Dr. Michael Hurdzan has devoted much of his life to the turf industry. Today he is one of America’s most respected golf course architects. Earlier this month, he participated in a USGA symposium on golf course architecture along with fellow architects Gill Hanse, Robert Trent Jones II and Forrest Richardson.
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Based in Columbus, Ohio, Hurdzan has been the managing partner of Hurdzan Golf Design since 2012. Prior to that, he had a 15-year partnership with architect Dana Fry. His design credits include Erin Hills (Wis.), the site of the 2107 U.S. Open Championship, along with the renowned Militia Hill Course at Philadelphia Cricket Club, which will host the USGA Four Ball in 2020.
Hurdzan graduated from Ohio State and worked as a superintendent before deciding to make architecture his career. He is proud of the golf industry’s environmental record.
“There’s no question that almost all superintendents are environmentalists at heart,” he says. “They went into the business because they want to be outside. They want to be around nature and they have no interest in destroying it.”
Hurdzan is quick to point out that the industry has always been ahead of the curve on environmental issues Even during his undergraduate days at Ohio State, he was reading Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which warned of the dangers of pesticides. Hurdzan notes that in the 1950s products containing arsenic and lead were routinely used on golf courses; they were eventually outlawed.
Today, the issue is water. And with the summer of 2015 fast approaching, the golf industry is actively seeking ways to use less of it.
“Golf course have really led the way in developing the technology to save water,” Hurdzan says. “Everything from more efficient irrigation systems to the grasses that we use, to soil sensors There’s no question that living plants need water and golf courses are able to do more with less compared to home gardeners and people that have irrigated front lawns.”
Hurdzan notes that today’s strains of turfgrass need less water and nutrients than many golfers realize. “A plant is a pretty adaptable thing," he says, "and it can get by with a lot less water, fertilizer and pesticide than we think that it can if we simply put it in the right condition."
That will certainly be the case at Erin Hills, which opened in 2006 and hosted the U.S. Amateur five years later. Like Pinehurst last year and Chambers Bay later this year, Erin Hills will dispel the notion that a golf course must be green to be great.
“At Erin Hills, we simply put in a two-row irrigation system,” Hurdzan says. “Everybody else was putting in four rows. The middle of the fairways and everything else is going to go brown. We didn’t disturb the soil; all the grasses we used were fine fescue grasses that need less water and fertilizer. We didn’t till the soil. We simply killed the weeds so there was no loss of topsoil. Erin Hills is a good example of where you can apply all those principles and come up with a good golf course.”
This approach is getting a mixed reaction from the golfing public, which is not entirely surprising; Americans tend to prefer their golf courses lush and green. Hurdzan concedes that persuading golfers to accept turf conditions that are less than pristine isn’t easy.
“That is the challenge, frankly,” he says. “If you were to leave it up to the superintendents and the architects and the people who are administrators of the game like the USGA, there would be no problem. It’s just that golfers expect the golf course to be green. There’s some love affair with green and people are starting finally to come to the realization that water is a resource that we need to use carefully and one of the ways to do it is not use it in places where it’s not going to do any good. Golfers are our greatest challenge in being able to reduce the amount of water we use.”
Rick Woelfel is a Philadelphia-based writer and frequent GCI contributor.