Story & photos by Mike Besa
The Orchard Golf and Country Club has always been regarded as one of the best run golf clubs in the country today. The courses have always been in the best possible condition, despite the amount of traffic the golf course sees. The club saw fit to hire a professional management team, which saved the club the politicking and enmity that plagues other clubs as the members vie for management control. Things have gone very smoothly until late in 2016.
The greens at the Orchard were the first things that indicated that something might be amiss. The club failed to get the Player Course’s greens in truly tournament shape by the 2016 Founders Cup, the Orchard’s big member-guest tournament. The heavy rains and limited sunlight the course had received the months before were cited as the reason for the greens’ decline.
Unsatisfied with the explanation, Conrad Benitez, the Orchard GCC president, reached out to Jim Prusa, course superintendent of SKY72 Resorts in Korea, whose five golf courses see in excess of 100,000 rounds of golf each per year but remain in the best possible condition. Prusa is a member of the United States Golf Course Superintendent Association and a university professor of horticulture. He comes to the Orchard annually to lecture on golf-course maintenance at the annual Philippine Golf Course Management Conference hosted by the Orchard.
Prusa was on vacation in Puerto Galera when Benitez contacted him and asked if he might make time to visit the Orchard to consult on what he felt were worrying conditions at the club. Prusa agreed immediately and what he found shocked him.
The greens were far from the championship standards that he would expect from a reputed premier golf club in Southeast Asia. His thoughts immediately turned to the credibility of Golf Asia Magazine’s awards program due to Orchard’s appearance and consideration for Asian Golf Awards a few years ago. What he found was nothing short of a major disaster.
In Prusa’s words, “What I found at Orchard in December 2016, were unmistakably the results of significantly less than adequate maintenance practices, going on over a long period of time, which permitted root zones of greens to deteriorate.”
All turf areas had developed high levels of organic matter and thatch. This was preventing these areas from draining properly and oxygen from reaching the root zone. This was further exacerbated by the compacted state of the soil, which led to even lower levels of aeration. This stunted root development over time and left the turf grasses susceptible to disease. The thatch retained water that served as a breeding ground for the fungi that eventually hit the greens prior to this year’s staging of the Founders Cup and caused an uproar among the members.
He also called into question the club’s weed control policies. Particularly with the club’s continued use of monosodium methanearsonate (MSMA), a controversial chemical that has been restricted and banned in the USA as a potent, post-emergent herbicide that can readily cause significant damage to ultradwarf varieties of bermuda grass species and Paspalum species. The best weed control is to have healthy turf grasses in the first place. That is the first line of defense. The weed infestation issue was another indicator of the golf courses’ poor health.
But that was just the start. Probing deeper, Prusa found what he called “systemic failure and neglect of maintenance and proper maintenance procedures.” In fact, it seems that the club had suffered from years of neglect and systemic mismanagement in four key areas:
- General agronomic course conditioning
- Equipment, machinery, and repair facility maintenance
- Irrigation and pump maintenance
- Maintenance of the club’s invaluable asset—the golf-course maintenance personnel
The extent of the neglect is staggering. Most of the equipment fleet were in disrepair or close to it. Safety devices had been commonly removed and never replaced. This not only compromised golf-course maintenance but also the lives of the men and women that operate the machines.
The sprinkler system was a disaster. Sprinkler heads close to the greens and surrounds had been cannibalized for parts, while others were simply inoperable. Only two of the six pumps were working and one of the two was close to a catastrophic failure. All of this points to an inadequately trained maintenance crew that seemed unaware of the correct practices of maintaining the golf course. We could go on well beyond this section’s physical limits.
Prusa’s investigation was most thorough; he filed a condensed 27-page report that was circulated to the members to inform them of what they had found and his recommendations to solve the issues. Unfortunately, it seemed to do little to calm the members. Particularly as this all came to a head just prior to the 2017 Founders Cup.
Emergency measures were taken to get the greens ready for the Orchard’s biggest tournament. The Palmer’s greens were less affected and responded to the treatment. The Player’s greens, on the other had, were so diseased that they did not recover in time for the tournament.
I spoke to Prusa at length before the Founders Cup and asked him point-blank about the recovery time of the golf courses. In his estimation, it will take roughly five years to bring the golf courses back to the peak of health (given that the club does what is required) but he also said in four years, the golf courses will make the members proud.
A good percentage of the members found disfavor with the way that the club handled the crisis. The club is cleaning house of top management, including golf operations, which is not involved in golf-course maintenance. Members allege that this is unfair since Raymond Sangil, the golf director, is universally liked and well regarded by them. The profitability of his department has been key to the club’s financial independence.
It went so far that a number of concerned members contacted club chairman Vicente Santos, who represents developer Sta. Lucia Realty’s interests on the board, to a meeting that was also attended by members of the house committees. There they expressed their displeasure at they way that Benitez had handled the situation and some even put the blame squarely on his shoulders as part of his command responsibility as president of the club.
They took issue with the wholesale removal of the club’s top management, the same management, they reasoned, that took the club to the top of the golf-course industry as one of the best managed in the country. Removal of the managers whose departments were not connected to golf-course management seemed unnecessary and excessive, and served as a red flag that should be further investigated.
I might be a new member in the scheme of things, having only joined just two years ago, but I’ve known Conrad Benitez much longer than that. I do know that he is a man that loves the Orchard and everything it stands for most deeply. He was on site for most of the construction and had a hand in shaping a few key holes that added to the shot values while costing the club and the developers a bit more money. Knowing what I do, it is easy to see that he would never knowingly ever do the club and its golf courses any harm. He is incapable of that.
If anything, he is probably guilty of trusting his management team a little too implicitly to the point that he had foregone checking on the golf course and all its component parts in detail over time. Whatever the case, the club is at its tipping point. Where Mr. Benitez takes the club from here is key.
As a member, I want what all the members want; we all want our club back. We want it back to its former stature as one of the best golf clubs in Asia with golf courses that are up to and, perhaps, even exceed that standard. We want peace and respectability back without factions or strife to divide us. We want the Orchard whole again.
But we will have to accept the ugly state that we find our golf courses in today. As much as we might have liked members of the management team, the condition that we find the golf courses and equipment today is an unmistakable indictment of the mismanagement that it suffered at the hands of the previous team. Benitez did the right thing by bringing in an impartial third party in the person of Jim Prusa, whose impeccable credentials and love for golf make bringing the courses back to respectability his only priority.
We will all have to bear the burden of the costs of repair to the irrigation system, the maintenance fleet and the training of our staff to move the club forward and to make sure this never happen again. It is an abject lesson for all golf courses in the country, a tough pill to swallow for the board of directors and the members of the Orchard, but with a good management team in place and given the proper tools and training, I am hopeful that the Orchard will return to its place at the top of the golf industry in the Philippines as one of the best golf clubs in the land.
Image credits: Mike Besa