How we make the sausage

It was several years ago, at my previous job, and I was interviewing then-ESPN sportscaster Dan Patrick. We were talking about the work of superintendents, and how they keep golf courses looking great.

Patrick told me that it was a total mystery to him how superintendents accomplish this. Then he dropped a saying on me about sausages… something about not wanting to see how they’re made, just enjoy the final product.

I’m sure he wasn’t the first to use the phrase, but it was apt, and it was the first time I’d ever heard that saying. I filed it away for future use.

And today would be a good time to dust off the phrase. Because today I want to tell you about someone whose work readers have been enjoying for years, but just like a superintendent, this person is behind-the-scenes.

Mrs. Carrie Parkhill

Wallace has been the art director of Golfdom since I arrived here, and in all she’s been designing the magazine for 8 years. And it’s bittersweet to report that this will be the last issue of Golfdom that Carrie works on.

We have been talking about the look of the magazine a lot recently, more so than usual, with the recent redesign of the magazine. Carrie, or “C.P.” as I call her, was integral to the success of that redesign.

C.P.’s job, at its simplest, is putting words and corresponding art on paper. But putting it so simply gives it the same credit Bob Knight gave journalists when he told a reporter, “All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to better things.”

What C.P. does is art — it’s an art I don’t totally understand — but it’s an art that she’s clearly good at. She’s won numerous awards for her work. At the most recent Turf and Ornamental Communicators Association awards she won a cover photo design award for the April 2011 issue which featured Mark Woodward tearing a cover of Golfdom in half, as well as another award for the October 2011 layout of our “Turf on Trial” cover (I can recall both covers clearly in my mind. If you can too, that shows you how good she is at her job.) The next round of TOCA awards takes place next month — I fully expect her to rake in some more hardware at that contest as well.

One of my favorite things about Carrie is she cares enough to thoroughly read the stories before she designs them. Even if it’s a story on a vague turf disease, she’ll read it from beginning to end in order to better understand how to display the story for readers graphically. This might sound like something all designers would do, but trust me, it’s rare.

How do I know she reads the stories in the magazine? Because she’s caught errors I’ve made before. Several times, actually. Yeah, C.P. has had my back.

As I write this, Carrie and her husband, Mike (a fellow Spider-Man fan, I might note) are expecting the arrival of a baby girl any day now. Carrie has decided to become a stay-at-home mom once the baby arrives.

We’ll be sad to see her go, but there’s no better reason to say goodbye. Because as good a designer as she is, she’ll be an even better mom.

So thank you, Carrie, for all your hard work over the years on both Golfdom and our sister publication, Landscape Management. Though I didn’t always understand how you did what you did, I just remembered what Dan Patrick told me: It’s not important to know how the butcher makes the sausage, just that you enjoy it when it’s done.