I’ve worked on four courses in two 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,” he says, “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 quickly. It’s tournament time, and you’re doublemowing the back nine greens and approaches. It’s nearing midday, 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. Youre stressed and utterly confused. You know you’re doing a crappy job.
The superintendent drives by in his fancy cart and bawls you out: “Can’t you mow straight for Chrissakes! We’re having a tournament today!”
You reply. “I can’t see!”
The superintendent then starts in: “You see, it’s simple ...”
But it’s not. And I’m going to settle things once and for all right now. Check out the animation (Figure 1) I did with the 3D software package called Blender. Hit the reload button on your browser and watch it from the beginning to end. The animation will eventually stop, but clicking the reload button will always get things going again.
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The lefthand square is composed of little rays bent away from you, the viewer. The righthand square is composed of little rays bent toward you. The squares are 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 and you’re waiting for dawn.
As the animation progresses, I moved the light source just as the sun would move during the course of the day, going from the nine o’clock position to the 12 o’clock position and then dropping out of sight at the three o’clock position. As it does so, the 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 biteintheass is what happens in the middle of the animation: the swatches are colored exactly the same or nearly so. Translation: As midday approaches, the stripes on a green will temporarily disappear.
So there you have it. It’s simple. But it’s really not.
The Blender animation model is 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 (and descent) of an artificial sun. In the real world, things aren’t so. The stripes on a green never entirely vanish. But in an ideal world, they would.
In any case, I think everybody would agree that striping is a big part of golf course aesthetics. There’s nothing better than seeing a spectacularly bold checkered pattern on a green on a Sunday afternoon during tournament time.
Does the animation teach us anything about enhancing this effect? Absolutely! Let me step through a real life example. I used to work at the Savannah Harbor Golf Club & Resort, which hosts the Liberty Mutual Senior PGA Tour event every year. The event is in late April, and the last round is played on a Sunday and televised. According to online astronomical services (e.g., http://www.sunposition.info), the sun will be 210 degrees from due North at 2 p.m. on Sunday April 26, 2009. Translated, this means the sun will be slightly over your left shoulder if you’re facing directly toward North as the compass points. 2 p.m. is prime time for the broadcast, so we’d like the striping to be optimal at this point in time.
What can Lynn Childress, the superintendent and my former boss at Savannah Harbor, do to ensure this? From the animation, we know we should advise him to mow his greens in the morning exactly 210 degrees relative to North. See Figure 2 for an illustration. This will bend the grass in exact opposition (or apposition) relative to the sun’s rays as they will be hitting the earth at 2 p.m., thereby optimizing the dramatic contrast of hues during prime time.
But how should Lynn instruct his greensmowers? Greensmowers don’t usually carry compasses. Instead, they are instructed to visualize an imaginary clockface facing the approach and to mow in the “12-to-6 direction” or in the “3-to-9 direction”, so on and so forth.
The problem is that each green and fairway combination is oriented differently (or at least has the potential of being so) relative to due North. To achieve a consistent direction relative to the sun across all his greens, Lynn will have to figure out the corresponding clockface reading for each and every green beforehand and make sure the appropriate mower gets the appropriate instructions on Sunday. (On second thought, it might be easier to give everybody a compass). I’d also advise Lynn to get the TV crews to orient their cameras 210 (or 30) degrees due North as well, as illustrated in Figure 2, below. Good luck with that one, Lynn. Let me know how it goes;).
Is all this a waste of time? Hardly. Golf course aesthetics is a relentless arms race. It makes you feel like a rat running in a wheel, I know. But if you don’t do the simple stuff, your pal down the road will.
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