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There's more to renovating a course than meets the eye

By John Garrity

"Renovating a golf course is no different from renovating a house," says Bobby Weed. "You don't know what you're going to find inside the walls of an old house. Three kinds of wiring? Rusted pipes? Rotted sills?" He grabs a taco chip from a plastic basket and pops it into his mouth, ignoring the bowl of salsa in front of him. "It's the same with an old golf course. Until you stick a shovel in the ground, you don't know what's involved. That's why we have a contingency fund. We price for the unexpected."

It's early January, and Weed, a golf course architect, is having lunch with his staff at Cruiser's Grill, a raucous joint on Florida A1A, a block from Weed's headquarters in Jacksonville Beach. The table looks as if it has been dropped from a helicopter, but the food is good -- cheese fries dusted with pepper, teriyaki chicken salad and thick, juicy hamburgers. Scarfing down the cholesterol bombs with Weed are his senior designer, Scot Sherman; his business manager, Mike Matthews; and me, doing a woeful imitation of Bob Vila.

Bill Frakes

Asked what sorts of things you find "within the walls" of a 75-year-old course, Weed munches on another chip before answering. "You find pipes and drain lines," he says, "or utilities that weren't recorded. Sometimes they're abandoned, sometimes they're live." (Old utility lines can be 10, 20, even 50 feet off the positions marked on maps, creating the dodgy possibility of shock or explosion when a dozer blade creases the pipe.) "You might find an old burial pit," he continues, "or artifacts that you have to report."

The course Weed is about to renovate, I point out, is believed to be on the site of an old hog farm. Weed winces and says, "We did a job on an Arabian horse farm and uncovered a couple of horse carcasses. That wasn't much fun." The architect wipes his mouth with a paper napkin and looks up. "How's your hamburger?"

"Great," I say.

Anything else? Anything that could slow down the project and take a bite out of the $4 million budget?

"Soil conditions you don't anticipate," says Weed. "Buried logs. Stumps. If no oxygen can get to it, that stuff doesn't decay." Weed turns thoughtful, as if envisioning a Caterpillar tractor lurching and groaning over some mysterious object entombed in deep, wet sand. "Nobody likes surprises," he says. "They cost time and money."

ACTUALLY, A FEW surprises and cost overruns won't bother me; I plan to spend the better part of the year following Weed and his subcontractors as they demolish and then rebuild the University of Florida Golf Course in Gainesville. The series of articles will appear in Golf Plus on a regular basis and will attempt to cover every aspect of the renovation.

The real fun will start on April 23, when bulldozers begin ripping up the 118-acre site on the northwest edge of the Florida campus. "When people play a course, they see the grass," Weed says. "They don't see under the grass. They don't realize that 75 percent of the cost of construction of a course lies beneath the turf."

Similarly, most of the challenge of golf is hidden in the craniums of the architects who design courses and of the course superintendents who maintain them. In this case the intellectual property of Donald Ross, the legendary designer who laid out the Florida course in the 1920s -- it was the original Gainesville Country Club -- will be reshaped by Weed and Sherman, using all the tools available to 21st-century architects.

As with an old house, the challenge in remodeling a golf course is to preserve those elements that charm the beholder and speak to tradition while replacing other elements that are no longer functional. The University of Florida course already has some eye appeal: The redbrick clubhouse sits on high ground looking south over a landscape of pines, ponds and fairways shaded by moss-draped oak trees. The greens, due either to Ross's original design or to the sheer smallness of the property, are as cramped as Victorian drawing rooms, but they give the course its character.

Beyond that, there is much to criticize. At 6,205 yards, the par-70 layout is stunted. The longest of the six par-3s is only 185 yards, and the 14th and 15th holes, back-to-back par-3s, impede course traffic like an oxcart on a freeway. The greens are quaint, but they putt inconsistently and provide little hole variation. The bunkers don't drain. Some tees get too much shade while others get too much water. The colonnade of trees down the right side of the 10th hole fails to protect traffic on Second Avenue from sliced tee shots, which raises liability issues. As for the fairways, the current strain of bermuda grass should be called Incognito because it's overrun by invasive hybrids. This old course is, in two words, worn out.

But hey, that dining-room doorjamb is where we drew lines with a pencil to chart the kids' growth. That pale spot on the floor is where Grandpa used to snooze in his Barcalounger. At the University of Florida Golf Course the memories are just as rich, but they're recorded on bronze rectangles and photo-sensitive paper. A plaque by the 5th tee honors former Gators coach Buster Bishop, who led the men's team to national championships in 1968 and '73. Another plaque, on the golf team's redbrick teaching center, pays homage to the man who helped pay for the building, three-time Florida All-America and 1969 U.S. Amateur champion Steve Melnyk. In the All-American Room, a conference room on the second floor of the clubhouse, the walls are covered with framed photographs of Gators greats, such as two-time U.S. Open champion Andy North, 1969 PGA Tour money leader Frank Beard, 1973 Masters champion Tommy Aaron, 1989 British Open champ Mark Calcavecchia, 1976 U.S. Amateur champion Donna Horton and 1986 NCAA champion Page Dunlap.

"This little golf course was a wonderful training ground for all of them," says Buddy Alexander, the men's coach at Florida since 1988. "It's not a long layout, but it's got some difficult driving holes, and it's a little dicey getting up and down, particularly in the winter when the grass is a little thin and you get some tricky little lies." Alexander probably isn't aware that he has used the word little four times in 10 seconds, but it speaks to his reasons for wanting the course rebuilt. "I felt like our recruiting was suffering," he says, looking down on the 1st tee from his office window. "Kids today, the upper-echelon players to whom we would offer a full scholarship, want to go to a school where they can play big-time courses. Frankly, we don't have much sizzle to show those kids."

The elite junior players, in fact, have stopped beating a path to Alexander's door, unimpressed by the Gators' three NCAA men's championships and 13 SEC titles, and dismissive of the Lady Gators' lone individual NCAA championship and two national team titles. Alexander's men won five SEC crowns in the '90s, but last year's Gators finished eighth and failed to qualify for the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1982. "I have to take some of the blame," says Alexander, "but for the most part it boils down to facilities."

THERE'S ONE respect in which a course renovation is nothing like a home renovation -- the homeowner typically doesn't refinish the floors or paint the walls a month before demolition. However, on a cool but sunny afternoon in mid-January, one member of the 10-man maintenance staff was patiently filling divots on the team's practice tee with a pale-green sand and seed mixture, as if in three months it wasn't all going to be tractor tracks and mud.

The man in charge of the crew is Mark Birdsell, a third-generation course superintendent whose grandfather carried the golf gene from Scotland to Canada and ultimately to West Virginia, where he served as greenkeeper at the Fairmont Field Club in the 1930s. "I've kind of carried on the family tradition," Birdsell says, watching his men groom the 10,000-square-foot putting green at the team end of the practice range. "I have pictures of my mother driving a horse-drawn gang mower."

Birdsell is a stocky man with a square, florid face and a reddish-blond mustache that is Craig Stadler-ish. He graduated from Leonard High in West Palm Beach, Fla., in 1978 and moved right into golf course work, mostly as a "growing-in" specialist (a course superintendent who nurses a newly built golf course to maturity before passing the baton to a permanent greenkeeper). He is used to working with course architects, having grown in courses for George Fazio, Arthur Hills, Robert Trent Jones Jr. and Mark McCumber. "But I've never done a demolition," he says, "and I've always wanted to. I'm extremely excited."

When I ask him what he expects to find in the walls during demolition, Birdsell echoes Weed. "Hopefully we won't find anything environmentally sensitive," he says, "but in the '30s they might have used concrete asbestos pipe for the irrigation system. That would be a problem."

Turning around he points to a wide, grassy depression between the Melnyk building and the 14th fairway. "That sinkhole keeps getting bigger and bigger," says Birdsell, "and my understanding is that it used to be a dump for the hog farm. No tellin' what we'll find in there."

Asked if they might unearth something of archaeological value -- a Seminole bracelet, say, or the jaw of a saber-toothed tiger -- Birdsell nods and says, "You might find something that was buried, sure. You find layers of stuff. We might even find the original contours of a Donald Ross green."

His interest, though, lies less with what is already in the ground and more with what Weed will install there over the summer: state-of-the-art drainage and irrigation systems. When Weed is through, the bunkers that currently do not drain ("They're basically birdbaths," says Birdsell) will. The greens that currently are as different as foster children ("They're just push-up greens; there's no drainage in 'em") will putt like clones. "There'll be no reason to have soggy greens and ball marks one day and rock-hard greens the next," says Birdsell. "Everything will be more predictable and playable from day to day."

Not only will the new systems deliver just the right amount of water where it's needed and when it's needed, but the whole process will also be controlled by computer from Birdsell's office in a brand-new maintenance barn. The super laughs and shakes his head. "We've been driving a Chevy for years," he says. "Now we're gonna get to drive a Cadillac!

Issue date: February 12, 2001

In the next installment of This Old Course, we'll visit the design offices of Bobby Weed to see how preliminary hole routings are drawn. We'll also see how Weed plans to turn the existing 17th hole, a weak par-4 of 325 yards, into a risk-reward puzzle along the lines of another short par-4, the famous 10th at Riviera Country Club.

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