Muirfield Village Golf Club, the site of the Memorial Tournament, boasts fast, firm vibrant green turf mowed in patterns capable of dazzling even hardened geometry professors. In short, the Dublin, Ohio, course is one of the PGA Tour’s maintenance gems.
Alfie Hammond, one of 90 workers preparing the course for the Memorial, is providing GCI with photos and observations of this week’s maintenance activities. When he’s done helping Muirfield Village director of grounds operations Paul Latshaw, Hammond will return to Cleveland, where he works as an assistant superintendent at Canterbury Golf Club. Hammond is a PGA Tour tournament preparation veteran, and he’s relishing every minute of his most recent volunteer experience.
“It’s the sixth PGA Tour event I have done in my career,” he says. “Sometimes it just works out that everybody gets along well. That’s what I have seen. Everyone gets along really well. People are laughing and joking, and everybody is chipping in. There’s really good spirit on the team.”
Hammond is part of a quartet responsible for the front nine fairways. His days begin at 4:45 a.m. Some members of Muirfield Village’s full-time crew arrive at 3:30 a.m. to ensure all machinery is ready for use when volunteers arrive.
“There’s a crew for the front and a crew for the back,” Hammond says. “If you are on the front, you are on the front all week. Everybody knows the routine or where they are going. It’s the same every day. Paul will have a morning meeting with everybody and basically do a roll call, and then everybody goes out and does their tasks. Every morning is exactly the same. Monday was the same as this morning and it will be the same tomorrow morning. Everyone knows exactly what they are doing. The timing it down.”
Morning work is completed by 8:30 a.m. Machines are washed and brunch is served. Hammond sticks around to watch golf – he followed Tiger Woods, Jason Day and Patrick Reed on Thursday – before returning to the maintenance facility with the rest of the crew at 3:30 p.m. for evening assignments. “We don’t mow fairways in the evenings,” he says. “It’s more cleaning the fairways after the golf has come through.”
This marks Hammond’s second stint as a Memorial volunteer. He also helped the Muirfield Village crew in 2011, but he’s spending more time this year observing the data collection associated with conducting a high-level event. PGA Tour agronomist Paul Vermillion is a staple in the maintenance facility, where he enters stimpmeter and firmness readings into a laptop. The numbers Vermillion processes, especially those associated with the greens, are startling.
“Most of these guys here are in Latshaw network, so we all know what fast, firm greens and good quality turf is like,” Hammond says. “After they got the rain last weekend, they have had greens at 14 ½ since Monday. I have been to Augusta, too, and I have never seen greens this fast. I was in Augusta in 2005 and they were real fast that week, but I think these are faster.”