Kapalua-Plantation New Greens

[Chris Munoz]

I was watching some of the golf last night, and the golf commentators, Karl and Andy brought up some news to me.  Coore/Crenshaw re-contoured some of the greens, totally grassed all of the greens, probably with some new Bermuda.  And added some new bunkers.  Can anyone on this discussion site, add to this; like what turf selection did they add to the greens and what procedure did they go about re-grassing and re-contouring of the greens.  It is pretty interesting and probably a lot of money to re-contour and re-grass greens, right???

Christian C. Munoz

[redanman]

I found it telling by just how poorly the pros putted new surfaces of new greens.

I am constantly amazed at the poor performance of the world's best players their first time on a set of greens. (Further e.g. The first few years of the Penna PGATour event when it kept going to new courses.....)

[Greg Holland]

GCA'er Jeff Mingay wrote an interesting article on this topic recently -- its posted on www.golfobserver.com.  The discussion of the bunkers and the PGA Tour's desires in that regard was particularly good.  As to the greens, I believe it said that they used a TifEagle bermuda that was not available in Hawaii when the course was originally built.

[Martin Del Vecchio]

I played this course in 2000, and I loved it except for the greens.  They were very fuzzy, very bumpy, and not very fun.  I assume that the new grass has improved the greens, and I look forward to playing there again some day.

[Jeff_Mingay]

I talked with Bill Coore and Dave Axland about Kapalua a couple weeks ago. As Greg mentions, most of the details are in my article at GolfObserver.com.

There was an agriculture quarantine in effect when the Plantation course was originally seeded that outlawed importing certain grass types to Hawaii. This greatly limited what was available to Coore and Crenshaw. As a result, the Plantation course's greens were covered with TifDwarf Bermuda.

The greens are now covered with a new and improved Bermuda grass called TifEagle, that's apparently less coarse and grainy than the TifDwarf.

Coore very, very subtly recontoured a few greens while the grass was off, to create a few new hole locations - a new one on the right side of the eighth green, as requested by the PGA Tour, comes to mind. But, Coore says the recontouring is so subtle, very few people will notice any changes were made.

I was surprised to learn how much the green surfaces at the Plantation course had shrunken in over just 14 years. Coore says a few areas had crept in by as much as 10 feet! So, the re-grassing also allowed for quite a bit of green surface area, and in turn, some interesting hole locations on the outer edges of the greens, to be recaptured.

Bunkers throughout the course were reworked by Axland, Jeff Bradley and Tom Beck, too. And two new fairway bunkers - one each at the 15th and 16th holes - were installed.