Winter's Burn

For many of us, a golf hole’s green represents more than just the logical conclusion of a tee-to-pin journey. It’s a safe haven from sliced drives and skulled wedges, a redemptive opportunity—a course’s most promising means for making up precious strokes.

But every player, whether a short-game wiz or a flatstick hatchet man, has hopes—and, increasingly, high expectations—for a clean, consistent putting surface. Forced to surrender prime scoring chances to patchy, clumpy and generally uneven greens? That’s the surest way to ruin a round, friend.

Which is why frustration levels on many local tracks swelled a bit higher than normal this spring. Following a winter that arguably rated as Chicago’s most severe to date—a four-month stretch that, on average, was the city’s coldest since the National Weather Service began keeping records in 1872—most area courses have been slow to recover.

“We’ve kind of gotten spoiled,” said John Miller, the Great Lakes regional representative for the Golf Course Superintendent Association of America’s field staff. “We’ve had quite a few mild winters, but this was one of the harshest that we’ve seen in quite some time.”

The elements exacted the heaviest toll on the short stuff at area golf courses, specifically those greens consisting of poa annua—an annual bluegrass that can be found on a majority of putting surfaces across the Midwest. Poa thrives in temperate conditions, but it is vulnerable to extreme heat and cold, as well as drastic weather fluctuations.

“Poa annua is the most affected because it’s a shallow-rooted and very temperamental grass,” Miller said. “The bentgrass that many golf courses have on their greens is very winter-hearty. It’s very tough grass, and it survives the winter a lot better than the poa annua does. Unfortunately, poa is such a prolific feeder. That’s the reason so many golf courses in our area—especially the older courses—have the amount of poa annua that they do.”

Although the winter’s bitter cold surely played a role in this year’s poa struggles, Miller believes the specific culprit was a phenomenon called crown hydration. Plainly speaking, crown hydration occurs when temperatures rise high enough—often in late winter or early spring—to allow the plant to begin absorbing water, then rapidly drop again and freeze it. The resulting cell damage can severely compromise or kill the plant.

Ed Nangle, director of turfgrass programs at the Chicago District Golf Association, pinpoints one stretch of wildly swinging temperatures early in the year that he believes caused the most harm.

“There were three to four days in January where temperatures got up into the 40s,” Nangle said. “Poa is very sensitive to reacting to warmer temps and starting to activate. When the water froze again, it basically crushed all the growing points of the grass.”

Added Miller: “That, basically, is a death sentence.”

No matter the exact cause, an inordinately high percentage of Chicago-area clubs suffered significant greens damage this past spring—a survey by the Midwest Association of Golf Course Superintendents put the number at roughly 60 percent—leaving a legion of local turf caretakers with some difficult choices to make: sod, seed or start over.

A slew of factors play into those decisions, budget being only one of them. And in any case, the whims of weather can still unravel the best-laid plans. Miller and other local officials agree that each superintendent had to react to a unique set of circumstances.

“It depends upon how much damage they had,” Miller said. “I saw golf courses that basically lost the entire green, or more than one green, and they decided that they were going to seed. But the way the spring went—because we had a very cold spring—the ones that were seeded, they’re actually a little bit behind, because we didn’t have the temperatures to germinate the seeds and have them growing like we normally would in the spring.

“Those who sodded are doing okay. They’re doing better so far than some of the guys that seeded. But the guys who seeded later in the spring, once the soil temperatures warmed up, they’ve gotten great recovery.”

Luke Cella, executive director of the Midwest Association of Golf Course Superintendents, notes that sodding is a more expensive solution but theoretically has a quicker turnaround time. Although seeding is more cost-effective, he says, it comes with its own associated expenses (fertilizer and more frequent watering, for example) and isn’t playable nearly as soon as sod is.

But even then, “playability” can be a relative term. Nangle points out that sodding, for all its benefits, can introduce uneven putting surfaces and/or inconsistent speeds to greens whose damaged areas are repaired (rather than the entire surface receiving a turf makeover). So even when a club dips into the budget to pony up for sod in order to get players back on the original green that much sooner, the problem—the lack of a true putting surface—can persist. “There’s frustrations on all sides then,” Nangle said.

“To be honest with you,” Miller said, “everything that I’ve seen and all my experience says it doesn’t matter whether you seed or sod. You’re still looking at about six to eight weeks from the time you do it until the time it’s actually ready to be played on.”

According to Miller, several area golf courses with renovation plans slated for the fall had assessed enough greens damage in the spring to prompt club officials to contemplate the math, approach their membership about moving up the project and then pull the trigger. “It just makes sense,” Miller said.

Cella can appreciate that sort of cooperation. Given all the dissatisfaction about area putting surfaces through the early period of Chicago’s golfing season, he says it’s important for club officials to keep their players informed. “It gets back to communication. If people are educated and understand what’s going on, they can be part of the solution. They’ve been very understanding. Everyone that’s here [in the Chicago area] has experienced the effects of the weather.”

The good news: Our local golfing nightmare is almost over. Miller estimates that “probably 90 percent” of damaged greens have bounced back, and Cella says all are “well on their way to recovery.” And both are adamant that area club superintendents, every bit as aggravated by this year’s greens fiasco as those who play their courses, have done everything in their power to address the problem along the way.

“When you’re dealt this hand that we had this winter, there are no shortcuts,” Miller said. “Every golf course has gone through this, and some fared better than others. Budgets played no part in it; preparation didn’t really play much of a part in it. It’s one of those things you really can’t see coming.”

And with any luck, we won’t see it again for quite some time.