On the eve of the 150th anniversary of the Open Golf Championship, symbolically staged at the home of the game, there will be much talk in the greenkeeping world about the set up of the Old Course and the grass that the Championship is played on. This grass, especially in the greens, will be predominantly fescue/bent.
With Pebble Beach receiving adverse publicity at last month’s US Open, (due to critical player comments about their inconsistent Poa annua (Annual Meadow Grass) greens, the greens surfaces on the Old Course will be under the spotlight. My article on this Blog on maintaining good Poa annua greens received over 350 hits from the USA during the four days of the US Open so I assume that the press are interested in finding out more, if there is a story in it!
Fescue (Festuca rubra ssp.) and Colonial Bent (Agrostis capillaris) grasses are so entwined in our golfing history I doubt that the game would have been possible or indeed grown without them. The hardy low growing dense, springy sward produced by fescue growing on our linksland gave support to and shaped the game. Golfers would have followed the routes of least resistance through the dunes, playing over the fescue, bent “mown” by the grazing animals. This “tight” sward combined with the prevailing winds shaped the shot making of the time. Even when the game moved inland its practitioners sought out sites that were free draining, supporting fescues and bents, such as heath and down lands.
“Golf is a game best played on grass but not just any grass, the finest possible grass and this is fescue” The early exponents of the game and its greenkeepers knew and appreciated this, sadly to a large extent it has been a lesson lost. Golf greens are the ultimate playing/putting surface. In my opinion, fescue and to a lesser extent fescue/bent swards provide the ultimate grass for those playing surfaces. Why then have we lost so many of our fescue/bent dominated greens. The answer to this is not short as there have been many factors, however they all form part of golf greenkeeping history and thus the history of the game itself.
TV Greens
The boom in popularity of golf in the early seventies, stimulated by live colour television coverage of tournament golf, is the main marker for the start in decline of fescue/bent dominated greens. Simply the game became aerial, and played on colour, the colour of course being green, the darker and more uniform the better. Of course previously, golf had been a game played closer to the turf, the skilled exponent of the chip and run having the advantage. This skill dictated by the firm, dry, fast turf provided by fescue/bent. Now thanks to television and in particular the satellite signal we saw the ball being lofted into greens from a great height and stopping dead on softer irrigated ‘green’ surfaces. This is the game that the new ‘moneyed’ golfer of the seventies wanted to play, the game of the touring professional.
The growth in the game’s participants put money into the UK’s golf clubs, a large proportion of which became available to the Head Greenkeeper who had previously been used to getting by on nothing much. This in large part thanks to his undemanding fescue dominated sward. To ensure that a club and its Head Greenkeeper could be parted from their funds, irrigation, machinery and fertiliser manufacturers, closely followed by chemical companies ‘flooded’ the market. These tools to make a greenkeepers life easier only, as it turned out, made them harder and more complex.
Many of the inland courses with greens constructed on local ‘pushed-up’ soils suffered badly with fertiliser and water over-use combined with compaction from higher numbers of rounds. This in turn had a detrimental effect on the fescue/bent grasses. Compacted highly fertile anaerobic soils were opposite to the conditions that fescue/bent grasses thrived in. Poa annua took hold in these situations and vicious cycle of decline set in further with the production of thatch and associated turf grass diseases. Clubs with smaller incomes or clued up canny ‘links’ men in charge, avoided the decline but it has to be said these were in the minority.
Preachers not converters
During the late seventies and early eighties many head greenkeepers and course managers set about trying to rectify the problems. To this day very few have ever succeeded in returning these green surfaces to pure fescue/bent, let alone pure fescue. Some often compounded the problem by using 60/40 fen soil based top dressings. These dressings, due to their high proportion of fines and organic matter sealed the surfaces further. Golf committees also compounded problems by going through a number of ‘headmen’. This meant changing top dressing regimes that only succeeded in layering the surface 50mm with a strata of differing materials, thus introducing differing air and water movement rates. These strata also caused root shearing. Thus the keen fescue/bent green surfaces, that our country was known for, were lost replaced by poorly performing annual meadow grass dominated surfaces. This is a situation that many are still endeavouring to rectify today.
So what of the future for bent/fescue swards? Other than on the remote links courses will we ever see fescue dominated putting surfaces again? The R & A’s initiatives in relation to “best course for golf” are focused on returning green surfaces to our traditional native sward. The STRI’s golf agronomy focus is also only on this. In all of their report recommendations, when working with anything other than creeping bent grass, fescue/bent is the target. Many devoted course managers see that there is only one true greenkeeping direction namely fescue/bent. More power to them all I say but will they win out?
Unfortunately due to commercial pressures, an obsession with lower heights of cut to gain speed, soil push-up greens, and all their inherent problems, coupled with the sheer pressure of going through a species conversion the answer is often ‘no’. This is not a defeatist opinion more one of realist thinking gained out of experience.
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