Editor's note: This exclusive editorial content is made possible through a parternship with the Carolinas Golf Course Superintendents Association. The following dispatch is from Sunday, June 22.
It’s a little after 10 p.m. and we’ve just wound down “proceedings” at Maxie’s, a little pub in the village. (Assistant superintendents) Alan Owen and John Jeffreys and me, and a few other folks got together to celebrate. It was great but pretty quiet. Everyone is so tired but excited and thrilled all the same. Back-to-back U.S. Opens. Man, that was so much fun.
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It’s been three full weeks since we went to dinner with the USGA folks, Dan Burton, Mike Davis, Ben Kimball and Jeff Hall after our first set-up day in the lead up to all this. Three weeks! But it seems like it was just yesterday. In some ways this has gone really fast, but in some ways that dinner feels like forever ago, too.
There are so many people I am so grateful to. Our staff, the volunteers and the facilities that allowed them to come help us out. They all had a hand in helping everything go off without a hitch. And while we all got into a rhythm, that didn’t mean anyone switched off or went onto auto-pilot. If they did, we would have an issue this morning.
One of the approach mowers developed a hydraulic leak during the morning set-up, but we caught it immediately thanks to Steve Sheets (from Linville Ridge Golf Club) having an eagle eye and doing a first-class job of quality assurance. He was following after the mowers and spotted it right on the first hole and quickly called a stop to the mower and got on one of the cup-cutter’s radios to us. It turned out a filter was a little loose, and we got it fixed and didn’t really miss a beat.
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I guess we did have a big scare late in the day, too, when Michelle Wie double-bogeyed the 16th. All of a sudden a playoff was a real possibility. We didn’t know how she’d do trying to collect her nerve after that so we had our response team get started. The women were to play the first, 16th and 17th with cumulative scores, and if they were tied after that, it would have become sudden death. Our guys had the bunkers raked on the first by the time she birdied the 17th and we could breathe out again.
Everyone had their picture taken with Michelle after the trophy presentation, and Alan and John and I got to attend the champion’s reception in the Donald Ross Grill in the clubhouse after that. That was awesome to spend some time there, really neat. It was a big day for photos. Our set-up team had already had their photo taken with the USGA championship leadership group on the 18th green after the morning set up and I bet those photos will be a great memento for them.
Pulling off back-to-back Opens is an undertaking that is much bigger than any individual. I could not have done it without the help of Alan and John. We are always bouncing ideas and strategies off each other. I could not have asked for smarter, brighter, harder working people to share this with. They need to be superintendents somewhere. ... tomorrow!
To get through an operation like caring for a course like No. 2 day-to-day, week-to-week for the past four years, it’s been essential to have guys you can rely on to give each other a break now and then keep our sanity. It’s invaluable to know that I can take a weekend off now and then and be able to trust that you’re coming back to something running as smoothly as when you left. And the same goes for them. It’s been a great team effort.
I also appreciate that (director of grounds and golf course maintenance) Bob Farren, CGCS, has had the faith and trust in us that we could get the job done. Bob handles a lot of the outside-the-ropes issues and keeps them off our plates so we concentrate on what we need to do most of all. The big thing with Bob is that he doesn’t want to be left in the dark. If something happens that he needs to know about, then he needs to know about it. Fortunately, we didn’t have anything happen that fell into that category. He checked in with us, but he knew we had a good game plan going in and he trusted us.
I cannot believe how lucky we were with the weather. We had that one overnight storm during the men’s Open, but we were so lucky with the women. We didn’t have any delays that created major problems, no major clean-up operations were necessary. And so many days, or nights, places really close to us got hammered. I did not expect to water greens as much we did over the two weeks. I told Ben Kimball (women’s Open championship director) tonight that if he’d told me at the start of the month that we’d be watering greens that much, I’d kiss his backside.
It’s been tremendous to be able to showcase the golf course in June the way it was designed to play. To have dry, firm conditions for two weeks and to be able to control, pretty much, how much water the course got was really a highlight.
I’m going to take a couple of days now and reconnect with my family and get some good sleep. Then we will get busy converting the greens from bentgrass to Champion and, maybe, looking forward to the chance of doing this all over again, but on Bermudagrass next time. It’s been a great experience in every possible way.
But now it’s all over. It’s hard to believe.
Trent Bouts assisted in the creation of this article.
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