Jim:
It's funny how much people like to talk about grass cultivars, whether they understand them or not. I met with a potential new client on Monday, and though he did not offer many tidbits on design, he talked a lot about different cultivars of Bermuda grass, based on his experiences with them on past projects and other local efforts. It was really way too early to be thinking about grass selection, but this was a topic he had made a lot of notes about, and he was eager to help.
I have seen and played on just about every kind of grass you could imagine. When I worked for Pete Dye, and I'd been traveling around just a little bit, he asked me cryptically which course I had seen had done the most experimenting with different types of grass, and I immediately said Pine Valley ... the old super there, Eb Steineger, had test plots for everything, including various native species for use in the waste areas. I quickly realized that was Pete's point. He was not afraid to try different things, sometimes to the point it was ludicrous ... I remember at Austin Golf Club, they had a bentgrass green right next to St. Augustine in the rough, with the same sprinkler head hitting both of them!
Just in the top 100 courses in the world, you will find bentgrass, fescue, ryegrass, bluegrass, bermuda, poa annua, zoysia, and kikuyu used as the primary fairway grass. You can even find five of those on the greens of a top 100 course!!
Sadly, in the past 30 years, the turf researchers have spent most of their efforts on developing tighter grasses for the fairways and greens, and have ignored trying to develop maintenance-lite grasses for the roughs. That's what we need now.
P.S. to Kyle H: "Portmanteau" ? Really? You should be careful of using words your boss has to look up.