The Thankless Summer: Superintendents tell the stories of their worst summer on the job

It’s summertime, and for most Americans, that means barbecues, swimming pools, family vacations and fireworks.

For most Americans.

For readers of Golfdom, summertime is a much different animal. Long days with even longer hours, intense weather conditions, disease pressure and a packed tee sheet. 

We reached out to several current and former superintendents — all good storytellers — and asked them to recall their most brutal summers. These are their stories, along with some words of wisdom on how to survive the test that is summer.

— Seth Jones, Editor-in-Chief

‘I don’t think there’s any Bermuda in there.’

Johnny Walker has worked in the golf maintenance industry for more than 40 years. A longtime superintendent in Texas, Walker joined the staff of the GCSAA in 2017 as a member of the association’s Field Staff, serving his home state of Texas as well as Arkansas, New Mexico and Oklahoma.   

“My worst summer is forever burned into my mind…

It was the summer of 1990. I’m 26 years old, and I’m six months into my first head superintendent job. We had a freeze that came in that killed everything. It didn’t matter if you were a high-budget course or a low-budget course. That hit in December of 1989, we got three days below freezing — something like 100 consecutive hours. Every blade of short grass from Texas to Florida got hit. 

I told my members, ‘I don’t think there’s any Bermuda in there.’ They just looked at me like they didn’t believe me. So, I just kept the water on to get the rye through, but once the summer got there, sure enough, the Bermuda is all gone. And every other course in Houston, they were prepared for this, so they’ve already bought grass and hired people to install it. I’ve got no one to hire, and I’ve got to overpay for sprigs I’m getting from Louisiana. So, at age 26, I got to tell my members, ‘We will be closed while I do a renovation by myself.’

A friend of mine owned a construction company. He would call me every night and tell me exactly what to do the next day… that’s how I got through it. Remember, this is before YouTube or any online classes.

I was able to get my hands on a machine called a rotovator. It did three things: It was a tiller, a circular cutter and a beater bar. It was able to go to a depth of 8 to 10 inches. I get on this thing, and I’ve got all my bosses watching… I did one pass on a green, and I did not want to look back… but then I did look back, and I pretty much crapped my pants at that moment and thought to myself, ‘These poor people may never have greens again!’

The key to surviving in the summer is communication. I used to believe communication was in the top three most important things for superintendents to be good at. Now, 40 years into my career, I absolutely believe it is the No. 1 most important thing.”

10 inches in 10 hours

Bob Farren’s journey in golf maintenance began in 1979. In the summer of 1983, he joined the team at Pinehurst Resort and CC, where he has worked since. As the resort’s director of golf course management, Farren, CGCS, has hosted 11 USGA championships at Pinehurst, including the back-to-back U.S. Open and U.S. Women’s Open in 2014.

“You either have tragedies or strategies. But sometimes, in this industry, the tragedies can run amok.

Last summer, we had a 100-year storm event followed by, two weeks later, a 500-year storm that devastated the whole community. Tropical Storm Chantal…

You prepare for hurricane season psychologically. But things can go unexpectedly. The first one was during Round Two of the U.S. Open at Oakmont. Kevin (Robinson, Pinehurst golf course maintenance manager) and I were watching and, suddenly, we couldn’t get to our cars — we had water up to our knees in our shop. 

Chantal was five times that bad. We had something like 10 inches in 10 hours. We lost a dam on an adjacent course. That’s how we spent our summer … digging out. 

By the time I got home, I tried to keep everything in perspective. You count your blessings. You are grateful that you’re safe and you were able to get home. Then you check on your neighbors and make sure they’re safe.”

When COVID canceled the Players Championship

A native of England, Lucas Andrews and his family moved to Canada while he was in high school. He quickly got a job working maintenance at Predator Ridge Resort in Vernon, British Columbia, and the hook was set. He studied turfgrass management at the University of Guelph, interned at St. Andrews and talked his way into an internship at TPC Sawgrass, where he is now the director of golf course maintenance operations.

“We were running through the Tuesday of (The Players Championship). The NHL had canceled, and then the NBA closed down. And we were kind of looking around, Florida seemed to be the last place that COVID came to. We were hosting a concert on No. 17, The Chainsmokers were playing. So, we felt like if the tournament started, there’s no way they would cancel it. And nothing happened. So, every day they went through that tournament, we just felt like we were getting closer and closer to finishing it.

We played the first round. We were leaving Thursday night about 10 o’clock, and we said goodbye to everybody. And then Jeff (Plotts) gets a phone call from one of the executive leadership teams saying, ‘Hey, there’s an announcement about to be made here very soon that the tournament’s getting canceled.’ 

Our biggest focus turned immediately to ‘How do we get the volunteers out of here?’ If the world’s shutting down, we’ve got 50 guys that need to get out of the country. We had to make that happen really fast. 

Once that was done, it really turned our focus to our staff. We had a ton of food left over from the tournament, so we did a food drive for them where they could come in and take food home for their families, because it was just so much unknown at the time.

Then it really turned to, ‘Well, now what do we do?’ We decided we needed to be prepared, because there could always be this kickoff event again. With us being the global home of the PGA Tour, we just felt like we were going to be kind of that. 

We considered ourselves fortunate that we had somewhere to go during the day, that we weren’t stuck at home, we weren’t restricted. So, we just kept pushing. There were all these Twitter rumors that certain large tournaments would be coming here because we had the infrastructure for them.

We decided to maintain ourselves to the highest standard, and if we just get a four-week heads-up, we can host a tournament. And that proved to be a good motivator. We eventually hosted the Korn Ferry Tour Championship, which was basically like one of their kickoff events, on the Valley Course. It was a testament to what the team had been able to do over the summer of just always being tournament-ready.

It was tough. You’re having to deal with summer conditions. It’s hot, miserable at times in the summer. That’s the wildest summer I can remember, just in terms of the amount of unknown, the amount of work that still needed to be done, the different conversations that we had to have with the team about staying positive. The world was crazy. That’ll be the summer that sticks with me.”

Trust your gut

In his almost 40 years of working in golf course maintenance, Ron Stephan has seen it all. He recalls his days working on 18-hole or 36-hole facilities fondly, but for the last few years, he has served as the sole full-time employee of the nine-hole Pleasantville (Iowa) G&CC near Des Moines, where players can walk for $10, and their motto is “The name says it all.”

“In my 39 years as a superintendent, last year was my most difficult summer ever.

We had all this rain in the spring, then it turned all hot and humid … and no rain. The humidity was 90 percent, 24 hours a day. We don’t have fairway waterers, we have quick couplers. We had 20-some inches of rain from mid-May to mid-June, then it cut off until the middle of September. And it was 92 to 107 degrees F every day, with heat indexes reaching 115.

I learned that my wetting agents were a lifesaver. You have to learn to be very thrifty with a tight budget. You learn how to stretch chemicals. You have to learn to stretch water. That’s all stuff that we’ve always done, but last year we had to go above and beyond from what we normally do. 

And even though it was our most difficult summer ever, it was also our most successful summer ever financially. I’m the only full-time person here. All my staff are volunteers, and their average age is 63. 

The lesson I have learned is if you are in doubt of what you are doing or have a question, do not be afraid to pick up the phone and call another superintendent, especially a veteran superintendent who has been through it for a while, because more than likely that person has been through it or knows somebody who has. And you have to trust your gut feeling and your heart on what is the right decision.”

Hand-watering, dusk till dawn

A Chicagoland native, Mark Semm first pursued playing college basketball before he switched to golf and transferred to Iowa State. He was an intern and an assistant superintendent at Augusta National in the late 1990s before moving to Texas and serving as a superintendent at The Vaquero Club, then Spanish Oaks GC and finally the Clubs of Cordillera Ranch. Today, he is a strategic account manager for BASF T&O, and he still regularly volunteers each year at the Masters.

“It was the summer of 2011 at Cordillera Ranch (Boerne, Texas). Little did we know looking back that we were about to embark on a drought that was one of the worst in history …

One reason it sticks out, we have friends and they asked, ‘Can Justin come out and work for you?’ He’s a freshman in high school, and he ends up bringing three or four buddies with him. We were fortunate, you know this business — we can never get enough guys. 

We got 2.5 inches of rain in a 12-month span that year! And I can count the rain events on two fingers. One was in the winter when the course doesn’t need it. And the other …

We were pumping 150,000 gallons a day on the entire course, including zoysiagrass fairways and bentgrass greens. I remember talking to a member, and he was saying, ‘The bent, the bent, the bent!’ I told him the last of my worries was the bent — it’s our zoysia!

We had to train everyone on ‘the three stages of dry.’ There’s one stage of dry, then there’s a whole ‘nother level and then there’s the level where we might lose the grass. We only had enough water to focus on the ‘we might lose grass’ areas. Our high school kids and our whole crew, we were popping out irrigation heads where we didn’t have quick couplers to water fairways and rough.

The drought started in May. I remember coming up to the guys and saying, ‘This isn’t normal.’ Sunup to sundown, we were hand-watering every inch of turf. All summer long, pulling hose until September. 

At every club, there’s a core group of guys, and you get to know them. The guys you constantly see on the golf course. I saw a couple of these guys at the Men’s Grill, and I knew them well enough I felt comfortable to ask them, ‘Do you guys have any ideas, something outside-the-box, to thank our crew – it would mean a lot to them coming from you, knowing you have their backs?’

A couple days later, a group came down to the shop with these rib-eye steaks, I’m talking big rib-eyes, potatoes, corn, the whole works, and cooked it all right there at the shop. It was the neatest experience. The full-time guys liked it, but the high school kids? They were all like, ‘I can’t wait to do this again!’ And guess what? They all came back the next season. Justin eventually went to Texas Tech, but he still talks to me about that summer, and he still remembers the members coming to the shop table and the camaraderie. You can’t put a dollar amount on that.”

The summer I got fired

A graduate of Florida Gateway College, Nate Watkin has enjoyed being a mainstay in the Florida golf maintenance world for the last 20 years. Following stints at Trump International and The Seagate, Watkin became the outreach director for the Florida Golf Course Superintendents Association. Today, he still works with superintendents as the global golf division manager for SOX Erosion Solutions.

“My hardest summer would have been my last summer as a superintendent, going through a complete
regime change. 

Seagate leadership hired a new GM, and shortly after, he fired the head pro, fired the tennis person, basically got rid of eight department heads. And I was still hanging on, trying to do everything I could to impress the new GM. But it wasn’t enough and ultimately led to my firing. 

I think with anything, what it all comes down to is, any summer projects, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. You just have to take each task and just basically go one task at a time, one bite at a time. Don’t get too overwhelmed in the overall project, just try to accomplish what you can. And at the end of the day, you just have to understand that Mother Nature is the boss, she’s always going to win. She’s undefeated, period.”

A blizzard, a tornado, a drought

A longtime Friend of Golfdom, Anthony Williams, CGCS, studied ornamental horticulture at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College (ABAC) in the 1980s and then set out on a career in golf course maintenance. Serving as a superintendent in Georgia and Texas over the last 30-plus years, Williams has hosted multiple professional events and today works as a regional director of agronomy for Invited Clubs, assisting 26 different golf clubs. Oh, he’s also a 9th-degree black belt and a member of the International Martial Arts Hall of Fame.

“It was my first summer as ‘The Man.’ I was at Lake Lanier for six, seven years, and I got promoted to director of grounds. I was like, ‘I’m finally getting what I deserved!’

And what I deserved was the summer of 1993. It started with a late blizzard in Atlanta in March. We had 10 inches of snow with hurricane-force winds, followed by one of the hottest, driest summers on record. Right before the water shut off, we got hit with a tornado. So, I had a blizzard, a tornado and a record drought all in my first summer.

We had a good water supply, but my irrigation ability improved vastly. I also remember thinking that if this job doesn’t last, I’ll get a job driving a garbage truck or something, because it’s got to be better than this. That summer prepared me for every other summer.

As hard as it is, as back breaking as it is, it will teach you that you have to hire well and you have to train even better.

The way I look at it is, all superintendents are carved out of a different kind of rock than other people. If you’re going to be a superintendent, especially a bentgrass guy in the Transition Zone, you’re going to face some difficult summers. It really becomes like this badge of honor. ‘I will survive the 100 days of hell that is the summer of 2026, and I will add that badge to the other badges I have collected.’ The more badges you collect, the better table you get to sit at at the Golf Show. I found myself sitting with the Palmer (Maples Jr.) and the Randy Nichols of the world, legends from the markets where I worked. But you know what they said? ‘That boy can grow grass, and he can grow people.’ 

When you look at a hard-ass summer, and you ask, ‘Is it worth it?’ You’re going to work 80 hours a week, but there’s only a handful of guys who can do this, because it’s who they were born to be — and I’m proud to be one of those guys who made it through another summer.”