Thursday morning maintenance photos

By |  August 13, 2015 0 Comments

Golfdom Associate Editor Grant B. Gannon took on the challenge of a 2:55 a.m. wake-up call and the hour-long drive from Milwaukee to get some great shots of the crew hard at work on Thursday morning, the first day of the tournament. Here’s a look at some of what he saw:

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Breaking news! UFO sighting at the PGA Championship. We want to believe…

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…OK, not UFOs, but Jacobsen fairway mowers. It’s pretty dark at 4:45 a.m. Thankfully there are headlights on those mowers or we might have been run over.

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Straits Course Superintendent Chris Zugel (in gray) and some of his crew check out the progress on hole No. 1 as the first signs of dawn begin to show.

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You think you hate raking a bunker? This crew spent hours raking the more than 1,000 bunkers on the Straits course. Pete Dye puts the Dye into Dye-abolicol.

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That’s a Jacobsen SLF 1880 fairway mower in the shadows, taking on No. 8 fairway.

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The mowers have headlights, while the bunker crew uses head lamps to see what they’re doing in the early morning hours.

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A crew member rakes a bunker on the slope next to hole No. 8.

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It takes two when it comes to mowing the greens to championship form.

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A crew member keeps a close eye on her mowing lines as the sun rises over Lake Michigan.

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The first glimpse of the sun as a crew member hand-rolls the No. 17 tee box. Looks like this important penultimate hole will play to 223 yards today.

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Like two ships pass in the night, these two crew members pass with John Deere greens mowers.

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Two blowers head towards the light… and the next hole.

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John Reid, assistant greenkeeper of The Duke’s, St. Andrews, makes sure the cup on No. 11 is cut to perfection.

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Planting the flag for hole No. 11. Now onto the next one.

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A little bit of sun, a little bit of sand and a whole lot of fairway mowing.

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It’s easier to photograph the fairway mowing crew once the sun has come up.

Photos: Golfdom

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About the Author: Seth Jones

Seth Jones, a 25-year veteran of the golf industry media, is Editor-in-Chief of Golfdom magazine and Athletic Turf. A graduate of the University of Kansas School of Journalism and Mass Communications, Jones began working for Golf Course Management in 1999 as an intern. In his professional career he has won numerous awards, including a Turf and Ornamental Communicators Association (TOCA) first place general feature writing award for his profile of World Golf Hall of Famer Greg Norman and a TOCA first place photography award for his work covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In his career, Jones has accumulated an impressive list of interviews, including such names as George H.W. Bush, Samuel L. Jackson, Lance Armstrong and Charles Barkley. Jones has also done in-depth interviews with such golfing luminaries as Norman, Gary Player, Nick Price and Lorena Ochoa, to name only a few. Jones is a member of both the Golf Writers Association of America and the Turf and Ornamental Communicators Association. Jones can be reached at sjones@northcoastmedia.net.


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