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Ground Force Short on workers, the Florida project taps into an unlimited resource -- college interns
Updated: Tuesday August 07, 2001 6:07 PM By John Garrity
"That was dramatic," Weber says. It's the following morning, and we're standing outside the construction trailer under a cloudless sky. Black irrigation pipe is stacked everywhere, and piles of gravel and bunker sand form an Alpine profile. "I didn't ask them to work in the rain," he continues, "but they pulled together as a team. I liked that."
To find laborers, Weber spread the word among his friends in the golf construction industry and asked for help from university officials. He wound up with 16 young men who said they were willing to work 12 hours a day in tropical heat, in choking dust, in ankle-deep mud -- and if they didn't actually say that, Weber was sure they'd like the work once they got a taste of it. For their sweat and toil, the interns are getting $8 an hour and three months of free housing in a nearby apartment complex. They're also getting a quick and dirty education in course design. Right now, for instance, some of them are prepping the number 2 tee box for sod while others are wielding shovels to help shape bunkers on the 18th hole. The work is unlike any college course they've taken. Only Weber or one of his crew chiefs gives instructions to the interns. "We live in Vagueville," says Ken Gibson, a landscape architecture major at Kansas State. "They want us to work things out on our own." Around noon the interns begin to arrive at the trailer, which doubles as their lunchroom. Tracking mud and chunks of clay on the linoleum floor, they sit at tables and unwrap sandwiches they've bought across the street at the deli in the Publix supermarket. Everything is tranquilo -- the buzzword they've picked up from their Spanish-speaking coworkers. "Tranquilo, relax," they tell one of their mates, who for the second time in as many days has lifted his soft drink by the lid and spilled most of it on the floor. When I ask what they've learned from two months in the Florida sun, one says, "How to run machinery." Another says, "I never realized how much thought goes into the smallest detail." A third says, "Drainage. I've almost got this gravity business figured out."
Eight hours later -- and strictly in the interests of full reportage -- I join the interns at the Salty Dog Saloon, a campus hangout. The Salty Dog is long, narrow and filled with young people having a good time. A coin-operated pool table commands one area of the saloon, like a baptismal font in the nave of a cathedral. The first thing I notice about the interns, who have gathered along the bar in back, is that they all have scrubbed faces and wet shower hair, evidence that they stopped at their apartments only long enough to clean up and change. The second thing I notice is that they're already nostalgic about previous visits to the Salty Dog, their favorite watering hole. "We're like a bunch of sailors in port," says Kevin Wachter, who studies crop and soil science at Michigan State. Weber, who is having a drink at the bar with his corporate-chemist wife, Julie, is indulgent when it comes to the interns' free time, as long as they perform on the job. "Work is work and play is play," he says. "If they don't know the difference, they have a little growing up to do." It's clear, though, that he admires the kids who can both work and play -- someone like Australia's Steve Lalor. "Steve's an amazing worker," says Weber. "He gives it his all every day." Weber laughs. "He gives it his all every night, too." From the stories they tell at the Salty Dog, it's apparent that the interns have learned as much from their blunders as they have from their elders. One intern set the parking brake before hopping off a tractor on the 9th fairway -- or thought he had until he turned and saw the tractor rolling down the hill. "I chased it," he says, "but it rolled off the course and stopped in somebody's garden, crushing flowers. Tom made me go knock on the door and confess." Another intern, told that a Sand Pro grader had run out of gas under Bobby Weed, raced to the architect's rescue and poured petrol into the oil reservoir instead of the fuel tank. "I felt like a total idiot!" he yells over the noise of the bar. Most of their memories, however, are good ones -- laying sod in the rain, learning Spanish from the "amigos," watching a golf course spring to life under their very feet. "I've had a great summer," says Gibson, waiting his turn at the pool table. "These guys are fun to work with, and Tom has been a great friend and teacher." It's not so bad in Vagueville. In the next installment we'll check calendars and timetables as Weber's six-month-long construction train keeps chugging across This Old Course.
Issue date: August 13, 2001
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