Putting the ‘green’ in putting greens: How a platoon of workers keeps No. 2 looking like No. 1

John Jeffreys gets to live every golf course superintendent’s dream for one week every six years in the near future.

The help for the Pinehurst No. 2 golf course maintenance staff more than quadruples for the week of the U.S. Open. It comes from near and far to help the crew work more efficiently, a blessing in disguise amidst what could be a chaotic situation for the championship.

“It’s just to the nth degree. Everything is in excess,” said Jeffreys, who will lead Pinehurst’s maintenance crew for the second men’s U.S. Open. “Just lots of people and lots of equipment, living in a dream world as a golf course superintendent with the amount of people and the amount of stuff we have.”

Normal resort play set up can be done with a crew of 20 to prepare for play to start at sunrise off the first and 10th tees of the Donald Ross masterpiece. One month out from the Open, more part-time, contract and intern help brought the crew up to 31 people. That number has grown to more than 120 for the world’s best golfers.

Jeffreys has about 20 workers in from the Women in Turf program, 80 from other Pinehurst courses and 40 from the neighboring courses.

The daily work to prepare the course for play has to be done quicker and down to a level of detail, but many hands make light work in the early morning hours.

“We’ve got to be completely off the golf course by 6:45 a.m. They tee off at Nos. 1 and 10, and the way the course is routed, we can’t quietly leave the golf course,” Jeffreys said a few weeks ahead of the Open. “That means we will start at 4:30 a.m. This morning we sent out five greens mowers, and each greens mower mows four greens. During the U.S. Open we send out 19 greens mowers and they each mow one green.”

The course closed for play on May 29, and the time between closing and the first practice round on June 10 brought a focus of dialing in the course to provide the “fair but tough” conditions the U.S. Golf Association wants.

“Every little detail that you wished you could do every day, you’ve got the time and the people.”

While the course conditions are USGA specifications, there is no directive given on how to get there. That comes from the course superintendents themselves.

“It’s really a misconception about the Green Section championship team. The USGA with Darin Bevard as championship agronomist, Chris Hartwiger is the director of agronomy and Jordan Booth is the director of the course consulting service, and they don’t say, ‘This is what you need to do to get us these results.’ They give us the end number. They want the greens rolling 13 1/2 (on the stimpmeter). They want them to be firm. They want the fairways to play like this,” Jeffreys said. “They ask us, ‘How are we going to do this? This is a property you are familiar with for 365 days a year.’ Our team knows best, and they just provide the metrics. We’re able to bounce ideas off them because they see a lot more championships than we do.”

To get to the firm and fast green conditions, it will require mowing the greens four times in a day, with double cutting in the morning before play, and in the evening as the crew touches up the course.

The biggest difference for the 124th Open from 10 years ago is the change from bentgrass greens to champion bermuda. The new putting surface helps to match the green speeds to what the USGA wants to see.

“With (the greens), the grass is ramping up, so it’s getting into its growing season. A lot more things we feel comfortable doing to the greens to get them to championship conditions.”

Also new to the maintenance side for the Open is the use of electric walk mowers and backpack blowers that will be used in the evenings to limit the amount of noise distracting play on the course while work needs to be done in the evening hours.

“They wouldn’t want us mowing the first green with golfers (on the eighth tee) right here. With the electric we can because it sounds like a cordless drill,” Jeffreys said. “We’ve got electric backpack blowers, electric pumps for bunkers. We got electric things that are not just a sustainability message, but we can get our work done quietly.”

A decade removed from hosting back-to-back U.S. Opens on No. 2, there has been some turnover on the maintenance crew, so that means teaching and learning how to work around all of the “build” that has gone on the last few months.

“Practice rounds are practice rounds for us also because we’ve got that crew of volunteers who have never been here and don’t know how to get to the fourth hole,” Jeffreys said. “We pair them up with our people so they know.”

U.S. Opens are planned out for five- to six-year increments until 2047, meaning this process of preparing the course will be more repetitive in the future. To aid the golf course maintenance staff, there is the USGA Green Section, a team of agronomists and course consultants. That used to be a phone call and a long trip from New Jersey to have those workers on site at Pinehurst, but now is a quick golf cart drive across the Pinehurst Resort main clubhouse campus from Golf House Pinehurst.

That has meant new innovations and findings from the Green Section have now come right to Jeffreys’ office before being implemented across the country.

“There’s a comfort level for us,” Jeffreys said. “I tell people with the USGA being 500 yards from our shop or whatever it is, that they’re the largest funder of turfgrass research in the world. That resource that close makes our job so much more interesting because we learn cutting edge technology. We had the GS3 before anybody else did. We had the (Greenkeeper Apprenticeship Program) before anybody else did.”

Contact Jonathan Bym at (910) 693-2470 or jonathan@thepilot.com.