Back in the day, before EOP

What does the Vietnam war, cash kickbacks and South Chicago golf courses have to do with the origins of Early Order Programs?

Perhaps nothing — but it’s a fun story about how superintendents have always been good about putting their heads together to get the job done.

Strength in unity

A member of Golfdom’s editorial advisory board, Mike Bavier, CGCS, was a longtime superintendent in Chicago, starting in the 1970s. He was president of the Midwest Association of Golf Course Superintendents in 1975 and served as president of the GCSAA in 1981. He earned the GCSAA’s Distinguished Service Award in 2000 and is co-author of “Practical Golf Course Maintenance: The Art of Greenkeeping.”

So it would be fair to say Bavier wrote the book on greenkeeping. Surely he would know when Early Order Programs first started?

“I go back a long ways and I can tell you that I never worked with an EOP program while I was a superintendent,” Bavier says. “What we did was different: we’d get 10 superintendents together, all from the same area, and we’d go around and tell one guy how much product we needed.”

They called this the South Side Co-Op, and some of the area distributors didn’t take kindly to it.

But for the real scoop, Bavier recommended contacting his old colleague, Bruce Burchfield, CGCS.

The dream sheet

Burchfield, now retired in Ames, Iowa, led quite the life as a superintendent. Consider his first job out of Penn State: West Point Golf Course.

“This is the luckiest thing that ever happened to me,” Burchfield says. “It was 1970 and I was drafted by the Army. You fill out what they called a ‘Dream Sheet’ — where do you want to be, what do you want to do? I wrote down, ‘Work on a golf course,’ and they laughed at me and said that would never happen.”

Sure enough, Burchfield was sent to West Point. The General there told him that Richard Nixon would be arriving for graduation in two months and it was his job to get the golf course in presentable condition after it had fallen into disarray.

“He told me, ‘I’m not happy. If you make me happy, I’ll keep you here,’” Burchfield says.

Burchfield kept the General happy and managed to stay out of Vietnam. After his time in the Army was done, he called Oscar Miles — a powerful superintendent in Chicago and fellow Penn State grad — and asked if he could help him land a job.

The next thing Burchfield knew, he was the superintendent of Calumet CC, Homewood, Ill. At age 23, he was the youngest superintendent in Chicago.

‘Let me ask the guys’

While Burchfield was at Calumet, the president of Olympia Fields Country Club called a meeting with fellow presidents, greens chairs and superintendents, and said something needed to be done to get the prices on golf maintenance products to come down. The South Side Co-Op was formed, with Miles as its first chairman.

“We all sat around a table and said, ‘How much Daconil does everyone need?’” Burchfield says. “Then we went to the local distributors in Chicago and had them bid. We bought 90 percent of our products this way. That was 1973. The next year, I was the chairman.”

Burchfield said the purchases started off just with fungicides, but then started to grow when courses started realizing the savings opportunity.

“We only did three or four products in the beginning,” Burchfield says. “But it kept growing. We had a course that dealt with vandalism. He said, ‘I need you to add in there 20 sets of flags and pins.’ It was nuts.”

Burchfield changed courses. He was the new superintendent at Hillcrest Country Club on Chicago’s North Shore. There are more courses, and better courses, on Chicago’s north side, Burchfield says. So he got a call about forming a North Side Co-Op, which he did.

“We had a few courses, and then a superintendent would hear about it and call me and ask if he could join,” Burchfield says. “I’d say, ‘let me ask the guys.’ And they’d say yes, and we grew that co-op.”

An important conversation

Burchfield says some of the distributors didn’t like what they were doing, but most understood and worked with them. The distributors did like selling large amounts of products in February and knowing what they had sold for the growing season.

The most important part of these transactions is that they trusted their distributor, something Burchfield says is still vital for superintendents dealing with EOPs today. When he was at West Point, he remembers a particularly important conversation and a decision he had to make.

“I’m a young man and a salesman, an older gentlemen from New York City, comes to see me. He said, ‘Look, I’m not going to tell you what to buy or that you have to buy from me,’” Burchfield ‘says. “‘You graduated from college. You’re an agronomy student. Here’s what I’m going to do for you: everything you buy from me, I’ll give you 20-percent cash back in your pocket.’”

Though he was only earning $180 a month at the time, Burchfield knew that there really wasn’t a decision to be made: The answer was no.

“I’m a 23-year-old kid in the Army,” Burchfield says. “First of all, what if I did it and got caught? I’d be in Vietnam in a second. But second, it wasn’t my nature.”

Burchfield’s advice for today’s superintendents is to make sure you know the people you’re dealing with.

“We were always cautious, and we trusted our distributors,” Burchfield says. “If you work with someone you can trust, someone who has a long history of being legit … and you can get a low number? That’s the best of both worlds.”