Fried Egg Stories: The Pursuit of Perfect Turf

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Speaker 2: Frida Egg requires different technique. What you need to do is actually square the face so it'll dig down underneath that bad lie and propel that ball right out onto the green.

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Speaker 3: Here's the thing. Playing out of a buried lion of bunker is completely different than playing out of a nice, clean lion of greenside bunker.

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Speaker 4: You need to be.

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Speaker 5: Aggressive on any show. Weather it's sitting cleanly, or it's Friday.

00:01:22
Speaker 6: Well, we've all faiked it, the dreaded Friday.

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Speaker 1: It's not to be feared, though.

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Speaker 7: It's actually a pretty easy shot to hit.

00:01:33
Speaker 8: You are are you there?

00:01:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm right here. How are you doing, Russ?

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Speaker 3: I'm good.

00:01:37
Speaker 5: I got you on audio on my phone.

00:01:40
Speaker 1: And then that's Russ Myers.

00:01:42
Speaker 3: I'm the golf course superintendent at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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Speaker 1: But back in nineteen ninety four he was on the maintenance crew at Augusta National Golf.

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Speaker 3: Club and I left in roughly September of ninety eight. It's my recollections.

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Speaker 1: Right, was this toward the beginning of your career in the turf industry?

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Speaker 5: It was. It was my first job post college.

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Speaker 1: Wow, what a job, too many golfers. Augusta National is the pinnacle of golf course conditioning, and it's not hard to see why if you watch the Master's tournament every year. You can probably call to mind the specific hue of the grass, that vivid solid green. It's a famous color, and with the twenty twenty Masters being held this week, I wanted to know more about how it's achieved. That's why I called Russ Myers. Once the Masters is over and everybody leaves, what happens next?

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Speaker 3: Of course I want to preface it by saying most of my information is from my time there and sometimes past since then, so certainly some of it can have changed. Sure, But immediately following, you know, the green jacket ceremony on the putting green and butler cabin, the staff and the whole operation goes back into getting it back and member expectations as soon as possible. So that includes you know, getting scoreboards down, getting bleat off the site, and.

00:03:01
Speaker 1: The crew has to work quickly because after the Masters, the golf season at Augusta National doesn't last much longer. At what point does the club shut.

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Speaker 5: Down, roughly speaking, the latter part of May, mid to late May.

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Speaker 1: That's right when most golf courses are getting ready for their busiest time of year. Augusta National is shutting down. Why Well, for one.

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Speaker 3: My understanding of the club is it was built to be a winner club.

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Speaker 1: It was never intended to be open in the summer. And two the maintenance crew uses those summer months for various projects, the most significant of which is making the Bermuda grass on the fairways as sturdy as possible.

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Speaker 5: So that you could get a good overseat again the next fall.

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Speaker 1: Overseating. That's the big event of Augusta National's off season. In the fall, just as the Bermuda grass is going dormant for the cool season, the crew overseeds it with rye grass. In order for this to work, the bermuda base has to be strong, but once the overseated rye grass takes hold, it creates a brilliant green carpet that lasts through the winter.

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Speaker 3: And if you get that right, you've got the best playing conditions in the planet for overseeded turf. Right.

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Speaker 1: Those conditions tend to peak in April, when the Masters is held, or when it's usually held. But overseeding warm season bermuda grass with cool seasoned rye grass is a delicate process. There are a million ways to screw it up.

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Speaker 3: You don't disrupt the soil to a point where it'll loosen up or get softer, keep it as wet as you can without floating flooding, washing that seed to the point that it establishes, and in the perfect world, you catch enough weather that it doesn't wash out.

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Speaker 1: So overseeding turns out to be very labor intensive, very resource intensive. What are some things that you personally remember doing just as tasks during your day when Augusta was in the overseeding process. What are some of the things that were on your assignment sheet.

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Speaker 3: When I was there that that process could take a couple of weeks to get through. I mean, it's a lot of acreage, it takes a lot of prep, and it was kind of a phase deal.

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Speaker 5: You worked your way across the property.

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Speaker 3: My role, for the most part was to take a small water hose, and I had a map of fourth of the golf course that had areas that I was to go out and basically keep an eye on and hit multiple times a day. So I was out there with no shoes and socks on and throwing a hose over and walking out the spots and hooking up quick couplers and keeping areas that my boss, Brad owned or at the time, Marsh Spenceon were well aware were the same areas that had trouble germinating each year, So there would be a map that they would give me and they would have fifteen spots on it that they wanted me to.

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Speaker 1: Go Handwater sounds complicated and it really really is. Yet an Augusta National, the crew led by Superintendent Brad Owen, seems to execute the overseating process just right year after year.

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Speaker 3: It's a fine tuned art there that certainly is improved upon with experience with doing it. And they obviously have a guy there who's been doing it a long time and is as good as I've ever seen it doing it and seems to do it better every year.

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Speaker 1: But and let's take another step back here, why do they do it? I mean, if they just let the summer season Bermuda gras go naturally dormant in the fall and winter, it'll be fine. In fact, it would probably be great, very fast, very fun to play on. So why go through this yearly grind of closing down and basically installing a whole new surface on top of your golf course. Well, Russ doesn't want to speak for Augusta Nationals. Reasoning and understandably, so he was just doing his job. But I can tell you the main reason that many bermuda based golf courses overseed. It's because when bermuda grass goes dormant, it turns brown, and golfers, generally speaking, are simply not down with brown. This is Frida Egg Stories. I'm Garret Morrison. In this episode, we ask why Americans devote so much effort and money to perfecting their golf turf. Now, you might think that the desire to cultivate green, uniform grass is simply natural. The humans have always liked that kind of thing, and maybe so. But the particular intensity of joy that we take in perfect turf, that's a fairly recent development, and I think it's worth considering how it happened. The story I'm going to tell focuses on the US in the period after World War II, the nineteen fifties and sixties. That's when the national enthusiasm for maintained turf really took off. And this enthusiasm didn't just change what we expected out of golf courses. It also changed how we took care of the type of grass that many of us know best are lungs. So today on Frida Egg Stories, A Master's Week special, The American obsession with perfect green turf, where it comes from, and how it affects us today.

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Speaker 7: So long was a part of my life since I was really a toddler. I had a plastic mower.

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Speaker 3: You know.

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Speaker 7: My father would when I was eight ten whatever. He'd give me these little handshears to go around to clip around the lamp post in the yard.

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Speaker 1: Ted Steinberg is grown up now.

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Speaker 7: I'm the daily professor of history at Case Western Reserve University in.

00:08:29
Speaker 1: Cleveland, and he's the author of a book called.

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Speaker 7: American Green, The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn, which came out about fourteen years ago.

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Speaker 1: The reason I'm talking to Ted is that as I researched this episode, I discovered that understanding the history of lawn maintenance was a great way of understanding the history of golf course maintenance. What we've expected out of our lawns, we've tended to expect out of our golf courses as well. Ultimately, they're both examples of America's growing preoccupation with flawless turf, and lawns, like golf courses, take up a surprising amount of base in this country. How can we think about how much land is devoted to lawns currently.

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Speaker 7: There's not a tremendous amount of data on this. Satellite data has been used, and what it suggests is there is somewhere if you took all the lawns in the United States and put them together in one spot, you would have a land area at least the size of Kentucky and perhaps as large as Florida.

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Speaker 1: Take me back to the beginning here, what are the historical roots of the domestic lawn?

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Speaker 7: The lawn goes way back in American history. Washington and Jefferson, of course had lawns. But the perfect lawn, and by that I mean a weed free, super green monoculture, that's a much more recent invention. It's the product of a set of forces that began actually after the Second World War.

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Speaker 1: A big thing that happened after the war was the massive expansion of the suburbs, and therefore the massive expansion of suburban lawns. One of the earliest and most famous of the new suburbs was Levittown on Long Island, about thirty miles outside of New York City. The founders of it, the Levitt family, basically turned farmland into about seventeen thousand single family homes, and each of those homes had a lawn.

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Speaker 7: And the home er, of course, had to take care of this greensward. In fact, they called it, they called the lawn. The Levitts did neighborhood stabilization. The idea is that you will project a community identity. This idea, we were all in this together. We're all taking care of the lawns. We're gonna all do our best to make the landscape look relatively uniform and neat, so it doesn't look like a bunch of slobs of living here.

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Speaker 1: In other words, there was social pressure. The lawn became a sign of its owner's virtue, and a messy lawn suggested a messy soul. There were other factors too that fed into the craze for turf grass perfection.

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Speaker 7: One of the things that was going on in the postwar period was a kind of change in believe it or not, in the history of how people understood and used color. And that sounds sort of weird when you say that to people, because most people, unless their historians, think, you know, what is that about? But actually, if you take a look, you find that there's this trend in the postwar period toward brightly colored consumer products, and I think the idea was to suggest to the consumer that buying these kinds of like yellow pants or pink automobile, what have you, was a way of projecting an image of yourself as a kind of forward looking person. And the lug got caught up in that.

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Speaker 1: It was the technicolor age. So of course the grass had to be technicolor green. Problem was it could be extremely difficult to maintain this kind of grass most places in the US that oil and climate just aren't well suited to it. So cultivating the perfect lawn is an uphill battle against nature and sinsus is America. That's where consumer industry came into play.

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Speaker 7: You had companies like Scots, which have been in business for some time selling grass seeds, that were looking to expand their market at a time when tens of millions of people were fleeing the city for the suburbs, and the perfect lawn actually turns out to be something around which you could organize a very very successful business model.

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Speaker 1: For example, in the late forties, the Scots developed a product called weed and Feed, which was essentially a combination of fertilizer and a futuristic herbicide known as two four D. Two four D had the seemingly magical capacity to kill weeds but not grasses.

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Speaker 7: This was then sold to homeowners with the idea that they should be putting down chemical applications, you know, for well, actually more like five six times I think six times a year, which is quite a lot of chemical input.

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Speaker 1: Soon, many American homeowners found themselves caught up in what I like to call the lawn care spiral. Because of improved products like two to four D, perfection was suddenly possible. But the harder you tried for that perfection, the more kinds of imperfection tended to pop up.

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Speaker 7: If you're going to plant grass around your yard and you have perfection in mind, and you want to mow it low, so below three inches, which was common in the post war period. So you're mowing below three inches, you're getting in a crew cut, just like you know, we used to get the crew cuts as kids and stuff. I mean, that's what people were doing at the lawn. But here's what happens when you do that, When you start to mow low like that, well, I mean, first of all, you could traumatize the grass plant and open it up to disease like fungus. Now you have a fungus that doesn't look so good. Well, now you have to go back to the store for what we'll have about a fungicide and get rid of the fungus. You mow it low, and you increase the evaporation. And if you increase the evaporation, you have to now pull out the sprinkler. Okay, you're watering away on a regular basis. What happened in your water When you're water like that, you're leaching nutrients from the soil. Whoa if you start to leach the nutrients from the soil, where you head back to the to the hardware store of boy, more chemical inputs, now more fertilizer to throw down on the lawn so that you can then cut it short again. Increase the evaporation, right, increase the need for for fung aside, Increase the need for a more fertilizer and other chemical inputs. And not to mention, of course, the water that you're using in the and the oil to run the mowers and whatever else that that you're running. And you can very quickly see how this, you know, homewarns wire being caught up in this uh, just bizarre kind of never ending of increasing effort, increasing maintenance, and increasing chemical use. And of course this was something that you had to pay for on top of everything else was expensive.

00:15:14
Speaker 1: It's absurd if you think about it. I mean, really, what's wrong with a little crab grass or a little brown There's no reason to be so uptied about our lawns. On the other hand, I get it. About a year ago, my family and I moved to a suburb and for the first time, we owned a home with lawns that we were supposed to care for ourselves, and I took a relaxed approach. Last fall, I kind of forgot to rake for a few weeks, and the fallen leaves ended up killing some of the grass in our front yard, creating these bear spots. And I was shocked at how ashamed I felt. I looked around at my neighbor's lawns saw that most of them were better than mine, greener, more uniform, more crew cut, and I thought, this is a judgment on me as a person. No, I did not run right out to the hardware store and stock up on turf builder. But I understood why someone might all, right, what does this all have to do with golf? Well, stick with me here, because I think you'll see that the American pursuit of perfect lawn turf very much runs parallel to the American pursuit of perfect golf course turf. They're both motivated by similar desires and enabled by similar technologies, and in both cases things were different before World War Two. Why don't we just put it this way? So, starting in the nineteen teens, twenties, and thirties, or what's usually called the Golden age of golf course architecture, could you just paint a picture of what golf course conditioning was like in the US in that era.

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Speaker 2: I mean, certainly you would see very different levels of uniformity and consistency on golf courses for a variety of reasons.

00:17:01
Speaker 1: That's George Waters, and I.

00:17:02
Speaker 2: Am the manager of Green Section Education for the United States Golf Association, and.

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Speaker 1: George says that the historical record from prior to World War Two suggests that greenkeepers were mostly just trying to keep everything alive.

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Speaker 2: And that they weren't striving to have a uniform stand of fescue from tea to green. They were striving to have coverage, you know, vegetative coverage from tea to green, as best as was possible, and even when you look at those old photos, you know they didn't really have that.

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Speaker 4: I mean, they.

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Speaker 2: Look quite inconsistent when you look at them.

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Speaker 1: That inconsistency of golf course turf was inevitable, but it wasn't necessarily considered a bad thing. Some golf architects actually wrote about preferring a little variety in grasses, including one of the architects behind Augusta National.

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Speaker 2: I'm just reading one right now from Alistair Mackenzie. This would be in the nineteen thirties, but he talks about how the best golf and grasses.

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Speaker 5: Vary in color.

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Speaker 2: They may be red, brown, blue, dark green, light green, yellow, at times, even white and gray. The golf course that has consisted entirely of one shade of green would be merely ugly. There is great charm and beauty in the varying shades of color on a golf course. So I think that's a pretty interesting perspective there, and it's you know, I think it's indicative of the fact that the architects of that time were to a large part deriving what they knew about golf from visiting overseas.

00:18:24
Speaker 1: Visiting specifically links golf.

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Speaker 2: Courses in the very earliest days. It was it was very much a natural kind of maintenance where you see Mackenzie talking about, you know, the rabbits being the primary caretakers of some of these early links, and how the sort of the rabity turf was the ideal type of thing defined on Links. The coloration on those courses is very inconsistent. You'll see it greener in the hollows between the little wrinkles and then kind of a tanner color up on top. But while you see a kind of a visual inconsistency, the playability is still really really good and you get great bound says, you get a good smooth roll on the ball.

00:19:02
Speaker 5: You can putt from far far.

00:19:04
Speaker 2: Out, in part because the turf isn't you know, isn't super lush, It isn't super grassy necessarily, so the ball just kind of coasts right across it.

00:19:13
Speaker 1: So the turf on those old Links courses may have been less attractive, at least to a modernize, but it did its job. Playability was more important than uniformity, and many golfers of the teens, twenties, and thirties seem to accept that. But these links turf ideals of firmness, naturalness, and variety didn't always translate super well to America.

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Speaker 2: In an American golf context, where you're dealing with lusher turf growth for the most part, denser turf growth, when you start to get inconsistencies in that it doesn't work out as cool as it does on the links. I mean it just you know, an inconsistent kind of patchiness on a parkland course isn't going to play as well, just by the nature of how the grasses are going to perform.

00:19:57
Speaker 1: I think bumpy and muddy instead of smooth and crispy. So after World War Two, just as American homeowners were fighting their way to the perfect lawn, American greenkeepers were trying to solve the problem of turf inconsistency on golf courses. And these greenkeepers, some of whom are now taking on the loftier title of superintendent, would play a key role in the next stage of this history. To learn more about the golf course turf revolution in the period after World War Two, I called up Derek Duncan.

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Speaker 9: I have to preface this by saying, I'm not an agronomist, and some people know almost everybody knows a lot more actually about turf and maintenance than I do.

00:20:34
Speaker 1: He's being modest, but it's true, he's not an agronomist. Derek is the associate editor of Architecture at Golf Digest and the host of the podcast Feed the Ball, and he's done a lot of research on golf in post War America.

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Speaker 9: So when you come out of World War Two and you enter this period in the nineteen fifties when golf is really beginning to boom, there's a shortage of golf courses. In the late forties and in the early fifties, people are waiting in line to play golf. Golf courses are turning people away. There just aren't enough places to play. People want to practice, there are no practice facilities. So golf is at this like staging point where it's just about to explode, which eventually does happen. In the beginning and middle of the nineteen fifties, courses start to proliferate.

00:21:17
Speaker 1: These new courses mainly serve the middle class and much like the suburban homes that this middle class was buying up in droves. The golf courses of the post war period had to be affordable but nice. They had to be maintained. So suddenly there's an unprecedented need for cheap, systematic methods of greenkeeping. And that's what brought about what Derek calls the age of the Superintendent, and.

00:21:40
Speaker 9: I do call it the age of the superintendent, because this is when they have at their disposal better fertilizers, better herbicides, better pesticides, better fungicides. They have the ability to access and purchase better mowers, machinery, irrigation systems. Now, you know, prior to the nineteen fifties, in many cases, you would have to kind of walk over to a spickett set your sprinkler. I just kind of like we would water our lawns, turn it on for a period of time, and turn it off. Now, you know, getting into the fifties, you have automated irrigation, so it's all underground and it's installed and you can time it and control it and not have to use the hoses. And these are all like huge leaps in technology.

00:22:22
Speaker 1: And then there were the chemicals.

00:22:24
Speaker 9: The big breakthrough was this chemical called two four D. Hey we know that one, and it's a nerbouside and it kills broad leaf weeds, but it doesn't really affect the grass that much. And this was this really revolutionized how golf courses could be maintained.

00:22:38
Speaker 1: The result was a kind of post war middle class golf that was above all user friendly. The golfer would pay a reasonable rate and we'll get a nice course with nice green uniform turf and not too many surprises. As Derek describes it, this kind of recreation just suited the mood of the era.

00:22:57
Speaker 9: As you get into the fifties and sixties and you get into this golf development boom and more people want to play the game. More people are coming into the game. So on one hand, the golf course is for them to be able to function, and functionality really becomes the principle and the majority of golf courses that are built, rather than you know, making grand architectural statements, is they have to be affordable and they have to be able to be easily maintained. So architecturally they don't need to be that interesting because you just have such a demand from people that just want to get on the golf course. They want to get out and hit a ball and be outside and play eighteen holes. This is what's happening in America in the fifties and sixties. I mean, everything is becoming more functional, and it comes at a cost of artistry of expression, but that was less important than functionality and efficiency. And look at the way the shapes of cars changed from the early fifties and through this fifties into the sixties, that they have more streamlined passenger trains are streamlined appliances. Look, you know, coffee makers are have this kind of chic, rounded, sleek look. And so everything is really about efficiency, comfort, ease of production in society as a whole, as a consumer culture, mass production drives our economy. Golf courses were products of mass production. They were mass produced on the same way in the same way that cars were. They needed to be operational, efficient, and functional.

00:24:24
Speaker 1: This emphasis on functionality over artistry might sound depressing, but frankly, it's what many Americans wanted after World War Two.

00:24:33
Speaker 9: When you have the Great Depression in the nineteen thirties and Americans now understand a level of poverty that they never did before. A level of displacement, and you come from there and you go into World War two. That period in time does something psychologically to most Americans. So when the war's over and they stand there and the dust is cleared, there's no desire to look over your shoulder and look backwards and go back to what was there before you went into that tunnel. You want to guilt toward the light. It's the idea of great possibility, new frontiers, the highway, interstate system, expanding out into the cities, having something of your own that makes your life a little easier and better because psychologically and in the well of our beings, we'd been through this horrible period where we didn't know if we were going to make it out or not. And this is just that's the America of the nineteen fifties. Really, that's kind of the launching point for this post warre golf architecture, golf course era of the fifties is this mindset of we want something new and fresh, and that's going to be easy to use, and it's going to be accessible, and it doesn't have to be terribly complex. I don't need to be intellectually challenged by.

00:25:43
Speaker 1: It, and just imagine you're a post war golfer. With that mindset, you're unlikely to be persuaded by romantic arguments from the likes of Alastair Mackenzie for spotted grass or unpredictable lives. When you're out on the course, you're probably just going to prefer green, uniform turf. Turf as functional as your car, or your microwave or your crew cut, or, for that matter, your lawn. In many ways, we're still living in that fifties sixties period of golf course maintenance. Most golfers want their playing surfaces to be green and consistent, and they tend to complain when that's not the case. As we've seen. That attitude, that set of expectations is rooted in post World War two America and its culture of ease and functionality. But there is one key difference between then and now, and that's that golf has become more aware of its ecological responsibilities. Yes, golf courses can have a positive impact on the environment, especially compared to other forms of development, but the pursuit of perfect turf is what Ted Steinberg calls an ecological boondoggle. In the American South, for instance, on Bermita based golf courses. The desire for green grass has led to wide spread overseeding in the fall. We've already talked about how Augusta National overseeds and how it takes a lot of work and a lot of water. Well until recently, that was the case also at the Pinehurst Resort in North Carolina when John Jefferies joined the maintenance crew there twenty years ago, overseating bermuda with rye was a big part of the annual routine.

00:27:21
Speaker 6: It was very common practice for the first week of September through the third week of September. Eight golf courses at the time would prepare to overseed and that was for us a two day process of actually spreading the seed, raking it in, doing some practices to ensure that the seed to soil contact was good, and then we had germination and then the watering process was two to three weeks after that of a significant amount of water being applied. So it was a disruptive process. It was not fun to play through and you may or may not know that that's a very busy time for us. September golf in the Carolina is big. It's starting to cool down. Kids are back in school, so parents are getting away from the house a little bit to come play some golf, and our conditions are less than ideal, but.

00:28:17
Speaker 1: Pinehurst felt that it had no choice. A lot of their customers came from the Northeast where the weather wasn't great, but the golf turf was almost always green.

00:28:25
Speaker 6: They had to have green grass and rye grass. Overseating was the way to do that, and so that carried on until twenty ten. And what really kick started us to thinking differently was the Core Crenshaw restoration project of Pinehurst Number two.

00:28:43
Speaker 1: The renowned golf architects Bill Cornbank Crunshaw were brought in to restore Donald Ross's design and they saw that overseating had over time built up the turf at course too, so that it was lush and soft. But they knew that Ross had wanted it to be the opposite, more like the Scottish links he had grown up on.

00:28:59
Speaker 6: As good as we are as superintendents and communicators, we don't have the pool that someone like Ben Crenshaw and Bill Koorr have to say, Hey, you need to stop overseeding because Course two is meant to play firm and fast, and you're going to have a hard time achieving that with this overseeding.

00:29:15
Speaker 1: So Pinehurst began to consider letting its bermuda grass go dormant in the winter. But there was one persistent problem.

00:29:21
Speaker 6: Our customer base, we felt demanded lush green grass three hundred and sixty five days.

00:29:29
Speaker 1: A year, and obviously dormant bermuda is brown. So what to do. Well Around that time twenty ten, some golf courses had actually begun to paint their cool season turf green, which did away with the need to overseed. When you first heard about this, John Jeffries wasn't totally convinced. Could you tell me, by the way, you'll notice a change in the audio quality here, it's a whole zoom story. You don't need to hear it. Could you tell me, like before you saw turf colorants in action, did you have any particular thoughts about that. About turf colorants, we.

00:30:03
Speaker 8: Were hesitant that it would look too artificial, and if we didn't want Course two to look fake, we wanted the color on the ground to be very similar to what our bermuda grass looks like. In June, July and August Versus an overseated, bright striped look, and.

00:30:23
Speaker 1: What surprised you about them when you actually saw how they worked.

00:30:28
Speaker 8: We were surprised at the appearance. You know, these things are as they're advertised. You know, we can customize the colors a little bit and get what we want out of it, and it's a lot less expensive. The cost of the paint is cheaper than the rye grass seed itself, So those things were surprising.

00:30:49
Speaker 1: So Ever, since corn Crenshaw's restoration ten years ago, Pinehurst number two has let its Bermuda go dormant in the fall, and instead of overseeding, they've broken out the green paint. I'll admit when I first heard that Pinehurst was using colorance, I thought, you know, here's yet another example of our obsession with perfect turf run amuck. But as John explained it all to me, he's not a superintendent. Of course too, I started to come around, do you have a way of thinking about the environmental impact of turf paint versus overseating?

00:31:23
Speaker 8: So, you know, the big thing now for us is water use. That's a you know, hot issue in golf. Is are we a good steward of our water? I could do some easy research back into our data from the overseeding days to how much water we use from September first to May first, and dealing with ryegrasts versus now, and I would speculate those numbers would be ninety percent less water used for us wow painting versus overseating.

00:31:54
Speaker 1: So I guess the big question that maybe even a non golfer would have looking at this kind of process would be, well, why not just let the grass go brown?

00:32:06
Speaker 8: There's a lot of golf courses that tolerate dormant surfaces, and primarily in the Carolinas, that would be private clubs who have always done it that way. They never overseeded. Us in the resort industry that had customers coming in from the Northeast that left green grass and wanted to see green grass down here was what drove the decisions to overseed or paint. But we felt like we had to have green grass.

00:32:35
Speaker 4: And I think golfer appreciation for playing conditions has improved so that I don't know that there's as many golfers or courses that demand lush green anymore. And a lot of it has to do with some of the architecture that goes now and is appreciated now, not only in the United States, but when they watch and championships and things, and they see how the balls are running and balancing, and people are more demanding of those conditions. So all that factors into what the golfer wants and what they wanted their club or their resort or where they're going, and helps us better present those conditions for them by knowing, Hey, this is what the customer really wants. They want the playing conditions, but they also want some color, and that's the decision we came to.

00:33:27
Speaker 1: So John is seeing a little movement in golfer's attitudes toward grass. They still like green, but maybe they aren't looking for Augusta green anymore. Maybe they prefer pale turf that's a bit firmer and a bit more sustainable. Of course, it's still just as hard for greenkeepers to meet the new expectations as it was for them to meet the old ones, but just the fact that the expectations have shifted slightly is notable. It should remind us that history produced our obsession with perfect turf, so history should be able to undo it. Now. I'm not saying that's necessarily gonna happen. I mean, I can't even argue myself out of loving the sight of flawless, orderly, bright green grass. Listen, I grew up in America, so that post World War II culture of nice, shiny, bright things. I'm just as susceptible to it as anyone. Right now, as I record this, I've just come in from raking my lawn and I like how it looks. It's a deep green. After the rains we've had recently, those bear spots grew back a little over the summer. The truth is, this weekend, I know what's going to happen. I'm gonna sit down in my easy chair, turn on the TV, and let myself drift away into one of the most intensively engineered landscapes in America, a perfect green world where everything is fine and there's nothing to fear. This was the eleventh episode of Fried Egg Stories. It's produced and hosted by me Garrett Morrison, with engineering from Jay Vieric and transcript assistants from Jay Fishel. Our executive producer is Andy Johnson. Many thanks to Russ Meyers, Ted Steinberg, George Waters, Derek Duncan, and John Jeffries. Ted Steinberg's book once Again is called American Green and I'd also like to recommend George Waters's book Sand and Golf. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review in iTunes. Those help us out. You can also find me on Twitter at g Ford Golf and the Fried Egg at the Fried Egg with underscores between each word, don't be a stranger and thanks for listening.