What the Greenkeepers Know

By Tom Coyne

If you want to know your golf course, mow it.

????? Verticut the greens. Rake out the bunkers. Weedwack the margins. Run a blower around the fairways until you’re dizzy, and accidentally shower your 6th green with a morning’s worth of clippings. Go get the backpack blower and fix your mistake.

????? Remove the markers and cart signs. Cut the tee, clean it. Get off your machine and put it all back. Cut a hole before the players get to the green and feel the plug of soil you’re pulling break in two—find a screwdriver somewhere in your cart and try to scoop out the rest. They’re waiting in the fairway and you don’t want them to trash your place on Yelp.

????? I’ve bounced around the planet surveying golf courses and golfers for the last 25+ years, and I thought I had all the angles covered. I knew a Redan from a Cape hole; I could tell a Tillinghast from a MacKenzie; I could debate top-100 lists with informed opinion and toss in obscure substitutes, just to boast of my bona fides. I knew where to find the best showers, the best swag, the best bowl of soup. And then I started operating my own golf course and realized I didn’t know a damn thing.

????? Sullivan County Golf Club is a community 9-hole golf course in the Catskills in New York state. Dirty Dancing country. It’s nearly 100 years old with golden age lineage, and aside from some of the sand bunkers turning to grass, nothing much about the place has changed over the last century—except for management. I have the chance to buy the place at the end of this season, and if we can get it out of the red and prove that the place still has an audience and a purpose, that just might happen. But I didn’t end up here because I wanted to round out my resume with point-of-sale experience or hours spent on the back of a Toro—rather, I’m here because of a superintendent. We’ve called them the keepers of the greens going back to Old Tom’s time, but in this case, the Sullivan County super is keeping the lights on and doors open as well.

????? I found a note in my DMs some time back in January telling me about a golf course in the Catskills that wasn’t going to reopen this year, asking if I had any contacts in the architecture or golf club world who might be interested in a new project—otherwise these 175 acres were headed to market. Its owners had the best intentions, but they’d been losing money for three years and weren’t golfers—they’d hoped to put a hotel on the property, but those plans didn’t materialize. Superintendent Shaun Smith had kept the place going with a tractor and duct tape—literally—and hoped I knew someone who could help. It turns out that I did, and that he might like to write a book about the experience. And there isn’t a morning spent following lines in the dew that I’m not grateful I decided it was my turn to finally figure out how golf happened.

????? With the help of partners like Aquatrols, we’ve been able to bring inputs to Sullivan County that its grasses have never known, and they are drinking them down like desert wanderers. We’ve got mowers that cut and sprayers that spray—we’ve got shirts in the shop and beer in the fridge. And we’ve even got people showing up to see it all. This old beauty has some life in her yet.

????? The financial risks are still real and there are miles left to go for Sullivan County—the club isn’t out of triage yet—but the rewards for responding to Shaun’s message are abundant and clear. As a golf writer, I don’t get the chance to watch someone read a page and know what they’re thinking, but watching golfers enjoy a hole I just mowed is gratifying in an entirely new way. Watching them not repair their ball marks is also soul-crushing in a new way, but that’s the gift of Sullivan County: a chance to know a course beyond the version presented to paying golfers; to understand that golf requires so much more than well-fit clubs and swing-thoughts; to know the days and months and dollars that go into a party that only lasts for four hours. It’s an education one can’t get from a book.

Or maybe you can.