Reflecting on progress

On a blustery late-March afternoon, Maketewah Country Club superintendent Ted White gently touches the brakes of a utility vehicle, places his beige Keen work shoes on maturing T1/Alpha bentgrass, and begins a show and tell atop the 17th fairway.

The Cincinnati club’s final drive-and-approach-shot hole — both nines end on par 3s — features a flat landing area flowing into a 50-foot descent. Wearing three layers, including a black full-zipper jacket, White is standing three yards in front of where the dramatic slope begins. A golfer sees a downhill shot into a green beneath a steep hillside protected by four bunkers. White sees 15 years of progress.

A cluster of ash and pine trees once covered the hillside left of the green. Unsightly maples rested right of the green, masking views of the 15th green and 16th tee. Six bunkers previously flanked the green.

Whenever tussles with nature become overwhelming or the demands of guiding a private club through an ambitious transformation pile up like spring paperwork inside an accounting office, White heads to No. 17. “This is my comfort zone,” he says. “When I want inner peace, I come here.”

Later in the afternoon, while sitting at a table inside a clubhouse banquet room with beamed ceilings and a hardwood floor, White reflects on those quiet moments on Maketewah’s penultimate hole.

“That’s an area where I can see the property,” he says. “It’s always a great vantage point. It’s a calming influence to be there and see the property and see what we have created.”

White arrived at Maketewah, a revered club within the city limits, in 2008, when maintaining high-level turf for a membership filled with low-handicappers and seeing any hole other than the one somebody was playing proved difficult. Founded in 1910 by a group of prominent Cincinnati business leaders, including grocery store visionary Barney Kroger, Maketewah occupies 160 acres surrounded on three sides by neighborhoods with hardy brick homes.

Maketewah is a Native American word for winding creek. Coincidentally, nary a water hazard covers the site. The club uses municipal water to irrigate its turf, and a new Toro Lynx irrigation system installed during the current phase of a multi-part restoration will yield the most precise water management regimen in club history.

Land such as the descent on No. 17, a ravine intersecting Nos. 6, 7 and 8, bends in the 10th and 14th fairways, and hillsides ideal for greens, represents Maketewah’s main physical attraction. Over the last 15 years, more of that land has been revealed by White and architect Brian Silva. Their work has returned Maketewah to a form Donald Ross intended. Tom Bendelow designed the first iteration of Maketewah, with Ross redesigning and refining the course in the 1920s.

After following his grandfather Howard White to residential and commercial landscaping jobs, White landed a position as a teenager on the turf team at Brookside Country Club in his hometown of Canton, Ohio. White then attended Ohio State University and worked at nearby Scioto Country Club. Brookside and Scioto are two of Ross’s heralded Buckeye State designs. Those stops helped him understand the appeal and nuances of Ross’s approach, including how the architect used myriad Ohio terrain.

As a veteran superintendent, White’s legacy is elevating turf conditions and uncovering elements of a fascinating Ross design in the southern part of the state. Maketewah reopens this month following the completion of the third phase of a three-phase restoration. The first phase commenced in 2012, although preliminary work, including tree management, started almost immediately following White’s hiring.

“I know some people like the privacy of a hole and not seeing anybody, but that’s not the way this course was designed,” says assistant superintendent Dave Basil, who played the course numerous times before White’s arrival and the start of the master plan. “This course was designed to see everything. Small piece of property. See everything. Now it’s coming back to it.”

Maketewah has fewer trees, more yardage from the back tees, less yardage from the front tees and more fairway bunkers than it did in 2008. The practice facilities are modern. Timeless land is visible. “We want to be known as a great Donald Ross course,” White says. “We want to be known as one of the best Ross courses in the state.”

Cincinnati is the hilliest of Ohio’s major cities and many neighborhoods rest on bluffs above the Ohio River. Maketewah appears flat when driving past the fence surrounding the club. But the main club drive dips, offering a glimpse of a 2½-acre short game area installed in 2012 during the first phase of the master plan. A patch of woods with scrubby undergrowth engulfed where some of Ohio’s best golfers now hone their scoring shots. Bentgrass stripes are in the foreground and three chimney tops hover in the background as members and guests approach the brick-and-stone Tudor-style clubhouse.

A desire to meet the demands of the 2020s while keeping elements of the 1920s charm are the impetus behind the conditions White’s team wants to provide despite a varied climate. The crew has experienced years when greens needed to be mowed in January. The crew also has experienced snow in early spring. And Cincinnati summers can be as fierce as the city’s professional baseball teams of the 1970s.

Basil started his turf career in Georgia. He says Cincinnati summers are comparable to the season in the Deep South — with the added challenge of keeping cool-season turf thriving. “Believe it or not,” he adds, “they are very similar. Humidity is terrible in both places. You’re waking up in the morning in Cincinnati and it’s 70 degrees, and the plant can barely breathe. You’re down in Georgia, waking up and it’s 75 degrees, and the plant is barely able to breathe.”

The new irrigation system will help produce consistent conditions by “allowing us to dial in water a little better, especially with our fairways,” White says. Silva’s restoration expanded fairways from 23 acres to 25 acres, creating multiple approach angles into greens.

White’s familiarity with the Toro Lynx Control System and the company’s support structure influenced the irrigation system selection. “I have always gotten the best support from Toro and a Toro irrigation system is what I have always been accustomed to,” White says. “I know it, I’m familiar with it, I know I’m going to get the support I need and that’s been helpful.”

The precision extends to Maketewah’s plant protectant program as White’s team integrated a Toro 1750 Multi-Pro with GeoLink GPS sprayer into its operation before the renovation. The club also retrofitted its Toro Multi Pro 5800 sprayer with the GeoLink system. Relationships with Toro district sales managers Scott Papania, who covered the Cincinnati area before being transferred to Florida, and Andy Cook increased White’s comfort in adopting GPS-guided spraying.

“If something can help make it easier on our team and to put the product exactly where we need to put it, I’d be foolish to not start looking at some of that stuff,” White says. “That comes from the relationship I have with Toro. The relationship I have with people like Scott Papania and Andy Cook are the reasons I use the Toro GPS sprayers. I can go back to Scott on it. Any time I need help, he’s going to help me.”

The final phase of the restoration included a course-wide revamp, redesign and regrassing of tees with T1/Alpha bentgrass. The project increased back-tee distance by 300 yards and shortened the forward-tee distance by 184 yards. White mapped the new tees using the Toro 1750 Multi-Pro with GeoLink GPS sprayer. “It gives us the exact square footage of what we have,” he says.

A sprayer is an especially important maintenance tool in Cincinnati, where disease concerns range from snow mold to Pythium, fast-growing weeds suddenly emerge, and the Annual Bluegrass Weevil has recently invaded playing surfaces. Sprayers operate regularly from March through November, according to White, and the Toro 1750 Multi-Pro with GeoLink GPS unit treats turf in some tough growing environments, including 12 greens beneath trees and ivy-covered fencing along the periphery of the property.

Reflecting on the technology he has used to improve Maketewah over past 15 years, White says, “I want to make sure I’m not one of those superintendents who is a dinosaur and not trying new things. I’m also looking out for the future, too, if it can help us.”

Combining design features from its past with modern maintenance practices and tools positions Maketewah for prosperity. The club Kroger and his business peers — including Procter & Gamble co-founder William Procter — fills more than half its membership with single-digit handicappers. Even with the suburban migration of the past half-century, fabulous golf remains played on thoughtfully preserved urban sites such as Maketewah.

White can’t see downtown Cincinnati when he stands on the 17th fairway. But the quiet moments give him a sense he’s enhancing a special place in the city’s lore.

“You see the great golf courses that are leaving us,” he says. “To keep one revived is great. It’s important to keep these inner-city clubs going and letting people know that, ‘Hey, this is still a great club. It doesn’t matter if it’s not out in the suburbs. It’s a great club.’ What our club has been able to do in the inner city here to keep striving and pushing forward by building the membership and investing in the club is huge.”