Do golfers even notice?

[Anthony_Nysse]

  In the direction that the economy has going and seems continue to go, many golf courses are struggling and superintendents are being asked to make cuts and adjust schedules, yet produce the same conditions are years before. As labor is the largest, single line item in any golf course budget, many superintendents have less members on staff than previous years. Hand labor, walk mowing tees, greens, approaches, hand raking bunkers and hand work in general, requires many people on a day to day basis. A lot of superintendents are looking at combinations of triplexing/walk mowing greens, tees and approaches, machine raking/handraking bunkers and even removing triplex fairways unit for the faster, with 5 plex.  
   This being said, do most golfers even notice if bunkers are hand raked? Do golfer noticed is greens are walk mowed? Tees? Do they know that this a a large reason why greens fees can be so high? What do golfers think that difference is between the more labor intensive walk mowing/handraking vs triplexing greens/machine raking bunkers?

A walkmowed green at Arcadia Bluffs


A walk mowed tee at Sage Valley


A handraked bunker at Bedford Springs


A triplexed fairway at Kinloch


Tony Nysse
Asst. Supt.
Colonial CC
Ft. Worth, TX

[TEPaul]

Tony:

I can't really speak to walk-mowing greens vs an alternative but at my course we went to hand raking bunkers with apparently no cost increase (perhaps because it wasn't easy getting sand-pros in and out of most of our bunkers----eg we had to use planks).

[Anthony_Nysse]

Tom,
  I know what you're talking about. We machine rake twice a week to smooth out the floor, but we always have to put down a piece of plywood for the machine to get into and get out of the bunker. We also have to blow the tire tracks that leave sand behind once out of the bunker. There isnt much difference on our part.

Tony Nysse
Asst. Supt.
Colonial CC
Ft. Worth, TX

[Adam Clayman]

Anyone who says they can speak for everyone shouldn't be listened to. My guess is the more it costs to play, (or join), or the more truly sophisticated, notice. Does it matter to have every little anal detail perfect spending 6m a year, like that bastion of every thing good about our sport, Augusta Nat'l, does?

[Bill Gayne]

It depends on your branding. At Kinloch and Sage Valley it does (I don't know enough about the other two courses).

An analogy would be Chryslers ownership of Mercedes and the  quality and feel of the before and after. Once the brand of quality and attention to detail is gone it's hard to get back. You can't say we believe in it when times are good but will compromise when things go south.

[Anthony_Nysse]

As a note, all of the above courses walk mow thier tees and greens, hand rake thier bunkers.

[TEPaul]

Tony:

You know it may be a bit OT to your subject (or perhaps worth its own thread) but my suggestion for maintenance departments that are facing up-coming budget cuts is to do their very best to really "line-item" all their various maintenance expenses and then just put them all on the table (broken out) for their golf and green committees and boards and memberships to examine and then tell them something has just got to go in these hard times and just get the club to pick what they want to sacrifice on a line item basis.

If maintenance departments can do it that way it should help them get somewhat out of the line of fire of future unreasonable expectations and demands.

[Ronald Montesano]

It would depend, in my neophyte's opinion, on the sophistication level of the golfer.  A golfer might notice the difference, probably would notice the difference, but would not be sophisticated enough to know what the difference entailed.  Tony, from your perspective, does a hand-raked bunker offer playing qualities that a machine-raked bunker does not (more spin, better lie, less plugs)?  Continuing on, does hand-mowed on the greens, fairways, tees offer more than machine-mowed?

[Anthony_Nysse]

Tony:

You know it may be a bit OT to your subject (or perhaps worth its own thread) but my suggestion for maintenance departments that are facing up-coming budget cuts is to do their very best to really "line-item" all their various maintenance expenses and then just put them all on the table (broken out) for their golf and green committees and boards and memberships to examine and then tell them something has just got to go in these hard times and just get the club to pick what they want to sacrifice on a line item basis.

If maintenance departments can do it that way it should help them get somewhat out of the line of fire of future unreasonable expectations and demands.

  Tom,
  Part of what you write is what I'm trying to get at. If golfers even can tell the difference if the turf is walk mowed, handraked, handsprayed, handtrimmed, etc....I know some clubs are really facing these issues and must make changes. Does a membership/public even know that courses do these actions? I want to believe that our membership, and the ones I've worked for before, have....

Tony Nysse
Asst. Supt.
Colonial CC
Ft. Worth, TX

[Bruce Leland]

Tony: my guess is that the average member at MOST clubs wouldn't notice the difference in playability but might notice the aesthetic differences immediately but that "visual" impact would lessen over time.

As a Supt. you can speak to this better than I but aren't there some long term benefits of walking greens vs triplex mowing in terms of compaction and wear and tear on the "1 R's" at the edges of the greens as well?  I'm sure there are other "practice specific" factors that members don't think of such as blowing the sand tracks after machine raking the bunkers

Current economic factors are a reality even for high end private clubs and communication surrounding these issues will remain important to the relationship between the Supt and the members.

[Anthony_Nysse]

It would depend, in my neophyte's opinion, on the sophistication level of the golfer.  A golfer might notice the difference, probably would notice the difference, but would not be sophisticated enough to know what the difference entailed.  Tony, from your perspective, does a hand-raked bunker offer playing qualities that a machine-raked bunker does not (more spin, better lie, less plugs)?  Continuing on, does hand-mowed on the greens, fairways, tees offer more than machine-mowed?

Ron,
  I think that handraking bunkers keeps the original design intact longer-less sand is being moved around and you don't have a machine ruining edges getting into and out of bunkers. It also offers a smoothe floor because many machines, unless there have a GREAT operator, will leave some sort of furrow. I think that walk mowing offers a better cut, less overall compaction, no hydraulic fluid and its better for the turfgrass. It is also easier to keep the original edge of the green by walk mowing the cleanup.

Tony Nysse
Asst. Supt.
Colonial CC
Ft. Worth, TX

[TEPaul]

Tony:

I just can't really answer who amongst a membership would notice that kind of thing and who wouldn't. At my own club I think some would notice (and probably some of those on the golf and green committee and board) but I believe a vast majority of the membership probably wouldn't even notice if you pointed it out to them and once you did they probably wouldn't care a hoot. My club has a relatively laid back membership that way though. Not as much as it used to be for sure but nevertheless.....

The only real problem amongst my membership is we have so many of them who are cross-over members of clubs like Merion and Pine Valley. I mean we have scores of them and that comparison sometimes gets their attention when it comes to our course.

[Mike McGuire]

Last year our super stopped raking bunkers completely on Sundays for a few months. No one noticed.

[Tom_Doak]

Anthony:

Yours are all good questions, and you can be sure as budget pressures increase that some clubs will take a step back toward the good old days on some of these line items.

Walk-mowing greens is obviously much more labor-intensive and more expensive, but one aspect of it that's overlooked is the potential for damage to the greens from hydraulic leaks from the triplex.  In Bandon they believe the damage from a hydraulic leak to the fescue has a very long-lasting effect, so they are still walk-mowing to prevent that possibility.

Bunker maintenance is the most obvious place to save.  I'd bet my house that before 1900 it was entirely the players' responsibility to rake bunkers after they were in them.  I wonder where that changed?  Oakmont?

[Peter Pallotta]

Tom - I'm always looking for reasons to repeat Jimmy Demaret's line about the rake they used to furrow the bunkers at Oakmont: "If they'd raked North Africa with it, Rommel would have never gotten past Casablanca".   

And I wonder if a 'dialectic' wasn't born there at Oakmont, i.e. once we started manipulating hazards so as to make them more penal, it opened the door to all sorts of manipulations -- more/less penal, more/less natural etc, depending on changing tastes/fashions and the ethos of a given club, but now an acceptable element of the game/maintenance practices

Peter   

[TEPaul]

TomD:

Another potential danger of triplex green mowing vs walk-mowing is that green peripheries primarily including tight corners tend to get rounded off with the former but not so much with the latter.

I think historic photographic evidence (particularly aerials) have already proven that with the onset of triplex green mowing just about all the old squarish greens from the old days got massively rounded out!

I don't think there's any question that a lot of the Macdonald/Raynor green shapes and styles got gradually altered in that evolutionary maintenance shift.

[Anthony_Nysse]

It would depend, in my neophyte's opinion, on the sophistication level of the golfer.  A golfer might notice the difference, probably would notice the difference, but would not be sophisticated enough to know what the difference entailed.  Tony, from your perspective, does a hand-raked bunker offer playing qualities that a machine-raked bunker does not (more spin, better lie, less plugs)?  Continuing on, does hand-mowed on the greens, fairways, tees offer more than machine-mowed?

Ron,
  I think that handraking bunkers keeps the original design intact longer-less sand is being moved around and you don't have a machine ruining edges getting into and out of bunkers. It also offers a smoothe floor because many machines, unless there have a GREAT operator, will leave some sort of furrow. I think that walk mowing offers a better cut, less overall compaction, no hydraulic fluid and its better for the turfgrass. It is also easier to keep the original edge of the green by walk mowing the cleanup.

Tony Nysse
Asst. Supt.
Colonial CC
Ft. Worth, TX

Tom,
  Walkmowing, to me, is the ONLY was to keep original greens edges, regardless of how good the operator may be.

[Anthony_Nysse]

What about walkmowed fairways, such as at Hudson National?

[Anthony Gray]

  Anthony,

  I don't notice the greens and tees, but I do notice the bunkers. Nice topic. I will try to notice more.

  Anthony

[Roger Wolfe]

   This being said, do most golfers even notice if bunkers are hand raked? Do golfer noticed is greens are walk mowed? Tees? Do they know that this a a large reason why greens fees can be so high? What do golfers think that difference is between the more labor intensive walk mowing/handraking vs triplexing greens/machine raking bunkers?

You might enjoy this... an analysis we did on the effect of cutting staff at a private club and an attempt to make it understandable to the "layman."  See attachment.

[T DeJonge]

In my experience, golfers don't notice when things are in great shape, they notice when something went wrong.  They don't notice the 80 perfectly maintained bunkers, they noticed  the one rock that was missed and effected their shot.
Secondly, you can get away with sub par conditions everywhere else if you have really good greens. 

[Anthony Gray]

  I think we notice the quality of the greens more than enything else.

  Anthony

[Carl Rogers]

I think that this is more of an over arching question than the world of golf.  It runs up against the entire notion of visual literacy.  

As to what do people notice, I have no way to generalize.

Sites such as Cape Kidnappers or PB are so overwhelming it is easy to overlook the course.

The late Mike Strantz makes you notice everything on the golf course.

[Alan FitzGerald CGCS MG]

Anthony

I had this very conversation with various different people last winter. The answer was simple; in most cases, most of the golfers won't know the difference. For example, how much difference is there between a hand mowed or triplexed approach or tee box. Once they are mowed on the same schedule and height, no one is really going to notice a difference, except for maybe larger lines. Now with saying that, and for the reasons mentioned in other posts I believe triplexing greens should be a last resort.

I've never really got the whole triplexing fairways thing; I understand there may be situations where it is necessary (like drainage issues requiring lighter machines) but for the most part the 5 gang machines use the same cutting units as the triplexes so any arguments of a better cut seem unjustified, again clubs might just like the smaller lines.

As for bunkers unless it's somewhere like PV with vast waste areas or a club with bunkers that are easily accessed, I believe Sandpros can do more damage than good, and while the short term saving might seem great, the long term damage makes it a false economy. Now the need to hand rake every bunker every day (depending on the amount of play) seems excessive and is an option that can be taken into consideration, however if left too long, one that players would notice if they are constantly trashed. Of course this then brings up the whole debate about bunkers being hazards…….

Rodger's PDF shows a great point. As I'm sure you are fully aware, any superintendent can make any budget work however the issue is not getting the course work done but how well it is presented. You can’t expect to buy a new Rolls Royce for Hyundai money…… (They both do the same basic job but look at what the extra buys you) I could maintain my course for 2/3 my budget, but our standards would be nowhere near where they are and although the drop in standards would probably not as noticeable over the first few months it would slowly deteriorate as everything that wasn't getting done compounded.

Which brings me to my final point of things that golfers wouldn't notice but agronomically are very beneficial. An example being spray-hawking greens, it might be an extra labor expense but it is very beneficial for a number of reasons not least keeping the heavy sprayer (and associated tire rutting) off them. Just remember that what is good or works for one club or membership will not necessarily be beneficial to another.

[Roger Wolfe]

I believe Sandpros can do more damage than good, and while the short term saving might seem great, the long term damage makes it a false economy. Now the need to hand rake every bunker every day (depending on the amount of play) seems excessive and is an option that can be taken into consideration, however if left too long, one that players would notice if they are constantly trashed. Of course this then brings up the whole debate about bunkers being hazards…….

During our renovation we abolished our sand pros (actually sold them to the construction company); but we made damn sure to explain the labor and budget necessary to hand rake 73 bunkers every day to their specifications.  Our bunkers are flat-bottomed and drain well, but its still a lot more expensive.  The greens committee and board agreed it was worth the additional expense.  Greens are king... keep them strong and a lot of other things are easily unnoticed or forgiven.