straight south of Lawrence. I had heard that the guys were back in the golf biz, but hadn't heard directly from either of them. I asked Kyle what he was up to, and he sent me this story, from The Chanute Tribune.

So, there's no way anyone picked Glover, right...?

I'm watching the end of the U.S. Open today, and I know no one picked Lucas Glover to win the Open. That's like picking Ricky Barnes, right?

Then I checked the picks. Someone DID pick Lucas Glover.

Congrats to our old friend Kyle Kreighbaum for the sharp picks! His three golfers -- Lucas Glover, Hunter Mahanand Henrik Stenson -- blew away the field. Actually, I didn't even add it up... besides having the unlikely winner, his other two also finished top 10! How can you beat that?

K-Bomb, drop me an email soon and let me know:

1. What made you pick Glover
2. What your shirt size is
3. What the heck you've been up to lately!

Flower Power

In case you were thinking about cutting your golf course budget's line item for ornamentals in these uncertain financial times, I offer the following for your consideration: In Japan, they believe that flowers repel vandals.

It's not quite as "out there" as it sounds. It seems that in 2002, Suginami, Japan, saw a record 1,710 break-ins. When a neighborhood watch group found that there were fewer crimes in buildings on flower-lined streets, Suginami decided to kick off Operation Flower and asked volunteers to plant flower seeds on side streets and in front of their homes. Suginami says that burglaries fell to just 390 in 2008, down almost 80 percent from 2002. (The flowers are part of a wider crime prevention campaign that includes volunteer patrollers and 200 security cameras.)

Stay with me now, and just think this through: A vandal, out trolling the streets for a likely target, observes a sea of flowers, the beauty of which pierces his blackened, evil heart and causes him to think, "Hmmm. This place is too pretty to despoil with my intended deed. I shall go elsewhere. Better  yet, I'm so overwhelmed that I might just give up my life of crime."

C'mon! It could work that way. Perhaps the members of your club's ladies league would be interested in volunteering to ring your putting greens with posies.

Trading rain for heat

Readers of this blog often ask me why we typically end our live, behind-the-scenes coverage of golf course maintenance activities at major championships on Friday, two days before the tournament ends. And we do have a pretty good reason for doing that.

At most majors, the golf course, it's condition and the job of the superintendent take a fair amount of the spotlight during the early parts of the week, before play begins. With us on hand at that time, we can produce a good mix of coverage focusing not only on the work being done on the golf course, but also the way that work is being received by the broader golf media. Barring any unforeseen disasters such as weather, that attention moves almost exclusively to the playing of the tournament by the weekend, giving us a convenient time to make our exit.

Of course, that becomes problematic when there are the unforeseen disasters. That's why it's a crying shame that I'm sitting at Laguardia waiting for a flight back to Kansas City while the first round of the U.S. Open roars on at Bethpage Black. Weather is clearly going to be in the news this weekend, the condition of the golf course will be front and center far longer than tradition dictates, and I wish we were still on site to cover it all live.

Bethpage Blech!

Thursday afternoon, about 15 minutes after the USGA officially suspended play in the first round of the 2009 U.S. Open because of heavy rain and after trading text messages with Black Course superintendent Kevin Carroll, I put on my rain suit and ventured out into the elements that had put their mark on this year's tournament. I figured the best way to show you what I encountered was through some of the photos I managed to take.

This is the green on the par-4 second hole on the Black Course. It stands directly behind one end of the maintenance complex.

The Hyler and Davis show, part two

Here's the second half of the transcript of the press conference featuring Jim Hyler and Mike Davis, discussing the suspension of first-round play in the U.S. Open today.

Q. Mike or Jim, how would having USGA subsurface greens impact the greens the way they're playing? Would it help at all?

MIKE DAVIS: You know, these greens are essentially the old pushup. In fact, if you look at it, we rarely play U.S. Opens on USGA spec greens. We do at Pinehurst because they rebuilt their greens and Pinehurst happens to be a Sandy area. And going down the road, there will be a few newer courses we're playing on.

But all our U.S. Open courses really are on the old pushups. Now, understand that these old pushups have been modified over the years with a lot of deep-tine aerification and they do a lot of drainage work in them. While they're not USGA spec greens they do tend to start to act like that.

But our problem, if it weren't raining right now, even if the greens were dry, we still couldn't be playing golf. There's just casual water all over the fairways. You'd be at the point where you'd need to take relief, and your relief may be 150 yards away. But good question.

The Hyler and Davis show

I just returned from an extended walk around the Black Course, and quite frankly, I'm not sure if there are proper words to describe just how wet this course is right now. I'll post more about that later, including some photos, about that trek and my extended stay at maintenance. But for now, this is the transcript of the press conference featuring Jim Hyler and Mike Davis. I've identified both so many times this week, I'm not doing it again. Long transcript, so coming in two posts.

JIM HYLER: Ladies and gentlemen, we're getting to be a regular visit. Mike and I are here to sort of give you an update on where we are now. And I'm going to attempt to bridge my last message to you with the decision to go ahead and suspend play for the day.

When I was down here earlier, our forecast was that the rain would lighten up considerably by around 1:30. There might be a few lingering showers but around 2:15 or so we felt like -- all the weather guys felt like the rain would end and that we would have a chance to get back on the golf course.

Obviously it's now 2:21 and it's still raining very hard. What happened was there was some weather that filled in behind what we thought was the end and it's continuing to rain.