At the historic Newport Country Club, some renovations are as old as the club itself.
Kathryn Riley/USGA
If your idea of big-time championship golf is a tournament played on an emerald-green, backed by SubAir Systems, overseen by humidity-sensing drones and fine-tuned with the help of all manner of space-age advents, we’re not. to blame you.
That’s a lot to go around.
This week, however, something different is happening as the over-50 set meets in Rhode Island for the US Senior Open, at Newport Country Club.
A visit to the 100-year-old club is a trip to the birthplace of championship golf in this country; The first US Amateur and US Open were both held here in 1895. It is also a reminder of an unusual era in golf course maintenance, when facilities in the US were maintained like their counterparts in Ireland and the UK. Augusta National this is not.
For example, consider irrigation. While Newport’s greens and fairways have sprinkler heads, its playgrounds do not. Unique among USGA competition venues, the course does not have an irrigation system for its fairway and is difficult because, of course, it always has been, and the membership likes it that way.
What are the results of this week’s competition? Ben Kimball is the USGA’s executive director of titles. We asked him about Newport’s unique infrastructure (or lack thereof) and its impact on event course setup.
Plenty of room off the tee
Strengthening roads in competition means growing in rough terrain, but growing in rough terrain requires access to good irrigation. “You have to be able to water regularly,” Kimball said. Doing so in Newport would mean running large pipes yards from the tees or greens, a labor-intensive and fraught process. “The situation here is more controlled by mother nature than by someone with a switch box,” Kimball said. That makes it difficult to predict how the course will develop in the winter and spring, and how easily it can be managed in the weeks leading up to the event. In addition, because Newport is a windy area, there is a chance that “not all the water will get to where you need it to stay.” Rather than run those risks, the USGA has chosen to leave the fairways as the club reserves them for members’ play, mostly from 35 to 45 yards in width, five to 10 yards wider on average than most championship venues. “It’s going to look like there’s a place to hit it,” Kimball said. “And when the wind picks up, they’ll be happy to have that range.”
Non-uniform rough
Interspersed with Newport’s native grasses are bentgrasses that, Kimball says, are either pulled out by golfers from their shoes or left where they used to be. Bentgrass does well in green. However, as hard as it is, it is bearish, thick and grippy. “And if you cut it, you don’t like it anymore,” Kimball said. Without watering, “it turns yellow and looks leathery.” So, where most major tournaments have uniform rough, Newport will have a mix of easy-to-reach traditional grass and, sadly, the club’s bentgrass patches. “You never know what you’re going to find,” Kimball said. “But if anything, if you go offline, you can be a lot better,” because the bentgrass, because of how it got there in the first place, will probably be closer to the edge of the fairway.
Jonathan Ernst/USGA
Minor minor repairs for the trip
Changing course setups is common practice at major tournaments, and the USGA will do just that this week on the tees and greens. But it will be a different story on fairways and rough. “In a way, you could say it’s actually easier for us, because we have to let nature take its place.” (The exception is the middle of the 10th fairway, where there is a sprinkler head, which was installed because the soil is thin and rocky in that area.) “It’s like playing golf in a museum,” Kimball said of Newport. . “It’s good, but you can’t touch much.”
The US Open, looking British
Like all species, grass is variable. The turf on Newport’s fairways has done just that, aging, firming and firming, well suited to its environment. But not Augusta-green. A mixture of different types of grass (bentgrass, poa, rye and fescue), monochromatic, and as the week goes on, it will go the way nature takes it, creating brown or short patches reminiscent of turf across the links. lake. “Viewers may find it has more of a British Open look and feel than what they think of as an old-school US Open,” Kimball said. “More Pinehurst than Winged Foot, if you know what I mean.”
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