Shinnecock Back to Past
os
By Mark Herrmann
Staff Writer
One of Mark Michaud's first projects as course superintendent at the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club was to clear out all the vines, brush and trees that just didn't belong. Seeds for those plants had been carried from the South by the Hurricane of 1938 and dropped haphazardly in Southampton, proving that the forces of nature can do some weird transplanting.
Those forces can make some perfect matches, too, as far as Michaud is concerned. They have brought the U.S. Open to Shinnecock Hills, with the fourth visit scheduled for June 17-20. They also brought a head greenskeeper from a plum job at Pebble Beach to the East End of Long Island and one of the world's most natural courses.
"I always said Pebble was the greatest course in the world when I worked there," Michaud said in his office at the course recently. "Then I came here and I saw this and I was blown away. Everybody always asked me, 'Where do you go from Pebble? You could only go down from there.' This is the one place I could come to and go up."
With the 2003 season having ended, it is natural for golfdom to look forward to the 2004 Open. Yet it isn't a time of mad scrambling for Michaud and his staff of 26.
"Everything is done," Michaud said. "Now we've just got to not screw things up and do too much to it."
They didn't have to rebuild lots of tees or extend fairways, as many clubs do in the age of big-hitting golfers and high-tech equipment. The greens crew made the course only 75 to 80 yards longer, Michaud said. Their more important work was restoring the 163 bunkers to their original shapes. Beyond that, they tore out a lot of scrub trees and brush that allowed better air circulation for the grass and opened vistas to reveal what a great job nature did creating the place to begin with.
"If you look to where golf was born in Scotland, this is the closest thing to it," he said. "When you stand on the first tee, you can see a bump in the ground that goes across the first fairway, the ninth, the 18th, all the way over to 14. Now they build courses and try to create that. They put mounds down both sides and call it a Scottish links course. But it's just not the same. Here, they kind of went out and placed the golf course on the natural terrain."
It is just the right place for a 42-year-old native of Rochester, N.Y., who would rather be outside than indoors and would rather be on a "pure course" than anyplace else. "You have to be born into doing it," he said. "I felt like I found what I was put on the Earth to do the first day I walked on a course."
He has that feeling every day, when he sees the rich green of the Shinnecock fairways next to the shades of brown and purple from the natural grasses that make the course such a distinct and appealing Open site.
"It's not only a beautiful setting, it's a heck of a test of golf," said Tim Moraghan, director of agronomy for the United States Golf Association. "I might vote for Shinnecock to be No. 1 in the world. What Mark has done is gather old photos and go back to the traditional look, the original intention of the architect. He cleaned it up, aired it out and made it a true links course."
Michaud started there in January 2000 as successor to the late Peter Smith. The latter was a second-generation superintendent at the club whose work for the 1986 and 1995 Opens helped Shinnecock earn a spot in the Open rotation. Smith was a leader of the Shinnecock Indian Nation and was proud to be a descendant of the men who endured clothes-ripping bushes to build the original 12-hole layout in 1891. He left in 1999 to be course superintendent at Foxwoods Resort, which is owned by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. Smith died at 47 of a heart attack Dec. 13, 2002.
"He was part of this course. His family is deep in the history here," Michaud said.
Michaud built on those roots. He has used the latest advances in turf management and 20 years of experience. For instance, he and his staff have carefully monitored soil cultures and made the greens firm enough for an Open -- golfers will have to place a shot precisely or be in trouble. And the uprooting of trees and underbrush was more than an aesthetic pursuit. It gave wider berth to the South Fork winds that make Shinnecock so difficult.
"Mark has a real feel for what it takes to condition a course, and he has a real good eye for the proper look of the particular course he's working on," said Moraghan, who has known him for 14 years.
Anyone who knows Michaud knows that his career started basically by accident. He was working in a computer factory that built memory banks for hotel phone systems. But the company went out of business. "So we were standing there on the unemployment line, in the middle of winter in Rochester, N.Y.," he said, adding that it didn't take much prodding from a friend to move to Orlando, Fla.
There, in 1983, he saw an ad for a greenskeeping job at Grand Cypress Resort. He jumped at it.
"Even when I first started playing golf, I used to be fascinated with the equipment," he said. "I'd be playing, but I'd always be watching the mowers and seeing the grass clippings go flying out. I always thought that was so cool."
Nothing changed when he was assigned to clean reeds from a pond that had alligators and water moccasins. "I was like, 'Man, this is awesome. I don't want to do anything else,' " he said.
It turned out he was a natural. "You could tell immediately that he had a passion for it," said Tom Alex, director of golf course maintenance at Grand Cypress. "It's like any other business: When it becomes part of your soul, you absorb everything. You'd tell him something one time and he had it."
At Alex's suggestion, he enrolled at the agricultural and technical college in Cobleskill, N.Y. Then there was an internship at Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester, just in time for the 1989 U.S. Open. In 1993, he was off to the Pacific Coast as an assistant superintendent at Pebble Beach. Four months later, he had the top job, and two years after that, he added the title of agronomist for all four world-class courses in the Carmel, Calif., area.
"That's kind of what I thrive on. If there's not a lot going on, I'm not happy," said the man who dealt with the winter rains in California during the annual AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. He once took a puddle- dispersing helicopter ride with Clint Eastwood and John Denver.
Michaud also got Pebble Beach ready for the 2000 U.S. Open and was gratified when the place achieved a No. 1 ranking in Golf Digest's list of the Top 100 courses in the country. Still, he was intrigued by Shinnecock.
His wife wanted to move back east (although they since have split, he still sees her and other family members on trips to Rochester). Michaud also relished the changing seasons: deer hunting season starting on Oct. 15, duck- hunting season from November to February, fishing season year round, all close to his Hampton Bays home.
He knows what to expect of the next seven months. He has attended the past eight U.S. Opens, usually volunteering to fill divots, rake bunkers and mow grass. He has worked at the Masters and Ryder Cup (wet greens allowed him to have, in his words, "squeegeed for my country.")
"I've probably lived about five lives," he said. This is the best one so far. He finds the members respectful and appreciative. He believes Shinnecock can rise from sixth to first in the national ranking. Said Moraghan: "I think the U.S. Open competitors next year are going to be amazed."
The landscape is spectacular, on and between the holes. "It changes about five times a year. We go from green to brown to maroon to pink to brown again," Michaud said. "There's no place better than this."