The Taste of Morning
“Someday we shall have, I hope, books written upon grasses and green-keeping, upon the methods and costs of construction, upon tools and maintenance and other problems connected with the building and administration of golf courses… There are some stunning things being done by the best men these days, but unhappily they are too busy to write about them.”
- Robert Hunter in “The Links”
The alarm went off at 4:30 that morning, and for just a couple of seconds, I forgot why I had set it in the first place. I rolled back over on my side, looked outside my window and couldn’t see anything through the pitch black. Even through the glass, I could feel the crispness of the early morning, a reminder that winter had not yet moved on into a more hospitable early spring. I sensed myself slowly drifting back into a heavenly state of unconsciousness when, to my luck, a spider the size of a watch dial sprinted across my forehead. I rocketed out of bed, slapped myself with the intent of killing whatever found itself on me, and then out of the corner of my eye, caught a glimpse of neatly folded clothes on my chair. Why are those… was as far as my brain needed to go to put it in an immediate state of panic: It was my first day of work, and I was running late.
I opened the maintenance shop’s big green door to find the smell of freshly brewed coffee and the assistant superintendent sitting in his office. I introduced myself and sat just outside, looking at the door and waiting to see who’d walk through. Every crew member, without fail, came in one by one with their lunch in one hand and jacket in the other, looked over at me, and nodded with a smile. I tried my hardest to conceal my incessant yawning and the occasional eye rub, but it was just too early to feel normal, and for as long as I worked on the crew, waking up that early never got easier. The nervous energy pent up from the day's uncertain future was the only thing keeping me from slumping over in my chair and falling back to sleep. I had never really seen what the maintenance side of the operations looked like. That’s what I was wanting to find out.
I was called over by the head superintendent into one of the meeting rooms where all of the crew had been sitting patiently for his arrival and list of daily tasks, and after he said a proverbial “Good morning” and “How is everyone?”, he then pointed over to me. “This is Nico. He’s gonna be helping us out a few days a week. Let’s try not to scare him off”, he said with a lighthearted grin and a chuckle that spread to some of the crew. There were some tasks, only a quarter of which I understood, given to individuals of the crew. And then like a huddle break in a football game, there was an explosion of squeaking chairs and doors flying open into the frigid morning.
A cacophony lingered outside while I still tried to put one foot in front of the other, and it seemed almost like no time at all from when the superintendent ended the meeting with “Let’s have a good day”, to speeding out onto the course. All I could see was the blur of dark, looming trees and our headlights guiding us towards our morning job. Some of the drainage lines had been sinking on one of the fairways, and the grass had to be cut open and filled with just the right amount of sand for the fairway to play evenly again. “I can’t see anything”, were the first childish words out of my mouth that first day, if not that first week.
“It’s pitch black. Of course you can’t see anything.”, he said as he started to position a headlamp around his forehead. I tried my best to see what was going on, but through the constant scurrying of headlamps surveying the ground and my complete lack of knowledge with everything that was going on, I was literally lost in the dark.
As the sun poked its head out from behind the neighboring hills, a hovering cloud started to just barely spit down upon us. The fresh rays of sunshine gleaming through the fragmented rain created color prisms with a sky blue backdrop. I had never seen that on a golf course, or anywhere for that matter. And while I was still gawking at some random weather phenomenon, the rest of the crew hadn’t shifted a single ounce of focus off of those drainage lines. They had seen weather like that before, and they would see it again.
Putting the turf section by section back onto the opened fairway raised a question for me. I asked “How long will this take to heal?”, almost inferring that I doubted it would ever look normal in a reasonable amount of time.
“About a month and a half or so”, said a crew member. That shocked me for some reason. My impatience was clearly showing. If I had worked there for a quarter as long as they had, I would’ve understood that grass, although time is needed, usually always comes back. It just needs a patient and a committed crew member to tend to it day in and day out, like a farmer growing a crop or a gardener with a flower.
“You must really love golf”, I interjected as they were putting the tools back into the Gator’s bed, still tending to the momentarily wounded turf.
“Oh I’ve never played. I don’t think anyone on the crew has.” My brain had a tinge of an aneurysm just then as I tried to compute what had just been said. It was the opposite of what I was expecting.
“Wait a minute. You’re telling me that most of these guys have worked out here for decades, and they’ve never even tried to swing a club?” He nodded his head and shrugged his shoulders.
“It’s mostly all about the money for them.”
The question arose. So if it’s not about the golf, then why do you work on a golf course?
I doubt most golfers know how long it takes for turf to heal. I doubt most golfers have ever experienced a sun shower at sunrise. And I know for certain that most golfers have no clue what it takes to maintain a golf course.
On top of that, I doubt that the only motivation involved in working at a golf course is a paycheck. Waking up at 3:00 and driving an hour and a half both ways doesn’t sound like the minimum amount of effort for the same wage.
I wanted to find out what the separation was between the two.
There’s cute rain, and then there’s real rain. Everyone wants to look outside and find a peacefully quaint setting, the smell of the freshwater hitting the asphalt like you’re living in a Jack Johnson song. Can’t you see that it’s just raining. There ain't no need to go outside… doesn’t resonate with those whose job it is to actually be out there. “Comfort is for the people who pay my salary”, a crew member once told me. It’s an honest but truthful statement.
I was still learning the complicated ropes of the business when the clouds above California decided to cry for four months straight. Cry is too cute for the type of weather we experienced. “Weep” is more apt. It was the heaviest rainfall the state had seen in decades.
The first bunker I ever raked on the job was flooding. The water was leaking through the hard packed sand faces from every side. “How do I stop this?”, I asked the crew member working with me.
“Just start shoving sand up into where the leaks are coming from”, was his solution, one that seemed that it could work however elementary in theory. But the water kept coming and I couldn’t do anything about it. I dropped my rake in frustration, put my hands on my hips, and with a sigh of dissatisfaction said “This is dumb. It’ll just flood either way, right?” The crew member looked at me with a soft smile, one with understanding and experience, and simply stated “Try your best, Nico. That's all we can do.”
A couple of weeks later I found myself picking up the remnants of a trench that was being dug out by hand. It was another deluge, and there was so much water and not enough drainage to direct it away from areas of play that, where there was large amounts of pooling water, an ad-hoc trench had to be created. The grass was fibrous and stubborn, not wanting to be easily picked up and hauled over to the dump area. I had assumed that my Gator’s bed was able to be automatically raised like a dump truck, but soon found out that although that feature was present on the control board, it hadn’t been working for quite some time. That’s probably why I found myself with it in the first place: everyone knew that it didn’t work and therefore picked another one. Luckily, I had a shovel with me.
I parked the Gator on a hill, climbed on top of it, and started to use the shovel over my knee as a lever, hoping that gravity would do most of the hard work for me. “One more big pile of mud soaked fescue and I’m a free man” I said to myself, there being only 10 more minutes in the day when I felt the shovel’s tension release and heard a loud crack. The shovel had snapped in two and I was suddenly on the ground with the wind completely knocked out of me, looking up at the sky while rain droplets found the center of my eyes like heat seeking missiles. The words “Try your best, Nico. That's all we can do.”, kept ringing in my ears. It made me get back up on the Gator.
Effort is one of the only things that these men are able to control. They can’t control the weather, as much as they’d like to avoid torrential downpours. They can’t control if their equipment breaks down in the middle of a tee box. They can’t even control the jobs they get tasked with doing day to day. But they are able to give all of themselves to that task. “When they give me work, it’s very important. It’s my duty to give 100 percent.”, says the crew member that’s been working in the mud for eight hours.
I find “duty” to be an interesting word choice. Most people use “duty” when referencing their family or country, I know I have. But I’ve never used that word with regards to a job. And that right there tells you a little something about the average crew member: they find it their duty to make it a great place.
I always thought that courses were maintained the same every day. Other than the occasional crazy pin placement, players see enough consistency to assume that there is no real change with set-up on a day to day basis. There's an unseen tension that exists: the variability of the outcomes of a course’s set up is intentionally small - that's what we as players experience; but the variability of any two or more particular individuals' work output could be quite large. So how does this tension between input and output get managed? At the heart of this balance is the unique team dynamic at play in course maintenance and set-up. It’s all enabled solely by a crew that works as a cohesive unit - crew members who are capable and skilled enough to work on a variety of tasks, filling in for each other and joining forces when necessary. Independence and sole expertise only go so far. Interdependence truly rules the day.
The head superintendent has full control over the turf grass program, yes. That’s the job description. But he has to put an invaluable amount of trust in certain members of the crew. Those crew members that are, say, ripping up greens when aerification week comes around; a process, and a grueling one at that, involving the full attention and effort of everyone there. You can’t just let anyone rip up your greens.
The crew members I worked with decided where the pins would be cut everyday, not the super or his assistants. Even for tournaments, those pins were selected and cut to perfection by people who have never played a day in their lives, a fact that I still find ironically entertaining.
Mowing every aspect of a golf course is nothing like mowing your front yard. The only similarity between the two is that both involve blades. There are numerous different mowers used for a myriad of tasks: mowers for fairways, mowers for the rough, mowers that one can ride and walk on a green. The mowing patterns you see on the fairways and greens don’t get there by just steering the machine in the right direction. Crew members have to be pin-point accurate and, a lot of the time, have to work as a team to maintain proper overlap throughout. It looks easy only because of who’s on the mower.
I got to know the veterans like a student gets to know a teacher. Everytime I would sit down with them, be asked to help them with a task, or pass them on the course in my crappy Gator, they were always teaching me. The untapped ocean of knowledge was the accumulation of 110 years at one course from just four guys, averaging 25 years at the course and 55 years old among them. They had worked here long before any renovation. They have seen superintendents, general managers, and other crew members come and go like seasons in a year. They have had to adapt to constant changes in the turf grass maintenance industry, everything from putting a centerline stripe down the fairway to raking a bunker in a completely different style. They have deep loyalty for not only their fellow crew members but also, on a less serious note, to certain brand names and pieces of equipment. So when I was first asked “Can I have that hose? I like it more than the other ones”, I was a little confused.
“Aren’t they all the same?”, I naively asked, not being nearly as entrenched in the world of hoses as he.
“This one has a bigger nozzle on it and it’s longer. It’s been the one I’ve used for years now.” I didn’t really care that much about nozzle preferences, but it still made me think about why it was a deal at all. I remember asking one of the vets about what kind of mowers they prefer, a riveting piece of conversation I randomly brought up one day over lunch. “Nothing runs like a Toro.”, he said.
“Isn’t it ‘Nothing runs like a Deere’?”, I asked, being familiar with John Deere’s long time slogan.
“No, no. John Deere didn’t know anything about golf.” No matter how accurate that statement really is it still proves a valuable point. Without their confidence in their equipment, the course will not look the same. A sharp mindset translates to a sharp looking course, no matter what task is given to the crew that morning.
Fertilizing greens with a push spreader is a simple enough job: fill it, walk it, spread it, overlap it, repeat it. Easy enough for a 24 year-old who doesn’t even know why the fertilizer is being used in the first place. That was a learning curve in and of itself. Jobs are given to those who don’t necessarily know how to do them; to those who have no clue but have the patience and malleability to try. It’s a “trial by fire” type method.
I filled up the Gator with the push spreader and enough bags of nitrogen-based fertilizer to kill a full-grown rhinoceros. I felt like it would save some time if I filled up the push spreader before loading it into the back of the Gator (I don’t want to explain how idiotic that sounds to me now), and off I went with a loose push spreader filled to the brim with fertilizer that smelled of ammonia, chicken excrement, and other chemicals humans just shouldn’t go near.
And I was on my merry way, not a worry in the world when the edge of a curb lunged out of nowhere and grabbed my front left tire, my foot still pressed to the floor. Just the slightest imperfection, when going fast enough, will allow the curb to twist the wheel completely out of anyone’s control; any half drunk guy in a golf cart knows what I’m talking about. I had the wheel in my hands one moment and was covered in a wave of smelly fertilizer the next moment, left helpless as my Gator was heading directly towards the 50 foot drop down to the creek that babbles and meanders its way through the property. Within a half of a second, if that, I thought I was going in and not coming out.
I hit the green guard rail and was rocketed forward in my seat, my left knee hitting the panel in front of me. I jumped out of the Gator and started to hobble around, not knowing what or if anything had happened to my knee. All I knew was that I couldn’t walk right, that was for sure. The Gator was still rocking back and forth over the ravine like a teeter-totter. Do I call for help and risk being yelled at, laughed at, or worse, fired? Or do I muscle up and get myself out of the hole I’ve dug myself in? Fear took over and I chose the latter, dragging the Gator back up to solid ground.
I hobbled around every green that afternoon with a dented knee, a dented hood, and even more painful, a dented pride. But I didn’t have to. I finally had to walk into the office with a grimace on my face and sheepishly say that I had properly messed up some expensive machinery. I don’t know what I was expecting as a response, maybe palms to the forehead and flagrant incendiaries. But what came out was something that taught me a lot about how the crew operated. It was an “Are you okay?”, and it was the only question asked. Not “Is the Gator reparable?”, or “How much paint did you swap with the guard rail?”, but a genuine concern with whether or not I was able to put one foot in front of the other.
“Everyone here has had an accident or two out here.”, the assistant superintendent said with a look as though he had a specific story in mind. “Lord knows that I can’t say I’m perfect. I spun out the spray rig (a hefty, technical, and yes, expensive piece of machinery that sprays fertilizers and other agents onto the surfaces of the course) and crashed it in the creek next to the first green last week.” Each member of the crew at some point learned that they can’t do everything by themselves, and that it’s a skill to know when and who to ask for help. It’s a team. One teammate gets pushed down on the field, and another helps him up. One teammate accidentally puts his spray rig into the creek, and the other teammate gets a winch and pulls him out.
There is an interesting Venn diagram that is drawn between the player and the crew member. There are obvious outer wings where nothing about these two subjects are alike in any way, which makes sense. They live completely different lives. The average crew member doesn’t know much about what goes into physically playing the game of golf, the rules and traditionally charged pieces of etiquette. Another example can be that the player lives close to if not on the course itself while the average crew member usually has to cross numerous county lines in order to get to work. But within the natural partitions that exist, there are incredibly important similarities.
There is something to say about both parties enjoying the outdoors. There was a crew member that painted houses for a living. It was his passion. Then the deluge came and he had to start looking for another source of income. His only requirement: it couldn’t be inside. It’s the morning, the cold, the fresh air; the feeling of being exposed to whatever elements came his way.
Ajeet grew up in a region in India with very little relief from the sun and its heat. Even in the mornings, the humidity was incessant. He didn’t know anything else until he and his family moved to the United States when he was in middle school. The recollection of that first morning for him is still visceral. The crisp, dry morning air felt foreign on his face, like jumping into a cold pool for the first time. It was more than refreshment. It tasted like a new life in America.
Still to this day, Ajeet seeks that feeling. The sting of the early morning reminds him of his journey here, a journey that included learning English from famous cartoons so that his accent wouldn’t seep through, afraid of what might come from the average ruthless middle schooler. It is, bar none, his favorite part of the day. It reminds him of where he came from, where he wants to go, and the steps to make it happen.
Most importantly, both parties find community in golf’s setting. Just as golf supplies the community for the weekly foursome, golf performs the same exact magic with those that are working on the course. The truest form of golf doesn’t even have to be in the context of hitting a ball with a club, although that is a big part of it. It is finding joy and camaraderie through the very medium of golf, regardless of whether one plays it or not.
I never once talked to a member when I was working on the crew. Not because I didn’t want to or had a lack of questions I wanted to ask them about their course, but because it hasn’t worked its way into the game’s culture yet. There is no communication between the two subjects that share the course most. Isn’t there a problem with that? Aren’t there amazing benefits that we as players and golf knowledge seekers can gain from those who spend three times as much time on a golf course than we ever will?
I’m imagining a world where there is an ongoing conversation between a player and a crew member, checking in with each other about how their day is going and what they’re up to; how the player’s round is going and, for example, how long it will take for the new fescue to grow in. Everyone on the crew is opinionated and smart enough to answer that question. We know that these same conversations happen every day, all day in the pro shop and with the starter on the first tee, which is great. But for those who want to really know what is going on with the health of the course, the crew is where the untapped reservoir of information lies.
Brett was a student who played on the golf team at the university across the street, and it was his third day on the job; a job he was stuck with because there were no more positions in the pro shop where the rest of his teammates worked. I wasn’t “the new kid” anymore, Brett had sufficiently filled that role just by his facial expressions. I made myself available for him to cling to, being the only one who wanted to deal with another new guy. We got into a Gator and headed out to start our morning job of Hydrotaining some browned-out drainage lines. “Wow, it’s really dark out here in the morning.'' Zach said.
“Just wait until you have your first 4 am start. If you don’t wear a headlamp you won’t be able to see 10 feet in front of you.” It was the same conversation I had with a veteran crew member months ago. It reminded me of how cold it was on my first day, how new I once was, how the job had calloused me.
It was my last day working there, and Brett and I were driving slowly, taking in the last hour of the day in peace. There’s always a lull in the day, the last hour of the workday I started calling “the golden hour”, where all of the tasks given have usually been completed and the crew finds a blind corner of the property to sit in or slowly drive around and find something to do. We passed by the 10th green and figured we should jump into another crew member’s project and help him replace some troubled turf.
As we got back in the Gator afterward, he said “For some reason I can’t imagine that grass ever looking like it was always there.” I stopped, looked at him with a contemplative face, looked at my watch, and said “I want to show you something.” I drove him to where I spent my first day working on the 6th hole, raising sunken drainage lines. We got up to where the cut was once visible, and I asked Brett to point out where the cut had been made. He walked around for a little bit, shrugged his shoulders and gave up. It was a trick question, really. It all looked like a normal fairway. And as I told him where I had once cut massive pieces of turf out of the ground, he turned around with a grin. I told him that I remembered when we did that project and said to myself that I would never see it fully healed. Yet, here we were. Grass does heal. It just takes a crew.
