Brown - Green - Brown Fairways? Isn't there a better way?

[Keith Phillips]

Watching The Golf Channel's 2013 Open highlight show presents a nice contrast between Muirfield's consistent yellow-brown conditioning and Pinehurst's green down the middle approach.  Again, I LOVE #2 but really prefer the look of Muirfield - I understand the climate differences between the two but curious what the irrigation setup is at Muirfield?  Also reminded that Phil's back 9 performance was truly one of the greatest ever...he blitzed a strong leaderboard over there!

[Ben Sims]

The approach taken to irrigation at P2 is only worth a debate if you believe two things: 1) that the lie two inches from the side of the fairway should be equal to that of the exact middle and 2) color is the ultimate factor in how to judge a golf course's turf quality and not playability or soil moisture.

I think those fairways were just gorgeous. And it should be noted that the team at Pinehurst understand and embrace the concept of hydraulic conductivity moreso than most folks in the irrigation world do.

[Adam Clayman]

When nature cooperates the color is more consistent.  

I'm a big fan of the mind trick dormant grass has after some rain. It looks brown but plays much softer than it did the day before. It takes a few days to turn green again, and then, if it doesn't rain again soon, it's green and firm.  Once again a mind trick that only fools the less adaptive and those who ignore humidity levels.  I assume Friday's round had a lot of the former after the rain. The latter might show up this weekend for the Ladies.  we shall see.

[John Connolly]

restraint and discipline. This is what is often lacking. Many start with the best of intentions but in the end these two attributes will fail to prevail.

playability, Which is what it should be about

more appealing to those that did not like how it looked. However, this point which is irrelevant from a golfing point of view often rears its ugly head leading to the abandonment of restraint and discipline.

In the end the substance of playability should always be before aesthetics.


Jon

While everyone can agree on the playability goals of firm turf, many, myself included, will not concede the point on aesthetics. I'm not going to use P2 as a good or bad example because I haven't seen it live since its restoration. But I will use the positive analogy of what I saw in Scotland last year where every course was firm and fast and every course was green. Turnberry, Muirfield, Troon, TOC, North Berwick, Jubilee at St. Andrews etc. They were all green and they were all firm and fun. Golfers everywhere have considered gca through many filters - strategy, shot value, routing, walkability, conditioning, but also through the prism of aesthetics. It matters in a course's overall architectural evaluation. Otherwise it's merely coincidence that CPC, ANGC, Shinny, Oakmont, PV, etc are not only structurally sound but pleasing to the eye. And none of them are brown. It's not a golf thing at that point - it's a human thing. Something tells our hindbrains that green indicates health in the botanical world and our hindbrains are correct. Green does imply health - the chlorophyll molecule that drives photosynthesis is green - it's the natural color of a healthy thriving plant. We have all subconsciously learned what a vibrant plant should look like and to suggest that golf should be above that perception is not realistic. I don't want to play on brown turf. It doesn't have to be emerald green and lush and manicured but I don't want tan grass beneath my feet or holding my ball up. That's ill vegetation asking to be watered. There is a middle ground in this discussion. Playability reigns supreme, agreed - but there is other royalty in the court of golf. 

[Ben Sims]

At some point on this website we have to stop comparing turf on the coast of Scotland to turf in North Carolina or Arizona. They couldn't be anymore different in the way they're cared for and maintained. Soil structure and climate have 95% of the control on how turf goes about its life. Us humans have to recognize that we really only control a very small fraction.

Sorry if that's rude, but honestly it illustrates a lack of knowledge when folks continue to compare a fine fescue in Scotland to bermuda in North Carolina.

[Keith Phillips]

Ben, I think I effectively stipulated that the turf differences between Scotland and North Carolina are profound - that isn't the point of the thread - the question is 'does single-row irrigation make sense?' particularly at a place like #2 where budget is really not an issue.  I played there 4 weeks ago and absolutely love the place...it's in my top 10 all-time.  Having said that, I think it would better if they maintained more consistent 'yellow/brown' conditions throughout, rather than bright green in the middle and burnt out at the edges.  Somewhere else in this thread someone suggested they would aggressively irrigate prior to the Women's Open...but how does that work when the irrigation only reaches half the turf...doesn't some get over-watered and some receive nothing??

[John Connolly]

Chlorophyll is pigmented green whether in fine fescue, bermuda, bent, poa or maple leaves. Green vs brown isn't about the grasses of Scotland vs Pinehurst. It's about biology.

[Ben Sims]

Accidental double post.

.....

[Ben Sims]

John,

In your post above, you used a positive analogy and listed courses in Scotland as the ideal in playability and aesthetics. As I mentioned above, it's foolish to think that everything that's attainable in coastal Scotland is perfectly attainable in the woods of North Carolina. I don't think leaning on chlorophyll is as strong an argument as you think it is. Maybe your tagline quote by Billy Connolly can offer a piece of the puzzle.

Keith,

I've seen it written somewhere where the turf at Pinehurst received 12 minutes of much-needed irrigation early on Monday morning, maybe that was in Brad Klein's after action report, I'm not sure. I don't consider 12 minutes as aggressively irrigating, but maybe I'm wrong. Your post goes further to show that this debate is really only a debate if you think the turf should be perfectly uniform from center to margin.  I don't think it has to. The goal--in my mind--had everything to do with playability and aesthetics be damned. In that respect, the course played incredibly well and met its goal.

[Sean_A]

Ben

I would take it one step further.  I think the goal should be to attain healthy, excellent surface playability (of course excellent is relative to the climate) using the least amount of money/resources possible.  I have asked this question before, how much of a resource buffer to supers use in the program?  Meaning, how much extra water etc is applied above and beyond what supers think would produce a healthy and excellent surface with a bit of buffer in case the weather turns nasty or calculations are't quite right?  Is it 5%, 10% or 30% extra?  That is where the rubber meets the road and I suspect a great many supers do what is expected to crank out the product the members expect - and thats fair enough even if possibly far from ideal in terms of conservation and creating a good surface for golf.  It is definitely the case that opinions vary on what is a healthy surface.  It is more than evident that a huge percentage of folks view brown grass as unhealthy and green grass as healthy.  That is a very simplistic PoV IMO even if it may generally hold true in the world of biology.  It is also definitely the case that some courses are designed to play wetter than many on this site think is ideal conditions.  Although, I would hope those courses designed to be wetter are in wet climates - makes sense no? 

I think my club over-waters the course yet many people would kill for those conditions. We all see things differently, but what I want to see more of is resource conservation because it is self evident that this is the right thing to do.  Golf has a much bigger problem than how far the ball flies.  Golf has an image problem which could be terribly damaging if water really does become more and more valuable. Why wait until an agency tells you the water supply will be cut in half?  Get working on a long term plan to reduce inputs now - you know it makes sense.

Ciao   

[Patrick_Mucci]

Watching The Golf Channel's 2013 Open highlight show presents a nice contrast between Muirfield's consistent yellow-brown conditioning and Pinehurst's green down the middle approach.  Again, I LOVE #2 but really prefer the look of Muirfield - I understand the climate differences between the two but curious what the irrigation setup is at Muirfield?  Also reminded that Phil's back 9 performance was truly one of the greatest ever...he blitzed a strong leaderboard over there!

Keith,

You can't ignore geography and climate in your preference.

If Muirfield was in the Sand Hills of North Carolina do you think it would look the same ?

Let's not forget the importance of growing and maintaining grass in specific locations/climates.

Seminole, in South Florida doesn't overseed and depending on Mother Nature has fairways that range from brown to green

[Keith Phillips]

I think we are actually in violent agreement on several things:

1. firm and fast / yellow and brown are desired (note the colors at Muirfield are hardly uniform, but I'd describe them as 'mottled' - low-lying areas tend to be greener, etc)
2. weather and turf are completely different at (say) #2 or Seminole than at a Muirfield
3. Coore & Crenshaw are great...I've played 6 of their courses and love them all so this isn't about them (Dormie Club is my favorite btw).

I played Pinehurst 4 weeks ago and absolutely love the look, but have to agree with some others on a very specific question - is it going too far in a 'restoration' to revert to a decades-old single-line irrigation approach...I don't think #2 has rolled back their mowing heights etc. to the levels of the 1950s - others have brought up Muirfield and Seminole, so I'll ask the questions - 'do Muirfield and Seminole have single-line irrigation?' 'has any other similar quality club adopted that approach?' 'wouldn't it be more sensible to install a moderately more elaborate system but be judicious in the actual water application to achieve the conditions desired?'  The issue isn't brown vs. yellow vs. green, it is stripes of green down the middle of fairways that are otherwise brown. 

[Brent Hutto]

I've been reflecting on the whole set of issues around this single-row thing and have concluded that above all else, it is just intended as a blast from the past to 60-year-old golfers who think it's a cool retro look.

No question in my mind that precisely the same playing conditions could have been created using a more modern irrigation plan. This is a deliberate Look At Me bit of contrarianism that some folks apparently would like to see become the Next Big Thing and spark a whole industry around re-doing golf courses in a throwback style. It's the sprinkler placement equivalent of the boom in frilly edged bunkers that has captivated the imagination of this forum (and the golf world at large) for as long as I've been paying attention to such things.

Personally I love seeing a major championship course that isn't in UK offering a variation on wall-to-wall green. And I can't fault the playing conditions offered at last week's US Open one iota. But the single-row irrigation gimmick, like the wire-grass-clubps-and-stemmy-weeds-in-sand look of the waste areas is sheer iconoclastic exuberance. Cheerleading these two basically eye candy gimmicks to try and gin up an industry-changing retrenchment is just over the top.

There. I've come clean with it. Not saying I'm qualified to judge these things but it sure looks that way to me. I'd love to play the course as it is but I'd equally love to play it with a conventional irrigation setup and sandy waste areas not in the early stages of becoming choked with weeds.

POSTSCRIPT

Informal poll question..which of these three courses would you rather play yourself:

a) Pinehurst #2 the day after the 2014 US Womens Open
b) The Ocean Course at Kiawah the day after the 2012 PGA Championship
c) Shinnecock Hills the day after the 2004 US Open

[Joe Hancock]

Brent,

If you are including me in your above description, you would be wrong. I have utilized minimum input(irrigation included) during my whole career. It isn't a fad, it's stewardship on a personal level.

Joe

[Brent Hutto]

Joe,

I'm including only the renovation of Pinehurst #2, as well as the expected effect that its cheerleaders expect it to have industry-wide.

[Brett Hochstein]

Brent,

Tough call between A and C, but I think I would choose A.


One issue is that single row can be limiting for what you want to do, especially in times of drought, unless you commit to letting all the grass go dormant/die just the same.  That may be what I would have liked to see from Pinehurst in pushing the envelop further--letting the centers go almost as much as the outsides.  Perhaps the concern there was the back to back tournaments and the wear issues, and maybe we do see something more aggressive the next time around.  The concern might have also been it being too firm throughout and too many balls running into the scrub.  I totally understand this for resort play (the single line making good sense here), but the pros might not have needed the line of velcro since they handled the native quite well. (side note: Anyone arguing the rough was too easy--there were three players under par. Your argument is invalid.) Overall, I think the single row works for Pinehurst because it ensures that there will always be nice natural transitions into the native areas, no matter who is in charge, and that is a big key point of this recent restoration.

Outside of Pinehurst, I'm not so sure.  On a big wide open course, it hardly makes sense to me.  There are some open old farmland type courses with single line irrigation around Southeast Michigan that we used to play in the heat of August, and everyone would aim away from the fairway, bombing it down the hard pan rough for an extra 80-100 yards of roll.  Obviously, it's not really working there, unless you are a big fan of inverse golf.  

The important part is to take what Pinehurst is doing in spirit and discontinue irrigation throw inside the areas of regular maintenance.  That could be one head, 3 heads, or 8.  It doesn't matter as long as those transitions to the native boundaries are made properly.

[John Connolly]

Ben,

As for "leaning on chlorophyll", there's no other game in town when it comes to green v. brown turf. To not include it in the discussion is like leaving out Stimpmeter readings when discussing green speeds. The browning of leaves is due to only one thing - chlorosis - the loss of chlorophyll from the cell organelle chloroplast. It occurs when the plant is stressed - water loss, disease, nutrient deficiency, etc. For practical purposes when discussing golf turfgrass, it's due to drought-like conditions. As much as I want firm and fast, and support limiting irrigation on healthy turf, this notion of "browning" courses is a slippery slope and needs to be approached carefully by supers who understand the vulnerability of stressing turfgrass so severely. It's no different than pushing green HOC very low - it's not tolerable for most facilities for very long. Achieving ideal playing conditions cannot, longterm, come at the expense of plant health which is why this conversion from green and lush to brown and sparse everyone is moving towards should happen with caution and expertise. The existence of grass "living on the edge" will happen only at facilities prepared to deal with turf loss - so places with deep pockets (read: P2), patient memberships (of which there is a paucity) and those with black and white historical photos adorning their clubhouse hallways so no one can tell the course was actually a little green.
 

[Mike McGuire]

Color is important to the player so he can assess the shot. If you see brown you know it's faster and can play accordingly.  Or is someone suggesting a uniform playing surface?

[John Connolly]

Mike,

I think that's a great point. Regardless of the super's efforts, there is going to be heterogeneity in coloration when withholding water and using those coloration changes to guide shotmaking is strategically sound. Although I haven't read players quotes from the "Pinehurst Open", they may have utilized different parts of the fairway when trying to pull off different kinds of ball roll out.

[Will MacEwen]

The approach taken to irrigation at P2 is only worth a debate if you believe two things: 1) that the lie two inches from the side of the fairway should be equal to that of the exact middle and 2) color is the ultimate factor in how to judge a golf course's turf quality and not playability or soil moisture.

I think those fairways were just gorgeous. And it should be noted that the team at Pinehurst understand and embrace the concept of hydraulic conductivity moreso than most folks in the irrigation world do.

Ben, with regard to point 1 (and understanding that I have no idea what the actual lies were like on the weekend), if the strategy of the hole suggests that the left edge of the fairway provides the preferred angle of attack, should the lie there be just as good/reliable as the centre of the fairway?

I realize we are cutting this pretty fine, just curious as to your thoughts.  I will also acknowledge that i am rarely accurate enough with the driver to favour anything but the centre line of the fairway.

[BCowan]

The other thing you have to consider is that when turf is stressed/firm it can't handle cart traffic.  With cartballin popular in the states, one has to ask if this is double at most courses.  P2 is cart path only. 

[Adam Lawrence]

The other thing you have to consider is that when turf is stressed/firm it can't handle cart traffic.  With cartballin popular in the states, one has to ask if this is double at most courses.  P2 is cart path only. 

I understand what you are saying but stressed and firm are not the same thing, even if sometimes there is some correlation. It's a mistake to conflate the two.

[BCowan]

Adam,

    You are correct, I didn't mean to lump them together. 

[Jason Thurman]

In fairness, I didn't find the conditions at No. 2 this week very reflective of normal conditions that I have witnessed at the course. The USGA undoubtedly decreased irrigation in the days leading up to the tournament, resulting in the turf on the edges that generally receives water getting parched and browned out. For resort play, my experience is that there is a foot or two of turf on the perimeter of the fairway that receives inconsistent water and bleeds into the native areas while the rest of the fairway turf stays green. It's a much less jarring presentation visually.

[Brett Hochstein]

Jason,

So how exactly did they achieve that?  Change nozzles?  Depressurize? Water manually?  I'm not an irrigation tech, so maybe I sound stupid here, but it isn't like they just shut off the outer heads (for there are no outer heads).