Removing the first cut around fairways

[Adam Lawrence]

Niall - I think you have slightly grasped the wrong end of the stick. I was agreeing with Sean's comments on parkland courses.

[Bill Crane]

Curious - was this a common practice on Golden Age courses in the 1920s?  Did certain architects have first cuts and not others?

Are courses that are doing historic restorations adding this feature?

Inquiring minds want to know.
 
Perhaps it is similar to cutting fairways to bunker ages, that is being done when fairways are widened in a restoration.


Wm Flynnfan

[Thomas Dai]

Curious - was this a common practice on Golden Age courses in the 1920s?  Did certain architects have first cuts and not others?
Are courses that are doing historic restorations adding this feature?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Perhaps it is similar to cutting fairways to bunker ages, that is being done when fairways are widened in a restoration.
Wm Flynnfan

Bill,

I suggest that any such practice was a result of the sort of mowers available (and the cost). These days sufficiently well financed clubs can have multiple types of mowers with blades (and thus cut lengths) that are quickly adjustable. Hence lots of flexibility.

In yee olde days mowers were nowhere near as sophisticated so the flexibility to cut grass to different lengths wasn't really a practical (and financial) option. It was fairway cut and greens cut and that was probably it. The rest was left as it grew or was cut (eaten) by animals.

I'm pretty sure this will have remained largely unchanged in the UK until probably some time around the 1970's, and probably still does on some of the more rural/basic courses mentioned on GCA from time-to-time, although I imagine someone with greater knowledge of course machinery could be more precise with matters.

atb

[Brent Hutto]

The course where I took up the game about 20 years ago kept the rough pretty sparse but there was no intermediate cut between there and the fairway. And since at the time they had single-row irrigation and quite wide fairways, the rough didn't get much water and wasn't lush at all unless it was a very rainy summer.

Pretty sure the guy who owned the course was far too cheap to have multiple kinds of mowers. In fact, I'd imagine at least as late as 1998 or so it was basically "the fairway mower" (quantity one) and "the greens mower" (quantity one). Mowing of the rough was with some pull-behind deal that looked like a bushhog to my untrained eye.

I clearly remember the summer they ugraded their irrigation and then started with the thick rough, intermediate cut, fairway cut and all that stuff. It was about five years after I had started playing and man, missing the fairway was all of a sudden a stroke wasted for me. To add insult to injury the new irrigation trimmed about 10-20 yards off the huge rollout I used to get in the fairways.

Fast forward a decade-plus and the original owner's son is back to pretty much his dad's early-90's maintenance. Hard, fast fairways (with cuppy lies) and there are two cuts of rough but the deeper cut is back to being hit or miss as to how much grass is there. I felt right at home when I played there recently for the first time in 10 years.

[William_G]

This is Merion - right side of 1st fairway taken in October 2012, some 9 months or so prior to the US Open. No first cut - just straight from fairway to primary cut. Our host was saying that they were planning to mow the edges with a mower set up slightly tilted from side to side so that the height of cut was around 2" or so at the fairway edge and grading up to around 4" back about 5 feet or thereabouts (I'm recalling these heights from memory as I didn't write them down). Whether they used this tilted mower or not I don't know.

And the fairways weren't too wide either  - a real premium on accuracy.

Merion looks about the same today...

With the a narrow piece of property, adding first cuts would either narrow the fairways or bring holes closer together.

[Paul Gray]

I have introduced it several of the courses I work with, since having first experienced it at Renaissance Club a few summers ago.

Key for it to work are sandy soil, fescue roughs that aren't irrigated and very wide fairways.

Frank,

Exactly.

As you're aware, I'm a member at a course where the transition to bare, fescue rough is, or rather would be, the most natural thing in the world. I've recently expressed this opinion with a view to returning the first cut to fairway but I'm not holding my breath.