I’ve worked on four different courses in two different states, but it’s always the same: Some idiot who’s been on the job all of two weeks wants to tell me about the physics of striping.
“You see, it’s simple,” they say. “When the grass points toward you, it’s dark. When it points away, it’s light.”
Sometimes, the greenhorns tell you the opposite: “It’s simple, you see. When the grass points away, it’s dark. Toward you, it’s light.”
Thanks, Einstein.
But here’s where it gets serious in a hurry. It’s tournament time, and you’re double-mowing the back-nine greens and approaches. It’s nearing mid-day, and you can barely see your stripes. Even when you can make them out, you can’t remember whether to overlap the dark ones or the light ones. It seems to differ from green to green. You’re stressed, utterly confused and know you’re doing a crappy job. The sup drives by in his fancy cart and bawls you out: “Can’t you mow straight for Chrissakes! We’re having a tournament today!”
“But I can’t see!” you reply. “I can’t see!”
The sup then starts in: “You see, it’s simple ...”
But it’s not, and I’m going to settle things once and for all right here, right now.
Check out the animation I did with the 3-D software package called Blender. I’m not going to win a job at Disney Studios, so you’re stuck with me and my lame efforts. Hit the reload button on your browser and watch it from the beginning to end. The animation will cycle endlessly, but clicking the reload button will always reset things to the beginning. The left-hand square is composed of little rays bent away from you, the viewer. The right-hand square is composed of little rays bent toward you. They’re supposed to represent two swatches of grass on a golf course green mowed in opposite directions.
At the beginning of the animation, I placed the light source at your back as you’re viewing the swatches, just as if you’re at Torrey Pines Golf Club facing the Pacific Ocean at dawn waiting to mow. As the animation progresses, I moved the light source just as the sun would move during the course of the day, going from the 9 o’clock position to the 12 o’clock position and then dropping out of sight at the 3 o’clock position. As it does so, the Blender software kicks in and automatically colors the rays like they’re blades of grass reflecting the sunlight.
As you can see, what’s dark early in the animation is light late in the animation and vice versa. Translation: Dark stripes on the greens in the morning will be light stripes in the afternoon. The bite-in-the-ass is what happens in the middle of the animation: The swatches are colored exactly the same, which means as midday approaches, the stripes on a green will disappear temporarily.
So there you have it. It’s simple. But it’s really not. The Blender animation models an ideal world where the blades of grass are exactly the same length, spaced equidistantly and oriented exactly 45 degrees (or 135 degrees) against the ascent of an artificial sun. In the real world, things aren’t so because the stripes on a green never entirely vanish.
But in a perfect world, they would. GCI