Risk And Reward

QUAIL HOLLOW’S quick work goes on display for the 2017 PGA and the 2021 Presidents Cup

- Ron Whitten

ON the afternoon of Sunday, May 8, 2016, even before James Hahn had defeated Roberto Castro on the first hole of sudden death to win the Wells Fargo Championship at Charlotte’s Quail Hollow Club, crews were busy on the front nine, preparing the course for the 2017 PGA Championship. Not by trimming tree limbs or spreading fertilizer, but by removing all the sand from bunkers and preparing the greens to be gassed, stripping all the grass from them. The next day, bulldozers moved in to rip apart three holes on the front nine and one on the back. Chainsaws were soon fired up, and clusters of tall pines came tumbling down.

Were they mad? The PGA, to be played Aug. 10-13, was only 15 months away. The year preceding a major championship is supposed to be spent tightening fairways, growing rough and fine-tuning operations, not reinventing the place.

“This was not a gamble,” says Johnny Harris, president of Quail Hollow. “This was a calculated risk.”

Why risk it at all? Because Harris was not satisfied with the potential of the club’s Bermuda putting surfaces, which had been installed three years earlier, after the catastrophic failure of its previous bentgrass greens from intense heat and humidity through three straight summers.

At one time, MiniVerde was considered a miracle turf. It has since fallen out of favor among many of its adopters, who report that after several years the turf becomes splotchy and blotchy because of contamination or a mutation of its original strain. Regardless of the cause, Harris didn’t want Quail Hollow’s greens to turn up half-dead on the eve of the PGA Championship. He’d already experienced patchy bentgrass putting surfaces at the 2013 Wells Fargo.

So out went MiniVerde, to be replaced by the newest strain of another genetically engineered ultra dwarf Bermuda called Champion G-12, trucked in from Texas in refrigerated semi-trailers.