What fresh hell is this?
The wisecracker humorist and Algonquin Round Table regular Dorothy Parker asked that question often in her essays for Vanity Fair, Ladies’ Home Journal and The New Yorker, among other Roaring Twenties publications. Golf course superintendents ask it far more often — often to themselves, and often before cutting from the earth a sample, 4¼ inches in diameter, of what they think is diseased turf, wrapping it in a damp paper towel and a sheet of aluminum foil, shipping it overnight to one of the handful of trusted diagnostics labs and waiting, often impatiently, for the results.
Upon receiving said samples, the experts at those diagnostics labs will, in turn, often ask themselves Parker’s famous question, as well.
There is no shortage of diseases spreading across golf course turf. Dollar spot. Leaf spot. Necrotic ring spot. Brown ring patch. Brown patch. Yellow patch. Large patch. Summer patch. Take-all patch. Take-all root rot. Pythium root rot. Pythium root dysfunction. Pythium blight. Southern blight. Spring dead spot. Fairy ring. Anthracnose. Thanks to burgeoning molecular biology tech, the number of diseases will almost certainly increase in perpetuity. Superintendents will continue to be flummoxed. Lab diagnosticians will continue to receive samples. The stress of the turf will continue to transfer directly to those who tend to it.
“I feel the pressure, I really do,” says Lee Butler, the longtime extension coordinator in Plant Pathology at NC State University, where he also heads the Kerns Lab. “It can be pretty stressful on our end. You can feel the stress even over the phone. You can hear it in their voice. You want to help. You want to figure it out.
“It’s serious business, and that’s why we take it as serious as we do.”
Butler has talked with plenty of stressed turf pros during his more than 25 years in Raleigh. He has also received plenty of samples that had him metaphorically scratching his head at first. Only about half of the samples he receives are diseased at all — the rest are plagued by abiotic issues, “like shade, drainage, layering, compaction, poor management decisions, over-regulation, under-fertilization, etc., etc., etc.” — and, as he says, “getting the diagnosis of no disease is just as important as a diagnosis.”
And a diagnosis of no disease is more fun and makes for a better story, at least in hindsight, than any of those diseases listed above.
Butler has peered through his microscope at turf samples discolored by a late-night golfer — and rather sloppy drinker — whose dripping beer bottle followed his errant putts around the greens. Same for samples marked by animal urine and human urine. The telltale difference between man and beast? “When you look at the photographs, you can always tell it’s a human who peed on the green,” Butler says, “because there’s a little trail.” Animals, conversely, tend to squat in one spot. Every spring and summer, there is an uptick in greens covered in little dots of sunscreen aerosols, the result of golfers protecting themselves against UV rays before three-putting again.
Vandalism and sabotage are common enough that Rich Buckley, director of the Plant Diagnostic Laboratory and Nematode Detection Service at the Ralph Geiger Turfgrass Education Center at Rutgers University, coined a term that would be at home in a Grateful Dead song: “Glyphosate is readily available, or it used to be,” he says, “and we’ve seen guys put it in balloons and throw them over the fence — glyphosate water balloons onto a putting green — and they broke and they made starlight splashes.”
Far less lyrical than a starlight splash? “Same guy got fired from two different golf courses and came back and wrote, you know, what he thought of the superintendents on a couple greens,” Buckley says. “I often wonder why people get so hateful.”
Not every abiotic sample is as nefarious or ignorant.
“Some superintendents will come in and if the grass is relatively green, they’re happy. Those are the guys who don’t ever send me a sample,” says Kurt Hockemeyer, turfgrass outreach specialist in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also manages the Turfgrass Diagnostic Lab. “Then there are superintendents who, if the grass is just a slightly different shade of green than it normally is, they’re immediately calling me up, pulling a plug and sending me a sample. And a lot of times, I say, ‘I can’t find any disease in here. The leaves look healthy, the roots look healthy.’ A lot of times, that’s a good enough answer. They just want that peace of mind that maybe there’s not disease there. But a lot of time, man, they just poke and prod and ask questions: ‘Did you look at this? Did you look at this?’ And I might have to hold onto that sample just a little bit longer so I can follow up with all their questions.”
Hockemeyer says no superintendent has ever called him a liar — at least to his face. “Probably behind my back,” he says.
Butler, meanwhile, estimates that about 5 percent of superintendents who send him a sample accuse him of not even looking at it. “A lot of that just boils down to they’re frustrated, and they’re convinced it has to be a disease,” he says. “Maybe they did something wrong and they don’t want to believe that. I’ve definitely had some tense phone conversations. The majority of the time, people are relieved to learn it’s not a disease.”
Butler, Buckley, Hockemeyer and every other diagnostics lab pro goes far beyond just looking at every submitted sample. They incubate and test. They stain and stare. After they reach their conclusion, they either call or summarize their findings in an email. How many greens committees have been swayed by the words of a scientist? (Perhaps the better question is: How many have at least considered the words of a scientist?)
Occasionally, a phone call or an email isn’t necessary: The sample has been hand-delivered.
One salesperson visited Hockemeyer so often after calling on Wisconsin superintendents and bringing him their samples that Hockemeyer developed a special policy. “He would just sit there and wait for me to immediately look at it, even if I was in the middle of looking at a different sample,” Hockemeyer says. “It annoyed me at first — No, you’ve got to wait in line — but then I reframed how I look at it. I could just immediately look at it, tell him what I’m seeing, show him the microscope camera, and that answer was good enough for him. I didn’t have to call him or write a report.” Ten or 15 minutes up front saved probably an hour later. “It just depends how you look at it.”
For particularly dire and immediate turf problems — say, during the days leading up to a big tournament — Butler has hopped in his car and visited a course to deliver a diagnosis. A course call, if you will. One PGA Tour agronomist who will remain unnamed visited Butler’s lab with a sample and stood over his shoulder while he worked.
“Once, Butler says, “a poor assistant from a prestigious golf course in Ohio drove through the night to get to us.”
The power of healthy turf has even helped at least one industry professional steer clear of a traffic ticket.
“One time, I had a guy drive in from Long Island, a really high-end, tournament-level course, and he got pulled over by the police because he was speeding down the Long Island Expressway,” Buckley says. “The cop’s talking to him through the window and the guy calls me and says, ‘Tell the police officer what you do and where I’m coming from.’ So, I’m on the phone telling the police officer, ‘He’s speeding because his grass is dying and they have a major situation.’
“And the guy got a warning and didn’t get a ticket!”
Turf diagnostics have also helped launch careers.
In August 1998, during the first week of his master’s program at the University of Maryland, Dr. John Kaminski happened to be in the diagnostics lab with legendary pathologist Dr. Peter Dernoeden when a curious sample arrived from what was then called Lowes Island Club — now Trump National Golf Club Washington D.C.
“I remember Dernoeden looking through the microscope that first day and being like, ‘Holy shit, this is crazy,’” Kaminski recalls. “And I looked through the microscope and I was like, ‘I don’t get it. I don’t know what this means.’”
Kaminski headed north that weekend to visit his girlfriend at Penn State, but he spent most of the next two days in the library, poring over and printing out research papers that he brought back to College Park, Maryland, and that eventually helped the pair identify creeping bentgrass and hybrid Bermudagrass dead spot — a disease that affects new construction putting greens on sand-based root zones and leaves behind large black fungal structures. Kaminski published his dissertation on the disease with Dernoeden seven years later.
“That disease made me more than I made that disease, for sure,” says Kaminski, now the director of the Golf Course Turfgrass Management Program and professor of turfgrass science at Penn State University. “I didn’t even know what I was looking at. Dernoeden knew it was something special because he had had 30 years of experience.”
Today, Kaminski looks at the diagnostics lab as the perfect place for students to learn.
“I really encourage all of my students to do pathogen isolations on media and see what the cultures look like and compare them to all the other diseases that are out there,” he says. “You can’t just look at a sample and say, ‘I know what that is.’ It’s good to play with it. You put it under different temperatures, you isolate it, you put it in different types of media.
“One of the pleasures of running a diagnostics lab and having grad students is using it as a training ground. You’re going to find it first coming into diagnostic labs. It’s the perfect training ground for grad students.”
Fresh eyes for fresh hell.
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