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Unique golf courses
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Fast track
Mexican venue pushes the envelope to prove paspalum can be a championship-caliber turf.
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A cenote, or ancient cave common to the Riviera Maya site, confronts golfers in the No. 1 fairway. Photos courtesy of El Camaleón GC at Mayakoba |
GCM’s bimonthly feature on unique golf holes is expanding. This issue’s subject is an entire course, and one beyond U.S. borders to boot — El Camaleón Golf Club at Mayakoba.
If you haven’t heard of El Camaleón GC, located among the lesser outposts on the Caribbean coast side of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, you probably will before long. Managed by Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, the Greg Norman-designed venue on the Riviera Maya 45 minutes south of the popular destination resort haven of Cancún is poised on the fast track to fame.
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Dramatic limestone canals are part of the three distinct micro-environments featured at El Camaleón. The 10th green is pictured. |
After surviving a couple of hurricane-sized setbacks, El Camaleón belatedly opened in January 2006 with GCSAA Class A superintendent Erin Stevens among those at the helm. In the ensuing 13 months, the facility caught up in time in a hurry, being named the Best New International Course by Golf Magazine, becoming only the second course in Mexico to earn Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary certification and, on Feb. 22-25 of this year, hosting the Mayakoba Classic, the first official PGA Tour event other than the Presidents Cup to be held in a foreign country other than Canada. That’s pretty unique.
And that’s just the half of it. The 7,039-yard layout winds through no less than three micro-environments — mangrove jungles, oceanfront sand and dramatic limestone canals. Moreover and more important from a golf course management point of view, El Camaleón is grassed wall-to-wall with SeaIsle 1 paspalum. It’s the first PGA Tour venue to feature that cultivar entirely, including the greens, which is a story in itself since SeaIsle 1 is normally used for tees, fairways and roughs only. Now that’s really unique.
Stealth show
All of the above is significantly noteworthy, yet the unique setting of El Camaleón GC and the Mayakoba Classic, which was presented by Greg Norman Production Co. and is a FedEx Cup points event, unfortunately flew under golf’s radar in February. The Classic, which will be held at El Camaleón for the next five years, was played the same week as the World Golf Championships Accenture Match Play in Tucson, Ariz., and the Golf Industry Show in Anaheim, Calif.
“We were overshadowed, yes, but we were the first PGA Tour event in Mexico and also the first PGA Tour event to be played on wall-to-wall paspalum. The tournament and the grass both got rave reviews from the players. The response was amazing,” says the 35-year-old Stevens, a Maryland native.
How Stevens, a Navy veteran of the first Gulf War and the conflict in Somalia, got from there to here in the last decade, along the way becoming a noted manager of a turfgrass that is growing in environmental importance for golf developments in various coastal regions around the world, is remarkable as well.
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Erin Stevens (left), El Camaleón’s Class A superintendent, greets his mentor, Paul R. Latshaw. |
A winning whim
Rewind to 1996, when Stevens, a student at the University of Maryland’s Institute of Applied Agriculture, “on a whim” applied for a job at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Md., and a chance to work for legendary superintendent Paul R. Latshaw, who was prepping for the 1997 U.S. Open, one of nine of golf’s major championships he hosted during his career of more than four decades.
Stevens got the job, and when Latshaw retired a few years later and eventually went into consulting, he got a lot more. He joined the old master as a kind of roving superintendent helping others put Latshaw’s suggested strategies in place. In the process, Stevens was exposed to the likes of Congressional; Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, Calif.; Baltimore (Md.) Country Club; and Cherokee Town & Country Club in Atlanta.
“I had some jobs that came up that needed a key person to get them done,” says Latshaw. “I was able to talk Erin into getting them done. He was single at the time, and I had him moving all over the place. He made my job a lot better and certainly helped the people at those courses ... all for the good.”
It was a tremendous career boost for Stevens once he
overcame a misguided perception that he was an unsatisfied job-hopper.
“Basically, I’d come in and set up things like chemical and spray programs and assist the superintendents who were moving into the jobs. For a while, all the moving around was a red flag for getting a head superintendent job until Mr. Latshaw started explaining to others what I was doing,” he says. “Now I see it as a great plus — all the different places, the different regions, the different grasses have given me complex job skills and more flexibility than most.”
Two moves to checkmate
Stevens’ big break came a little more than five years ago when another turf consultant, Terry Buchen, CGCS, MG, whose specialty is overseeing course grow-ins, asked his old friend and colleague, Latshaw (they have 78 years of GCSAA membership between them), if he knew of someone who could help with a challenging project in the Bahamas, a complete paspalum grow-in at a course being developed by Greg Norman Golf Design at the Emerald Bay Resort on Greater Exuma.
Latshaw suggested Stevens, and by 2002, the eight-year GCSAA member had his first head superintendent gig. He grew in Emerald Bay — with SeaIsle 1 tees, fairways and roughs and SeaIsle 2000 greens — and two years later was rewarded anew when Norman tabbed him for the El Camaleón project in Mexico.
Stevens’ mettle was tested from the start. El Camaleón’s signature feature was to be its turf, wall-to-wall paspalum, but the plan hit a major snag when a desired greens variety could not be acquired for the project for a number of reasons. Eventually, the decision was made from high up: Go with SeaIsle 1 on the greens.
“It was a risky move. It’s not a grass that normally performs as well as the other new greens varieties, like SeaIsle 2000, SeaIsle Supreme or SeaDwarf,” says Stevens, who adds, however, that he had dealt with SeaIsle 1 on the practice greens at Emerald Bay.
Addressing adversity
The project moved on with aspirations for a big-time event clearly in the sights of all concerned. But more setbacks were in store.
“This project was a unique opportunity from day one,” Stevens says. “We capped the entire golf course with a native material, a washed sand, that has an infiltration rate of 27 to 28 inches an hour. During construction, one of the key things was that we knew sodiums were going to be a problem, we knew bicarbonates were going to be a problem and we knew salts were going to be a problem. So, we had to make sure we could keep the water moving through the soil. The trick is holding the nutrients ... they can leach out very quickly here. We spray for rapid response of the nutrient uptake, and soil testing is very important.”
The grow-in was completed in June 2005, and a month later Hurricane Emily crashed into the Yucatan, and El Camaleón’s two principal ocean holes, 7 and 15, were basically washed away and trees were strewn throughout the layout. The holes were rebuilt and the course put back in order. But in late October, Hurricane Wilma came along and again holes 7 and 15 were decimated. By the time the holes were again rebuilt and other damage repaired, a deal was already being finalized with the PGA Tour to hold the Mayakoba Classic at El Camaleón through 2012.
Myriad issues to overcome
The course finally opened in January 2006, giving Stevens a year and a month to be ready for the event’s debut, a daunting task considering the gamble with SeaIsle 1 on the greens and the questionable water quality, not to mention societal issues in a locale almost totally unfamiliar with the game and its trappings and which was about to have a major professional event descend upon it.
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Hurricane Wilma laid waste to El Camaleón’s 7th hole and a restaurant behind the green in October 2005. The hole was rebuilt and today provides one of the venue’s most scenic vistas. |
“The pressure to get this place ready was pretty phenomenal. A lot of the people here had no idea what they were in for,” says Stevens, who points out that on his maintenance staff of 34, a lack of understanding was complicated by cultural and language barriers.
But the resilient superintendent, fluent in Spanish, managed to convince many workers to stay on as staff members following the course construction, and he avidly promoted letting staff play golf to learn the game and course management nuances.
“We get some strange looks,” he says. “It’s definitely a training evolution to make people understand why we do what we do. It’s probably five times more difficult than it would be in the States.”
The A-Team
Within a half-dozen or more months from the tournament, Stevens added critical elements to the eventual success of his prep work. He and Latshaw were reunited when the latter was hired to consult. Stevens then hired a new first assistant, Mike Spieler, a five-year GCSAA member who also had attended Maryland’s turf school and who also is a Latshaw disciple, a result of stints as an assistant at Riviera CC and Winged Foot Golf Club.
There were also several visits from the Tour’s vice president of agronomy, Cal Roth, and his staff. The mission was to manage the paspalum to meet player expectations while battling multiple highs in pH, temperature, humidity and disease pressure. The strategy was typical Latshaw — extensive and aggressive aerification (frequent spiking and solid-tine punches) and spraying (fungicides, foliars, soil enhancements) programs, weekly PGR applications, weekly verticutting and mowing with rollers. The soil was additionally bolstered with gypsum and manganese- and sulfur-based products.
“To be successful (at El Camaleón), we threw everything away we had heard about the grass and just grew it a completely different way,” says Latshaw, who had observed paspalum in various forms at courses in Florida and offshore and had also visited two of the industry’s major paspalum sod farms. “You have to adapt to every site. There is no universal, easy way ... and that’s true with most grasses.”
By the seat of their pants
Latshaw adds that the regimen at El Camaleón was indeed heavy on the side of experiment and adaptation.
“With the time frame Erin had to get that facility ready for a PGA Tour event, I take my hat off to him,” he says. “I’ll give him the credit. You can give all the advice and information you want, but somebody has to carry it out and get it done.”
Citing problems achieving low cutting heights on the SeaIsle 1 greens, Stevens credits a little trip to Florida he and Latshaw made in the waning months before the Classic to visit GCSAA Class A superintendent Jim Torba at Wilderness Country Club in Naples, which is SeaIsle 1 throughout, including the greens. Among the information gleaned from Torba, a 13-year member, were mowing techniques. The gist in a nutshell for Stevens was to swap out his Toro 1000 greensmowers for the Toro Flex 21. It put El Camaleón over the hump.
“That was probably the biggest turnaround for our greens program — the floating mower head technology,” he says. “We also found that the paspalum really needs a fast clip/reel ratio.”
In the end, the greens performed brilliantly. Stevens says the tournament cutting height was .090, with Stimpmeter speeds ranging from 9.5 at the start to an 11.4 that was throttled back to 10.5 for the final round.
“We let it dry out some and cut and rolled. They were dancing; they were dancing pretty low,” he says.
Rave reviews
“It’s a great turf to play on ... the greens are as good as anything we’ve ever putted on,” said Tour veteran John Cook during a press conference after the second round of the Mayakoba Classic.
Added the tournament winner, Fred Funk, following his playoff victory over Jose Coceres: “... The golf course is fantastic and the bottom line is that it’s the golf course that’s going to draw the players. If you came down here and had a Mickey Mouse, terrible-conditioned golf course, nobody would come back. But that’s not going to be the case. It was in immaculate condition. The greens were great.”
That Funk won and then praised the course conditions was a thrill for Stevens and his top hand, Spieler, because the Mayakoba champion made it a Terrapin trifecta — Funk also attended the University of Maryland and was the school’s golf coach before earning his Tour card 19 years ago.
A year in the life ...
Then there’s the personal, behind-the-scenes side of the past year and a half for Stevens. On March 1, 2006, less than two months after the course opened, he and his wife, Ana, had their first child, Juliana. Then, less than a month before the Mayakoba Classic, his father, who had encouraged him to forgo a Navy career and give turf school a whirl, died.
“It’s been tough. Events aren’t for everyone. It’s a tough lifestyle,” he says.
And Stevens is still living it. The Tour will be back on the Riviera Maya in just eight short months. Knock on wood, the time will fly by smoothly. The superintendent already feels as though he’s been there and done that.
“I think I’ve done what I set out to do. I like to grow, I like to build,” Stevens says, his voice trailing off as he recounts the time. “We were successful in building the golf course, we rebuilt after two hurricanes, we prepped for a first-year PGA Tour event, we were Audubon-certified in our first year ...”
The effort hasn’t been lost on those who have interest and investment in El Camaleón for the long term, either.
“Mayakoba has set a standard for environmentally sound golf course and resort developments all over the world,” Greg Norman said in a statement to GCM. “It is truly a special place with three distinct landscapes and a commitment to preserving the delicate ecosystem of the Yucatan. Erin and his entire staff are to be commended for their environmental responsibility and sustainability efforts.”
No doubt there is now a new presence on golf’s radar screen.
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