[TEPaul]

....back in the good old days of the teens, '20s, 30s and perhaps the '40s and even 50s?

This is subject I've never seen dealt with on here but if you think about it a potential huge difference in maintenance practices back in that day may've made a huge difference in playability, strategy etc.

So how and how often did most of those old courses, particularly the inland courses, mow their roughs?

Did they basically raise up there massive old reel driven gang mowers and take them into the roughs? And if so, how often? If it was regularly, that could be significant to know.

I sure do know nobody put regular irrigation out there back in the day.

If they took those big old reel driven gang mowers out in their roughs they probably played much different than they do today with some of the real gnarly and long over irrigated roughs that maybe get cut a few times a year these days.

Not just that but it has always struck me that on many of the old aerials it seems very difficult to distinguish between where those old wide fairways ended and the rough areas began.

[Joe Hancock]

TEPaul,

Could it be possible that they used the same mower? The only thing they may have done different was mow the fairway more frequently, allowing the rough to grow a little deeper before they cut it down. Long grass never cuts as uniformly as short grass....that's why we see the practice of mowing fairways 6 days a week now.....

Joe

[Tom_Doak]

Tom:

It looks that way because they didn't irrigate the roughs then as we do now.  The grass didn't grow as fast or as thick.

I was talking about that years ago with Karl Olson -- how it could be that there were no collars on the greens and it went straight to rough, especially since they didn't mow the rough so often back then.  But the greens themselves went all the way out to the top edge of the banks, and the roughs weren't irrigated, so there was no "bumper" at the edge of the green like there would be now.

[TEPaul]

Joe:

If they didn't use the old reel driven gang mowers (raised up) out in the rough years ago, I wonder what they did use out there?  

In any case, it probably wouldn't be hard to find out.

But as Tom Doak just said it isn't just about mowing, how often or with what, it's a lot about lack of irrigation in the rough back in the old days. Basically it just didn't exist---eg it couldn't or at least nobody thought along those lines back in that day. And that I would practically stake my miniscule fortune on.  

I wasn't exactly talking about around the greens anyway----I was talking more about off the fairways. But even around the greens back in the old days everybody used the old snap valves and hand held hoses and with that process they most certainly didn't irrigate the rough around greens if they didn't want to.

Not just that but in the old days at PVGC apparently they even used hand held hoses on some of the fairways.

And this would explain the reason Eb Steineger gave when asked why the old alternate fairway on #17 went out of existence. His simple answer was it was just too hard to get the hoses to reach it.  

[Adrian_Stiff]

Joe:

If they didn't use the old reel driven gang mowers (raised up) out in the rough years ago, I wonder what they did use out there?  

In any case, it probably wouldn't be hard to find out.

But as Tom Doak just said it isn't just about mowing, how often or with what, it's a lot about lack of irrigation in the rough back in the old days. Basically it just didn't exist---eg it couldn't or at least nobody thought along those lines back in that day. And that I would practically stake my miniscule fortune on.  

I wasn't exactly talking about around the greens anyway----I was talking more about off the fairways. But even around the greens back in the old days everybody used the old snap valves and hand held hoses and with that process they most certainly didn't irrigate the rough around greens if they didn't want to.

Not just that but in the old days at PVGC apparently they even used hand held hoses on some of the fairways.

And this would explain the reason Eb Steineger gave when asked why the old alternate fairway on #17 went out of existence. His simple answer was it was just too hard to get the hoses to reach it.  

I was a greenkeeper back inthe late 70s early 80s in the UK. I think we mowed about 3 times less than the amount we do now. We probably cut greens almost every day then but almost every mower went away mid October and fairways for instance we not mown again until early April, The rough would be cut Spring and Autumn when it was growing and it would have been a bi-weekly job. Many UK courses going back to the 20s 30s relied on sheep, Linksland hardly grows, almost certainly UK clubs would have had 1 mower, I think fairway width was more 50 yards then too. Obviously differentsituation than in the States, probably only 5% of UK courses irrigate fairways today and maybe 1% do the rough.

[Tags:]

Tags:

[Tags:]

Tags:

Call to undefined function theme_linktree()