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Let 'er Rip Following months of deliberations and delays comes a demolition derby
By John Garrity
There's no silver shovel, no ceremonial rhetoric, no prayer. Machine operator
Nick Carhart simply climbs onto the deck of a 15-ton Caterpillar SS-250B
rototiller, slips into the driver's seat, engages the rotor clutch, throttles
up, releases the parking brake and pushes the gear stick forward. With a throaty
roar the monster cultivator creeps forward, the big teeth on its rotating drum
chewing up a nine-foot-wide swath of sod and soil. Carhart has started this
first strip just below the 9th green, and he's crawling downhill toward the 9th
tee. Ten yards, 20 yards.
It's a grand spring morning in Gainesville, Fla. -- you can hear the mockingbirds and blue jays despite the throb of the tiller. Thirty yards, 40 yards. The big front tires turn like lazy mill wheels. Fifty yards. Then, with a muffled thunk and a mechanical groan, the big Cat lurches and stops. Somebody probably should have said a prayer. "This always happens," says Scot Sherman, the senior associate course designer for Weed Golf Course Design, watching from the middle of the fairway as the actual renovation of the course, which he has been involved in planning for months, begins. "The first hole with the rototillers, we always hit something. One time we hit galvanized pipe and snapped the shear pin. Another time we hit a six-inch water line, and water was gushing everywhere."
The crowbar is actually a five-foot bar, and it takes two men about a minute to dislodge the twisted pipe from the drum. Weber climbs aboard a John Deere 544H articulating loader with a forklift attachment and begins ripping the old pipe out of the ground. It's easy work, now that he knows where the pipe is. The fork plunges into the turf, heaves upward, and the rusted line springs out of the ground in 20- and 40-foot lengths. Watching this, University of Florida course superintendent Mark Birdsell shakes his head. Most modern irrigation lines run the length of a hole, but these old pipes were planted across the fairway at 25- to 30-yard intervals. Next, the rototiller gets a quick inspection. Opening a small hatch behind the driver's chair, Weber and Sherman check the shear pin -- a 7/16-inch bolt that's actually designed to snap under extreme loads, preventing damage to the drive shaft or engine. "It's broken," says Sherman, adding, "Been there, done that." Weber sends a crew member to the hardware store for a bag of replacement bolts, and everybody else breaks for lunch, having tilled a grand total of 1,458 square feet, or the equivalent of a small suburban lawn. During lunch in the clubhouse Weber sighs. "We're going to spend about 40 hours with that 544 now," he says, meaning 40 hours prying up pipe in advance of the rototiller.
"Good," says Sherman. "I budgeted 50." Neither man is worked up. This is only the first of many crises that Sherman and Weber will tackle over the next several months. Weber, 35, works for MacCurrach Golf Construction, Inc., of Jacksonville, the company hired by Weed to demolish and rebuild the Florida course. Weber knows the drill. Among other projects, he has overseen renovations at Riviera, in Pacific Palisades, Calif. (with designer Ed Connor); at Harbour Town, in Hilton Head, S.C. (with Pete Dye); and at Timuquana Country Club, in Jacksonville (with Bobby Weed). "On this job we're doing everything but the shaping and the tree moving," Weber says. "We're in charge from Day One until everything's planted." To help him accomplish his tasks, Weber has an on-site office manager, a mechanic and a crew of as many as 35 working 7-to-7 shifts, six days a week. He will also have at his disposal more than 25 pieces of equipment, including track hoes, bulldozers, tractors and dump trucks. Some of the machines belong to MacCurrach, but many are rented. The spanking-new SS-250B tiller, for instance, has been hired from Ring Power Corp. in Jacksonville for $16,000 a month. (Off the showroom floor the tiller costs $250,000.) A week ago, after the course plan got final approval from the university's Land Use and Facilities Planning Committee, Birdsell's crew sprayed the herbicide Roundup on the fairways, tees and greens. Then Weber's team began clearing unwanted trees from the site, bulldozing some, toppling others with chain saws. To Weber, the son of a Cincinnati golf pro, the sounds of construction are sweet music. Eleven years ago, he was selling Florida real estate by day and dreaming of better things at night. "I hated what I was doing," he says, "and I was going nowhere." His offices, by chance, were located one floor below the offices of Palmer Course Design in Ponte Vedra Beach. Stimulated by lunchtime conversations with the Palmer staff, Weber accepted a job with Landscapes Unlimited, Inc., a golf course construction company. "I got into a ditch with a bunch of workers for seven bucks an hour," he says with a shrug, a smile wrinkling his young but weathered face. "We're kind of like gypsies because we travel so much, but I have always loved construction. I try to work with architects like Pete and Bobby, who design less from plans and more in the field." Says Sherman, "Tom's multitalented. He can run any piece of equipment, and he has an intense interest in architecture and design." For the four to five months he expects to be on this job, Weber has rented a house less than a block from the course. He plans to drive home every weekend to spend time with his wife, Julie, and their children, Leila, 14, and Wren, 5 -- assuming he keeps the project on schedule. "Scot thinks the tiller breaking down is a good omen," Weber says with a doubtful smile. "I don't know." Around 5 o'clock, Carhart fires up the SS-250B, lowers the cutting drum to a depth of 12 inches and resumes his pastoral crawl down the 9th fairway, a 15-ton snail on a 100-acre lawn. In the next installment of This Old Course, we'll get on an excavator and load a few dump trucks with fine Florida sand. We'll also dig some trenches for the new irrigation lines and, if there's time, we'll watch the tree team move a 40-inch oak from here to there.
Issue date: May 21, 2001
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