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FRONT 9 |
Bunkers rejuvenated at the Old Course
Golf responds to tsunami victims
Two superintendents double up on awards
Wetting agent evaluation Green Section honor to Cookingham
Pickseed acquires Seed Research of Oregon
Money in hand for UMass Troll Center
Winterkill battleground in New England
Whistling Straits lands PGA, Ryder Cup
Kansas Ice Storm ravages Wichita CC
National Golf Foundation in GIS fold
President’s Message returns to GCM
Beverage caddy customers holding empty glass
ABT creditors win again in bankruptcy court
Bunkers rejuvenated at the Old Course
As head greenkeeper Euan Grant likes to put it, Scotland’s venerable Old Course at St. Andrews is likely to get in the heads of the world’s best golfers a little more than usual this July during the 134th British Open Championship.
In a project that was completed in early January, the St. Andrews Links Trust rebuilt 94 of the 112 bunkers on the Old Course; new tees on a handful of holes have lengthened the layout to about 7,200 yards.
More than 12,000 square meters (nearly 40,000 square feet) of turf from the Links nursery was used in the bunker work to reverse the ravages of time and player traffic and return them to their original playability, says Gordon Moir, Links superintendent.
“Wind blow and erosion subject all bunkers to some change over time, and the crucial task is to make sure they continue to gather the ball,” he says. “Contouring work was done in the vicinity of some bunkers to ensure they keep playing in the traditional way.”
All of the head greenkeepers from the Links Trust’s five other courses provided crews and equipment for the three-month-long operation, which was completed two weeks ahead of schedule. The rebuilt bunkers will remain closed to golfers until sometime in April, when sand will be added. The Old Course will be hosting its 27th Open, the most of any venue in the championship’s rotation.
Most of the interest in the project focused on changes to the famous bunker fronting part of the green on the 17th hole, known as the Road Hole. The bunker was enlarged — it’s about 3 feet wider — and the area around it was re-contoured. Moir notes that the Road Hole Bunker is usually worked over every two years because of the toll from player traffic.
However, several other prominent bunkers on the course also underwent significant changes. The greenside bunker guarding the entrance to the 12th green, for instance, was lowered 8 inches and turf was put in above it so now, like the other bunkers on the hole, it is hidden from the tee.
“They wanted us to play with the golfer’s mind as he stood on the tee,” says Grant. “He will know there is plenty of trouble down there, but he won’t be sure exactly where it is.”
The 12th was also one of five holes extended by new tees, including the par-5 14th, which is now the longest hole in the Open at 616 yards.
Golf’s travelin’ man, Gary Player, is the 2005 recipient of the Golf Course Builders Association of America’s Don A. Rossi Award for his significant contributions to golf and its growth. A professional star since the early 1950s, Player has chalked up 163 international tournament victories and designed more than 200 courses while circling the globe often enough to accumulate more than 14 million miles in his travels to play and promote the game.
Ty Votaw, commissioner of the LPGA the past six years, announced at the first of the year that he will step down after this season. The tour has made marked gains during his tenure, particularly in tournament purses. The LPGA’s total purse has increased from $36.2 million in Votaw’s first year as commissioner, 1999, to $45 million this year. Over the same period, the average purse per tournament has grown from $840,000 to $1.4 million.
The Arizona Society of Association Executives honored Lynn Cannon, executive director and secretary of the Cactus & Pine GCSA, as one of its top executive directors for 2004. Cannon was recognized for her leadership and board development and efforts for the Society in fund-raising and community service.
John Singleton, a leader in automated irrigation systems and sprinkler head technology for more than four decades, is the 30th recipient of the American Society of Golf Course Architects’ Donald Ross Award. Singleton began a long relationship with The Toro Co. 38 years ago and more recently has worked with golf course developers and operators in Europe. ASGCA President Bill Love said Singleton “has helped facilitate golf’s global expansion and provide the world’s golfers with the best possible playing conditions.”
Golf responds to tsunami victims
Both collectively and individually, those in the worldwide golf industry have answered the call to help the countries in Southeast Asia and Africa devastated by the Dec. 26 tsunami.
Chief among the efforts to support the recovery and rebuilding in the aftermath of the tragedy that took more than 200,000 lives is the U.S. Golf Tsunami Relief Fund, a collaborative effort by the major U.S. golf organizations, including GCSAA. Others involved include the USGA, PGA Tour, LPGA, the PGA of America and Augusta National Golf Club. The European Tour has also formed the International Relief Golf Fund.
GCSAA’s contribution is aimed at both those affected by last fall’s storms in Florida and the tsunami victims. The efforts officially launched during the Golf Industry Show last month in Orlando by collecting donations from members attending the event and also by accepting funds from those not at the show. The association will match those contributions and forward them to the U.S. Golf Tsunami Relief Fund.
GCSAA members and/or chapters can still donate through the association until the end of March by sending checks or money orders payable to GCSAA with the notation, “Tsunami Relief Fund,” on the memo. It should be mailed to GCSAA, P.O. Box 219004, Kansas City, MO, 64121-9004.
The far-flung golf course maintenance industry has shown considerable support, as well. For example, the major equipment manufacturers — Textron Inc., John Deere and The Toro Co. — along with Caterpillar and United Kingdom-based JCB, all have teamed with their employees to donate millions of dollars in matching contributions and also have provided local relief efforts through the distributors, employees and partners they have in some of the affected countries.
Agribusiness giant Syngenta donated more than $100,000 and also gave 10,000 safety kits with gloves and masks to the International Red Cross. The company also provided specific insecticides to combat dengue fever. BASF pledged $1 million in immediate aid and invited its employees to make donations. Its companies along the Pacific Rim also made initial contributions.
One of the largest relief efforts with connections to the golf course industry was from the Bayer Group, which employs 5,700 people in India, Indonesia and Thailand. The company donated cash and medicines totaling more than 10 million euros (about $13 million U.S.). Dow Chemical’s donation was $3 million in products, technology and funds, $1 million to the Red Cross and $1 million in matching individual contributions from its employees and retirees.
Typical at the grassroots level was Target Specialty Products, a wholesale distributor of ag chemicals, fertilizers and application equipment out of California, which gave more than $5,000 in matching donations to the American Red Cross/Southeast Asia Tsunami Relief Fund following a fund-raising campaign among its employees.
Two superintendents double up on awards
Compliance is a major part of the golf course management profession, and few superintendents are more notable practitioners than Stephen Kealy, CGCS, and Sean Kjemhus, two of GCSAA’s 2004 Excellence in Government Relations Award winners.
Kealy and Kjemhus were joined by Craig Hoffman and Ken Lallier, CGCS, as recipients of the EGR honors during last month’s GCSAA Education Conference and Golf Industry Show in Orlando.
Both Kealy, longtime superintendent at Glendale Country Club in Bellevue, Wash., and Kjemhus of Stewart Creek Golf & Country Club in Canmore, Alberta, Canada, had earlier garnered a couple of the association’s highest environmental honors. In November, Kealy was named one of the winners of the 2005 President’s Award for Environmental Stewardship in recognition of his salmon rehabilitation program in the streams that run though his course, while a month later Kjemhus was selected as the first Canadian recipient of the International Environmental Leaders in Golf Award.
For more details on all four winners of the 2004 EGR awards, see this month’s Government Watch column.
For the past two years, GCSAA, with additional funding from the USGA, has been conducting an evaluation of selected wetting agents at nine locations across the United States. The
purpose of the two-year study is to provide superintendents information that will help them make more-informed use and purchasing decisions. A summary of the results
will appear in the April 2005 issue of GCM, and the complete results will be available online.
Green Section honor to Cookingham
As caretaker of the world’s largest collection of turfgrass science and management information, Peter Cookingham has spent nearly two decades preserving the work of others. And now, as the 2005 recipient of the USGA’s prestigious Green Section Award, he is as appreciative of those efforts as the industry is of him.
“As one fortunate enough to work every day with parts of the legacy of nearly every previous recipient of the award, I know all too well what extraordinary company that is,” says the 52-year-old Cookingham, who is the project manager of the Turfgrass Information Center at Michigan State University and the only full-time librarian dedicated to turf.
Cookingham’s renowned database, the Turfgrass Information File, is almost 20 years in the making and includes more than 100,000 articles, books and other publications for worldwide access via the Internet and coveted by superintendents, turfgrass scholars and other industry practitioners.
Bolstered by expertise that includes college degrees in library science and recreation and park administration, Cookingham, who is also a 16-year-member of GCSAA, has developed the MSU turfgrass center into a vast font of information with four primary functions: to collect and preserve published and unpublished materials relating to turf science, culture and the management of such facilities as golf courses, parks, sports fields, lawns, sod farms, roadsides, institutional grounds and other landscapes; to streamline online access to the collection; to provide high-end user service; and to provide workspace and electronic support of turfgrass scholarship.
Pickseed acquires Seed Research of Oregon
The Canada-based Pickseed Companies Group greeted the new year by purchasing Seed Research of Oregon (SRO) from Land O’Lakes Inc., a U.S. farmer-owned food and agricultural cooperative.
As a further expansion of the strategic alliance between the two companies, Land O’Lakes in turn bought Seeds Ohio, a regional seed distributor out of West Jefferson, Ohio, from Pickseed. Both transactions were completed Dec. 31, 2004.
Pickseed is a developer, producer and distributor of turfgrass and forage seed crops with locations in Canada and Oregon and is running SRO as an independent business unit at its existing facility in Corvallis, Ore.
Money in hand for UMass Troll center
Construction began in early January on the Joseph Troll Turf Research Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst after a fund-raising campaign met its goal. Completion of the research and teaching facility is expected in late May, in time for the university’s annual Turf Field Day in June.
The campaign went over the top down the stretch, bolstered by $40,000 raised at a golf event at Hickory Ridge Country Club in Amherst (GCM, February 2005), a $75,000 pledge from the New England Regional Turfgrass Foundation and a gift from R.F. Morse Turf and Ornamental in West Wareham, Mass.
In addition to the 3,000-square-foot building honoring retired turf professor Joe Troll, Ph.D., the UMass turf program has begun the search process for a new turf faculty position, is revamping its internship program and is also considering more ways to maximize its 18-acre turf education complex.
Winterkill battleground in New England
Superintendents in New England and turf specialists from the University of Massachusetts have teamed up against winterkill following a string of successive hard winters in the region.
“A lot of us have gotten whupped by winter turfgrass injury in the last three to four years, so we thought it was time to try to do something about it,” says Pete Hasak, superintendent at Tedesco Country Club in Marblehead, Mass., and one of the leaders in the long-range, multi-year effort that began in December.
Hasak says about 16 superintendents representing courses in a half-dozen states in New England are participating and have been dubbed the Winter Damage Initiative Group. The study is under the direction of UMass turf experts Scott Ebdon, Ph.D., and Mary Owen. The USGA’s senior agronomist in its Northeast Region, Jim Skorulski, also is helping.
Owen, who notes that the ability to correlate specific weather events with turfgrass injury is integral to the study, says the protocol will be for participating superintendents to monitor and record turf canopy temperatures and air temperatures, as well as similar data from those who use turf covers, to evaluate their effectiveness. Every two weeks the participants send the data and turf samples to the UMass turf research center for analysis.
“We’re setting up a kind of hotline so if we start seeing issues developing through the study, we can send the information to the various state superintendent associations and they can get it out to their members,” says Hasak, an 18-year GCSAA member, who adds that the research will extend to studying superintendents’ seasonal management practices and their possible effect on winter turf damage.
The initiative also has received key support from the Onset Computer Co. out of Massachusetts, which offered the participating superintendents a discount on the data-logging software being used in the study.
Whistling Straits lands PGA, Ryder Cup
The PGA of America is obviously smitten by the tune at Whistling Straits Golf Course near Kohler, Wis.
The 7-year-old Pete Dye masterpiece on the shores of Lake Michigan hosted last summer’s PGA Championship and then in late January was selected as the site for the 2010 and 2015 championships, as well as the 2020 Ryder Cup Matches that the PGA of America presents with the British PGA.
The 2010 PGA was originally scheduled for Sahalee Country Club in Redmond, Wash., but due to the timing of that year’s Winter Olympics in the Vancouver/Pacific Northwest region it was decided to move the golf event elsewhere. Less than a week following that decision, it was rescheduled for Whistling Straits.
Michael Lee, CGCS and a 19-year GCSAA member, is manager of golf course maintenance at Whistling Straits and David Swift, a member of GCSAA for five years, is the course superintendent.
The 2020 Ryder Cup was awarded to Whistling Straits on the condition that a sufficient number of quality hotel rooms would be available. The course sits about 60 miles north of Milwaukee, the closest major metropolitan area.
Kansas ice storm ravages Wichita CC
A Jan. 4 ice storm in Wichita, Kan., damaged or destroyed 75 percent of the trees along the fairways at Wichita Country Club. Many of the trees that were lost were 50-year-old Siberian elms.
The course was closed for a month after the storm until cleanup efforts advanced enough to open the front nine in early February. The back nine opened a few weeks later. Wichita CC superintendent Brian White says the loss of trees and limbs has changed the playability of the layout as well as the turf management because of changes in air movement and sunlight.
“The membership has just been super — very understanding,” White says. “The main thing to come out of this is that it has pushed our tree program to the forefront. We knew some of the big old trees were a problem and needed serious pruning or taking out. We’ll be planting more desirable species.”
White, a seven-year GCSAA member, says the course’s insurance policy didn’t cover the damage and the cost of the loss hasn’t been estimated, but the cost of the contracted labor for cleanup was $65,000 and about $20,000 more will be spent in new plantings this fall.
National Golf Foundation in GIS fold
The National Golf Foundation was a late addition to the lineup of participants in the inaugural Golf Industry Show last month in Orlando.
The NGF joined GCSAA, the National Golf Course Owners Association, the American Society of Golf Course Architects and the Golf Course Builders Association of America in presenting the show. The Club Managers Association of America has already pledged to join the GIS in 2007.
Based in Jupiter, Fla., the NGF is the industry leader in providing relevant information and insights on the business of golf, including golf-business research and consulting services to companies and organizations worldwide. The foundation includes 6,000 member companies.
At this year’s show, the NGF announced its 2004 Golf Course Opening Report and 2005 Forecast, and provided data and interpretation to its GIS partners for education programs and member services as well.
President’s Message returns to GCM
Beginning with this issue, the monthly President’s Message returns to the pages of GCM. A longtime staple of the publication, the President’s Message was moved to GCM’s sister publication, Newsline, in April of last year. The first message from new GCSAA President Timothy T. O’Neill, CGCS, can be found in this month’s issue.
A long, hard look at changing GCSAA’s name has resulted in no action being taken.
A task force commissioned by the GCSAA board of directors studied the issue for nine months before recommending in late January that the association not pursue a significant organizational name change at this time. However, the group, chaired by Jon Jennings, CGCS at the Chicago Golf Club, did suggest that the GCSAA board consider additional study on the possibility of dropping “of America” from the current name.
The task group comprised superintendents, golf course management industry representatives and communications professionals. It surveyed several member groups, including chapter delegates, chapter leaders and members selected at random. The results showed that a reluctance to pursue a new name was based partly on a loss of identity of the superintendent and because of the significant progress that has been made in raising the profile of the association and its members.
“I appreciate the task group’s professionalism in conducting the study and the honesty in which the members answered the survey,” 2004 GCSAA President Mark J. Woodward, CGCS, said. “It is obvious that although there is some sentiment to pursue a name change, there is more support for retaining it at this point.”
Beverage caddy customers holding empty glass
In early February, members of the National Golf Course Owners Association were on the brink of filing a class-action lawsuit against Royal Links USA as a result of a leasing dispute between hundreds of golf courses and Royal Links.
Royal Links entered into written agreements for more than 1,000 golf courses in the U.S. in which the courses would use the company’s beverage caddies to display and sell food and beverage items. The “no-cost” program involved the courses leasing the caddies from more than a dozen third-party leasing firms and Royal Links USA agreeing to reimburse the courses for their lease obligations.
But, in October 2004 Royal Links notified all of its golf course customers across the country that it would cease making the monthly reimbursement payments. The written agreement with each course had stated that Royal Links would pay a course about $300 per caddy per month to meet lease obligations. Most lease obligations were for 60 months and most of the courses received less than a year’s worth of reimbursements.
A task force of NGCOA members has been studying the association’s options since last fall, and more than 200 courses have responded to the group’s requests for information so far. Investigations, assisted by the Chicago-based law firm of Lord, Bissell & Brook, have also included the role of the leasing companies.
Also, plaintiffs are requesting that customers of Royal Links USA contribute to a legal fund, with NGCOA acting as custodian of the money. Contributions can be sent to the association at 291 Seven Farms Dr., second floor, Charleston, SC 29492. Those wanting to use credit cards can go to www.ngcoa.org.
ABT creditors win again in bankruptcy court
The latest bankruptcy court verdict against AgriBioTech Inc. (ABT) includes a judgment for $14.87 million that will benefit hundreds of farmers and other creditors.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Linda B. Riegle of Las Vegas, Nev., entered the judgment on Jan. 31 against former ABT chairman and CEO Richard P. Budd and ABT Group LLC, which Budd established in 1999 to loan money to Henderson, Nev.-based ABT.
The court found that Budd received a preferential loan repayment of more than $10 million in June 1999 as ABT’s financial troubles worsened. Budd was paid in full, but ABT filed for bankruptcy less than a year later, leaving hundreds of farmers in Idaho, Washington and Oregon, along with other creditors, confronted with more than $60 million in unpaid debts.
ABT was a leading turfgrass seed and forage seed supplier before filing for bankruptcy protection early in 2000 in one of the largest agricultural bankruptcies in U.S. history. ABT creditor trustee Anthony Schnelling, one of the country’s top turnaround experts, and attorney David Bryant have pursued claims for creditors the past few years and have been successful in aggregate settlements of more than $18 million prior to this latest judgment.
On page 196 of the January issue of GCM, Ann M. Weaver, CGCS, was mistakenly listed as a Class A member at the Villages of Country Creek GC in Estero, Fla. Weaver is a Class A member at OneSource Landscape & Golf Services. Britton W. Dudley is a Class A member at Villages of Country Creek GC.
Brian A. Distel has moved from Dove Canyon CC to Mountain View CC in La Quinta, Calif. A database error in the February GCM’s On the Move placed him at Mountain View CC in Greensboro, Vt., where Scott Rossi is the superintendent.
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