Story & photos by Mike Besa
A quarter century after the great golf boom and subsequent bust of the 90s, many clubs are struggling with the practices of excess that were the norm of the day.
All of the golf courses built or renovated at the time wanted to bring “modern conditions” to a country weaned on carabao grass fairways and zoysia greens. Santa Elena and Manila Southwoods set the early benchmarks with their immaculate fairways and lightning-fast greens. Other clubs rushed to recreate the same conditions at their golf courses, unaware of the magnitude of the project that they were taking on.
Augusta National is single-handedly responsible for the predicament in which golf courses all over the world find themselves. The immaculate conditions at Augusta come at a staggering cost. The club has an unlimited budget to keep the golf course the most beautiful playing field in the history of televised sport, so to have it as a model for a golf course with financial constraints was madness.
Then there was the challenge of maintaining foreign turfgrasses and trying to insulate them from our aggressive endemics. The cost schedules were daunting but the clubs persevered, motivated by the astronomical share prices demanded by each new offering. It was greed without the slightest consideration of sustainability.
In the two intervening decades, the courses with the deepest pockets persevere with their programs. Others have surrendered their golf courses to the most dominant of the endemics then making the best of the situation by prepping the playing surfaces, as well as can be done for regular play.
Valley Golf and Country Club has faced this issue head on in the last two years. The greens on the South Course have always been problematic. The amount of shade around the greens doomed the tifdwarf greens. The club struggles to get them ready for the biggest club events and, a little over a year ago, decided that they would resurface the greens on the South Course with zoysia matrella which is employed most successfully on the shorter North Course.
The project began under the stewardship of then-General Manager Dan Salvador and now in the capable hands of current GM Cliff Friedman. I reached out to Cliff and he was quick to throw down the red carpet and give me a tour of how Valley Golf was tackling with the problems on the South Course.
The conversion process was well under way when Friedman arrived at Valley. He was quick to recognize the value of the work that was being done and worked with their maintenance contractor VMJ to speed up the process. The greens look like they’re covered with polka dots, but these are zoysia matrella plugs. These plugs help spread the zoysia and will accelerate its takeover of the greens.
The South Course has also struggled with the turfgrass on its fairways, as well. Some of the more shaded fairways already had large colonies of another type of zoysia; zoysia japonica. So rather than fight the infestation, the club helped it by scattering plugs from aerification of japonica laden fairways.
We took a tour of one of the South’s most problematic fairways—the 11th. It’s one of the narrower fairways on the course and lined on both sides with mature mahogany and acacia trees. The amount of shade, which was fatal to the imports, hardly fazed the japonica which took over very quickly. The muddy fairways are a thing of the past. Similar progress is being made on all the South Course’s fairways.
Beyond the fairways, the club has been hard at work rehabilitating the club’s waterways and lakes. Valley has the misfortune to sit in downstream of the many communities in the area. That means during the rainy season, trash from the more elevated communities flows down the streams into the club’s lakes.
Friedman tackled this challenge head on, putting in place an aggressive program to clean up and protect the club’s lakes. A series of staggered garbage traps was erected in the waterway feeding the lakes bordering 10, 11, 12, 16 and 17, and much of the silt that had accumulated over the previous wet seasons was dredged out. There’s still work to be done but this part of the course looks better than it has in a long while.
The course isn’t at its best at the moment but give it six months and the South Course should be in superb condition. Really, the club had little choice in the matter. Embracing it was the lesser (and far cheaper) of the two evils.
While Valley’s choice was straightforward, many golf clubs are still undecided about how to proceed. Many continue to fight the infestation of their precious turfgrasses by endemic invaders, but it’s an expensive war that they wage. Most will come to the point where they’ll need to decide whether it’s a battle that they want to keep fighting or just give in to the invasive species and adjust their expectations.
It’s going to be a tough call for a lot of clubs. Many of our golf courses are signature designs of great architects and golfers. Some have set standards that the club must maintain to keep their status as a signature design. These courses have the toughest task ahead of them. They’ll either negotiate with the architect to relax his standards or they’ll have to find an alternative turfgrass that will be acceptable to both parties.
Gone are the days of excess. These are tough times that call for hard decisions. The race is on to find a sustainable solution for the industry, one that doesn’t compromise aesthetics or the golf experience and doesn’t break the bank. It’s time to find a solution that allows the game to live on and grow at a rate that future generations can ethically sustain.
These choices will affect the growth and future of the game. Sound choices will have to be made to keep golf moving forward.
Image credits: Mike Besa