The Golfdom Files: A new breed of superintendent

Photo: Golfdom staff

The golf course agronomy profession has come quite a way since 1973 when Golfdom ran this piece on the struggles of superintendents. Still, as you read through this piece from January 1973, you might notice some common threads that ring true more than 50 years later. Read the full article here.

A new breed of superintendent

By Sherry Christie

Ten years ago superintendents were called greenskeepers. All the average golfer knew about them was that they were nice guys who always seemed to be out moving sprinklers or mowing—inevitably, in the middle of his play.

These days, a golf course superintendent, just back from a professional turf seminar, may have a pocketful of notes on urea-formaldehyde, phosphorous/lime ratios, plant clones and apomictic hybrids, and he may be about to go out to try and sell a $100,000 automatic irrigation system to his management.

But to John Q. Golfer, he’s still the head gardener, with a little extra status because someone saw him playing the course by himself on Monday morning.

Today’s golf course superintendents are better educated, better trained and more sure of themselves than were their predecessors. But, ironically, the more expert they become, the more they end up selling their expertise to the people paying their salaries. They have to.

Photo: Golfdom staff

Pressures are greater. Clubs that once shrugged and went along with parched brown fairways don’t anymore. Well-traveled golfers, who might be in Boyne Highlands one day and Delray Beach the next, have begun demanding the same championship standards at home, year-round.

For the average superintendent, this demand for excellence means keeping his head above an ever-rising flood of sophisticated new products: nitrogen urea fertilizers, non-mercurial fungicides, triplex greensmowers and verticutters and aerators. No wonder universities now offer majors in turf management. And no wonder top superintendents’ salaries have doubled and tripled what they were 10 years ago.

Expertise is necessary to manage a tight budget, to maintain a playable and photogenic course and to be able to sell every major decision to an ever-watchful management committee.

Superintendents have changed. The men taking over jobs now are in their 20s and early 30s, are university-trained, analytically minded and are not afraid of selling their expertise.

At 34, Don Clemans has been in the business 19 years, in Indianapolis, St. Louis, Detroit and now at Columbus (Ohio) CC. He feels that the golf superintendent’s job is getting tougher and he is blunt about the reason why.

“Maybe 75 percent or 85 percent of the business today is not really growing grass, but learning how to coordinate people and how to convince them that you need to do this or that. Going out and actually doing the job—that’s the least of my worries.”

Clemans has almost made a career of turning golf courses around. In St. Louis, he gave himself an ulcer working 18 to 22 hours a day on the job, putting in a quarter-million-dollar irrigation system and supervising $756,000 worth of improvement in three years.

At Columbus CC, which hosted the PGA tournament in 1964, the members had almost resigned themselves to a 100 percent turf failure annually when Clemans arrived in 1971. He recognized the problem as compaction and broke the seven-year losing streak by aerating the club’s 70-year-old fairways five times last year.

It seems incomprehensible to Clemans that clubs are more willing to pay for a pound of cure than an ounce of preventive maintenance. He thinks the ultimate absurdity already has arrived: “People will go out and spend fantastic sums for artificial turf on football fields — $250,000, $350,000 — when the grounds man, the year before, could’ve asked for another $5,000 to put the grass in great shape and they wouldn’t have wanted to spend the money.”