Thanks for the green expansion advice. In our restoration plan August of 2002 the course will be shut down until the following spring and in that phase the greens will be expanded back to their original dimensions (that has never been done before). We have excellent aerials and the 1939 one is as good an indication of the ideal dimensions of the course as could be found.
In the first phase the greens will be gassed and then expanded back to their original dimensions and reseeded with A4. At the same time as the green expansion the greenside bunkering will be restored.
A4 made me nervous at first as I was worried that this new "superfast" strain might hang us up the creek with speeds that needed to be maintained too high for our green slope and contours. I have since gotten some really good feedback from good sources that this is really not the case and that the ongoing OJT feedback on A4 is not as scary as at first thought. Our super is really excellent on greens and totally understands the speed/contour syndrome! In other words "softening" our greens will never really be an option! The membership is not into this and whoever may be will get outflanked in an NYC second.
As far as I know our greens have never been regrassed going all the way back to William Flynn in 1924. Is this possible?? We have a real evolutionary hodge-podge on our greens, although they have always been excellent and the reasons to redo them now are two. The timing is right to combine it with our green expansion but more so to get ahead of the poa/anthracnose problem!
This is a fairly early Ross course (1916-1919) and many of the Ross greens are squarish! Some of them have some interesting corner "flares" that were let go over the years. These will be really neat to restore and play! Some of the other greens are Perry Maxwell and they have their own look and playability. There are a couple of RTJ greens that aren't bad at all.
One green will be redone, added to and redesigned! This is hole #7 that is a Perry Maxwell ANGC's #13 "concept copy". The hole has devolved into sort of one dimensionality over the years with tree growth in the pay-off area and also some green redesign of Perry's green redesign. The hole concept is a straight "go/no go" short par 5 with interchanged features from ANGC basically accomplishing the same theme, concept, playability, options, whatever. I call it a "concept copy" because the hole is unrecognizable to its prototype although the theme, shot values etc are the same!
On this green-end redesign we are going to sort of work backwards and establish and set all the options for all the levels of players and then just carefully put them in the ground always mindful that what's being done will accomplish the playability were looking to get!
Since this green redesign was Maxwell we're hoping to do the green in such as way that the spectrum of the playability on and around the green will reflect Perry's internal style and surrounds. We even have a number of contours, mini-tiers, concave/convex, boomerang green features we can sort of work off of on his other holes that can be mixed around on this particular redesign to get the exact playability we want. I think it will work really well and make the hole about three times more optional and exciting than it's been in many years.
Some of the members are concerned this all might make the hole easier and I tell them it might if you hit three or four really excellent shots but if you don't the scores will be higher than previously.
I tell them that the sign of a hole that is not working well is one that has a realitively narrow scoring range and a hole that's a very good one has a far wider scoring range! I believe this to be true and the membership seems to be buying this logic.
Our super pulled out every stop imaginable this year to fight an attack of anthracnose and he did one helluva a remedial job. Given that we don't feel it prudent to take our present greens through that particular crap shoot for the forseeable future regrassing was decided upon.