The men behind the fairways

They are unheralded and unheard from most of the time, but the function of your local golf course superintendent and his crew cannot be understated

By Bob Albright

Have you ever met the golf superintendent at your local course? Do you even know where the maintenance building is? Chances are, if you’re like most golfers, the answer to both questions is no, but then again that’s not truly accurate.

If you’ve marveled at how quickly your course is opened each spring after yet another brutal New England winter or how lush its greens are in the dog days of August, you are on your way to getting to know your superintendent.

If you’ve gone back and forth with your buddies over a beer at the clubhouse lamenting how the new fairway bunker on the 14th has pushed you well back into the 90s, you are getting to know your superintendent. And if you’ve ever lined up one last putt at dusk only to be interrupted by the sprinkler head that suddenly erupted a foot away, you certainly are very close to knowing your superintendent.

“The course really is a reflection of the superintendent,” says Steve Murphy, the veteran super at Larry Gannon Golf Club

in Lynn. “What it looks like reflects on who you are and what kind of a job you’re doing.”

It’s clearly a labor of love guided by an artistic vision. After all, what else would motivate someone to roll out of bed before 5 a.m. six days a week, if not seven, all to make sure that someone else can play golf?

“It’s a passion. There’s the science and then there’s the art,” notes Marblehead’s Paul Miller, the super at Nashawtuc Country Club in Concord. “It’s the guy that can apply the science, but also knows the art who is successful.”

From the first tee to the pin on the 18th hole there isn’t one thing that your soft spikes come in contact with that he or she hasn’t orchestrated, yet even the most rabid of golfers would be hard pressed to pick the golf superintendent out of a lineup or have the foggiest idea of the all encompassing tasks they face each day.

Like the morning dew, they’ve usually disappeared into the periphery by the time most of us have taken the clubs out of the trunk, but the job that usually starts with the whir of mowers at dawn has become a daunting administrative exercise as well.

“Ten years ago I was probably on the course 80 percent of the time, now I’m probably out there 40 percent,” says Salem Country Club superintendent Kip Tyler, who overseas a staff of 24 full and part-time groundskeepers during the peak months. “The rest of the time I’m probably sitting at a desk.”

It has become the norm at large clubs for supers to wear more hats than solely that of the chief agronomist. There’s a reason that electives like Public Speaking 101 are part of the curriculum at schools like UMass-Stockbridge, which offers a degree in Turf Grass Management and has turned out countless superintendents across New England and nationally.

“It has become so political,” adds Miller, a Stockbridge grad.

“We have to know how to conduct ourselves professionally and be agronimcally strong. You have to be a psychologist and psychiatrist for your staff and know all the current labor laws.

“And you have to make yourself available. I’ve probably been at the club five nights in the last two weeks meeting with various member groups.”

The expectations game

The good news for course superintendents is that technological advancements in machinery, irrigation, seed and fertilizers enables them to deliver to golfers on a daily basis far better conditions than their fathers and mothers enjoyed. It would be nearsighted to think that the advancements have made today’s superintendent’s life any easier, however. In fact, the opposite is true.

Thirty years ago when Murphy took over at Gannon the tees were all Astroturf and the fairways were kept near the same length of the shag carpeting that was so popular at the time.

“I think it was a lot easier back then. We would cut the fairways and the greens a lot higher than we do now,” says Murphy, who has installed all natural tees and rebuilt several greens at the well played, but immaculate, municipal course. “Now we’re so contoured that it has created a lot of other demands. You have to use a lot of other chemicals and fertilizers.”

If there were one culprit in raising golfers’ expectations, many supers would point no further than the extensive TV coverage the sport enjoys today starting each spring with the lush fairways and pristine, azalea bordered greens at Augusta National.

“I think people expect more and more,” says Thomson CC superintendent Karl Heintzelman. “They call it the ‘Augusta Syndrome.’ Golfers see it on TV and go out expecting the same kind of conditions. What they don’t realize is that a lot of the courses they see on TV prep all year long for that tournament. They all don’t look like that every day.”

Nowhere are the expectations higher than at top private courses.

“When I first got to Salem, you worried about the greens and tees,” said Tyler, who left an assistant job at the prestigious Medinah Country Club in Illinois, a three-time US Open venue, to take over the Donald Ross classic in Peabody in 1982. “Then it became the fairways, and a few years later it was the bunkers and the rough. With the technology comes the demand for more things.”

Today, Tyler, like many supers at private courses, has gone back to the practice of individually hand-raking each bunker on the weekends – a task that occupies four men, starting at the break of dawn each weekend morning.

Along with sand art, many supers are now charged with making sure that the miles of fairway that connect each bunker stay green through even the hottest summer months.

Heintzelman worries that the obsession with always being green could lead to serious repercussions down the road as Thomson and many other courses face potential water shortages.

“I think where some expectations may have to be curbed is with the water issue,” Heintzelman warns. “People expect these sparkling green fairways and I know that I’ve probably been guilty in the past of over-watering fairways. I think what people need to realize is that a fairway doesn’t have to be perfectly green to be good.”

In the big scheme of things, Murphy feels that his peers are equally to blame for ratcheting up golfers’ expectations year after year.

“I basically think in a way the golf super is kind of his own worst enemy,” Murphy admits. “It’s to the point right now where they’re all putting in 60 and 70 hours a week trying to get their course to look the best it can.

“It can get very competitive that way because a course’s appearance is what drives greens fees, which we’re all competing for, and with higher maintenance budgets, everyone is able to deliver more.”

Tournament tested

Course expectations are magnified to the umpteenth degree when a tournament comes to town. Whether it is the club’s annual member/guest, an MGA event or a USGA or professional event, a superintendent cannot escape the microscope and the pressure that comes with it. Especially when Mother Nature decides to present the ultimate two-stroke penalty of her own.

Imagine that you are a course superintendent at a historic course in Peabody and after years of lobbying and schmoozing all the right people, your club has landed the prestigious U.S. Senior Open. Nicklaus, Palmer, Irwin and Trevino are all heading for your fairways at the end of June and a worldwide television audience is going to get up close and personal with every contour of your greens.

Then imagine watching the snow melt in March, only to reveal more dead grass than living and major damage to several greens, all with a little over three months until the grandstands go up.

“I never cried and I never threw anything,” recalls Tyler with a wry smile reflecting on his very eventful spring leading up to the 2001 Senior Open at Salem. It was a spring that saw Tyler and his staff reverse massive winterkill and complete a miraculous up-and-down that would have made even Seve Ballesteros blush.

“You are always prey to the whim of Mother Nature. It can make your job extremely difficult or very easy,” Tyler adds. “I think everyone knew how bad it was and I don’t think people expected a whole lot. I think it turned out better than anyone could have imagined.”

Tyler, who spent many a morning that spring on his hands and knees on Salem’s fairways looking for any signs of life, was named Golf Superintendent of the Year for his reclamation feat and Jack Nicklaus himself wrote the club afterward commenting on the terrific shape the course.

Miller knows all about the pressure of preparing a course for a major tournament. For the last 16 years he has welcomed the best over-50 players in the world to Nashawtuc, which has become a fixture on the Champions Tour.

While the tournament’s sponsor has changed seemingly on a yearly basis, (it’s currently called the Bank of America Championship), Miller has been a constant, catering year after year to the finnickiest of clientele: pampered golfers who have thousands of dollars riding on each putt and no patience for less than stellar conditions.

“The hardest part for me is to keep it tournament tough and member-friendly,” says Miller, a 5-handicap himself, who made the move from Tedesco to Nashawtuc in 1987 to pursue the challenge of establishing a long running tournament. “[Tour players] have no clue how hard it is to do, especially the newer players. These new guys just expect good conditions all the time now.”

While the common perception is that supers like Miller and Tyler can finally rest easy when the final putt is holed and the gigantic cardboard check has passed hands, the opposite is true. Try inviting 20,000 of your nearest and dearest over for a lawn party for three straight days and see how quickly you can whip the back yard back into shape. That’s not to mention the corporate tents, TV towers, and overflow parking that are all part of the package.

“My biggest challenge is to get it back into the kind of condition the membership expects after they’re gone,” says Miller.

Other courses may never see a big time tournament, but that doesn’t mean the super’s job is any less demanding.

Half the holes, twice the work

A bad day is when his seat rests on four legs instead of four wheels and his view is limited to the monitor in front of him and not a sprawling nine-hole course in Newbury. Like his ever-present black lab, Gunner, Nate Walker is about as comfortable indoors as Greg Norman is on Sunday afternoons at the Masters.

“No walls, that’s the best part of the job,” says the Ould Newbury Golf Club superintendent. “The hardest part of being a golf superintendent are those days when you have to sit in an office.”

Like many future supers, Walker, 31, caught the bug at an early age working summers at the rolling nine-hole tract in Newbury dodging the greenheads and picturing how he would shape the nearly century-old nine-hole course if he were in charge.

After graduating from Stockbridge, Walker had a short stint as an assistant at Ipswich Country Club and then came home to become the head man at Ould Newbury, and he can’t think of any other place he would rather be.

Granted, he doesn’t have all the toys or a fraction of the staff that comes with the job at a place like Ipswich, but in Walker’s eyes that is almost an advantage.

“I got a good taste for corporate, private, country club golf and it wasn’t for me,” he says. “You can shoot a little straighter here. It’s a real grassroots operation, but this is a place where people come and they stay a long time.”

With a full-time staff of two, “grassroots” certainly applies. Unlike larger 18-hole courses where contact between the super and golfers is minimal, Walker is on the front lines most days, which, believe it or not, he enjoys.

“You don’t have the resources in terms of manpower that other clubs have, but what you give up there you get back in the relationship with your members,” he says fondly. “They get to know you. You’ll come to work on Saturday and there’ll be a 12-pack on the stoop of the maintenance building from a foursome that played Friday just to let you know they appreciated the conditions.”

As far as manpower goes, Walker says it’s a matter of maximizing the day, or the night, as it were. He’s mowed more than a few fairways with only the headlights on his tractor to guide him and adds, “If I could figure out a way to put a light on my weed whacker I would do that too.”

Another challenge small public course supers like Walker have to contend with is keeping up with their larger counterparts with a budget and machinery that will never measure up.

“I think a lot of it comes down to creativity,” says Walker. “If you don’t have a lot of money, you better have a good mechanic and I do. We have created a lot of our own equipment. You have to make things become multi-faceted. You can’t afford to have five different types of equipment for each job.”

A perfect example of that ingenuity is a fairway sprayer that Walker and his mechanic revamped to work as a greens sprayer as well. His favorite piece of machinery? Probably the one wearing the red collar sitting right next to him.

“Never underestimate what a buffer a dog can be,” says Walker. “You can have a golfer who is angry and you pull up with a nice looking dog and they start patting him and soon they forget what they got worked up about in the first place.”

Leaving the course better than you found it

Other than the weather and increasing unrealistic expectations, a superintendent’s worst enemy is the very clientele he strives so hard to cater to.

While it is the golf professional who is responsible for teaching etiquette on the course, go into any super’s office and they can give you the Cliff Notes version because it’s their job to attempt to erase every transgression Golfer A commits on the course Saturday afternoon before Golfer B tees it up Sunday morning.

Chances are the first thing that a superintendent would hand out to all golfers at the first tee would be a simple divot tool.

According to the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, a properly repaired ball mark heals in 2-3 days, whereas an unrepaired mark takes better than two weeks to disappear.

Miller feels a big part of the problem is education, or more precisely, the lack thereof. (To find out the proper way to repair a ball mark, see the Ask The Super feature on page 28.)

Golf cart management comes in a close second to the aggravating brown spots that improperly repaired ball marks can make on a green. Many supers agree that at some point golfers need to use a little common sense when they get behind the wheel.

After all, there are only so many ‘No Carts’ signs to go around.

“I would say the No. 1 thing is the use of golf carts,” notes Walker. “As much as you preach good cart rules it’s the kind of thing where not all our cart paths are straight lines and golfers are usually going to find the straightest line between themselves and the ball.”

The Meadow at Peabody’s Dick Duggan wonders if golfers drive their own personal cars in the same manner they maneuver their golf carts.

“I think some people think the carts are all-terrain vehicles,” says Duggan, another Stockbridge grad who was hired at The Meadow seven years ago, before construction on the municipal gem had even begun.

“It’s amazing. We have the guard rails on the cart paths but if you give them an inch, they’ll find a way to get through.

“It all comes down to common sense. If you think about what you're doing, it’s easy to recognize where a cart belongs and where it doesn’t. But some people just don’t care.

“They just want to find their golf ball, no matter where it is. And when you say something to them, they look at you like you have two heads.”

Murphy agrees that carts can cause more than a few moments of consternation, but says you can’t lose sight of the larger picture.

“Gannon is not really designed for carts and I would say you would like at times to see better cart management in wet areas, but it’s a marginal case,” he says.

“Ultimately, it’s a game and you’re trying to supply a place for guys to go out and have a good time and not try to build some monument to yourself.”

In the final analysis, however, in many ways golf courses are just that. They are the rolling canvases reflective of the dedication and the perspiration of those anonymous green thumbs, who seamlessly combine art and science early each morning only to watch others undo it all by the afternoon.