Ontario Golf Clubs Recover by Robert Thompson
K
eith Bartlett thought there was a day in the future that he’d have to deal with the problems plaguing his course’s greens. He just didn’t know how quickly that day would come. Bartlett, Superintendent at St. George’s Golf and Country Club in Toronto, recognized his club’s problem in the late winter. Core samples of grass from the club’s greens didn’t come to life when grown indoors, and there was a decidedly nasty odor from the grass. It turns out a combination of factors – a lengthy and unseasonably long cold snap, ice and other circumstances – put undue pressure on the short grass that serves as a putting service for thousands of golfers each year. That grass was dead, leading Bartlett and other superintendents from across Ontario to seek out a way to deal with one of the biggest catastrophes to hit golf clubs in the province in decades. “It was a real mess,” says Bartlett, sitting in a golf cart near the clubhouse at St. George’s in Toronto’s west end. “But it helped us move forward with something I’m not sure we’d ever have gotten done otherwise.” In the case of St. George’s, the prestigious private club elected to make a bold move, rebuilding all 18 holes on its Stanley Thompson-designed course. But it was only one of numerous clubs in Ontario that faced tough decisions as courses came out of the cold to find their Poa annua greens – annual bluegrass in colloquial terms – dead and brown. Usually there’s some winterkill, but no one in the industry recalls such a widespread issue in the last 50 years. The problem captured attention from across Ontario’s media, with print and television broadcasters putting the spotlight on courses with dead grass. The cold didn’t discriminate based on a course’s rating or the fees it charged players. If a course had Poa annua greens – common at most older facilities – it faced some degree of damage from the winter, often with swaths of dead grass. Newer facilities typically have more resilient bentgrass greens, a more modern grass that isn’t nearly as easily damaged by ice and cold and is more environmentally sustainable, which explains why in some areas of the province one course would have extensively damaged putting surfaces,
while a nearby club didn’t have any problems. At its worst, some of the country’s most venerable clubs like St. George’s or Hamilton Golf and Country Club in Ancaster, Ontario, or London Hunt and Country Club, which hosted this year’s CP Women’s Open, lost a majority of their putting surfaces. Continued on page 18…
Summer 2014 • Green is Beautiful 17