Leaving the rest green with envy

As he looked towards the staging of the American Express Championship at Mount Juliet next year, it was impossible not to warm to the boyish enthusiasm of Aidan O'Hara.

"I want Tiger Woods and the other top players in the world, to be walking out of here thinking these are the best putting surfaces they have ever played on," said the greens superintendent.

In the meantime, the celebrated Thomastown venue is in a position to offer tournament-speed greens for the first time to their regular customers. And they are confident that word of mouth will endorse their own satisfaction with the recent course ungrading.

"I'm really excited about what's happening here next year," added O'Hara. "The only problem is that the third week in September can be somewhat unpredictable. The weather could be miserably wet or delightfully pleasant. That's the uncertainty we greenkeepers have to live with."

When the Irish Open came to Mount Juliet in 1993, Nick Faldo, the then British Open champion, could hardly credit that the course had been open only two years. "These are the best greens I have played on in Europe this year," he said by way of complimenting O'Hara's painstaking preparatory work.

So, what disaster befell in the meantime to require the re-sodding of all 18 greens? The truth is that it was a case of pursuing perfection rather than managing a mishap.

O'Hara explained: "By this time last year, it had become clear to me that we were losing the original greens as we knew them. Increasing amounts of annual meadowgrass were creeping in and with all the top-dressing we had done - up to four to five inches in places - many of the contours had been softened, or lost altogether."

Major upgrading was made all the more attractive by the development of Penn A4, a genetically improved version of the original grass which, among other characteristics, would achieve double the plant density in a given area. In simple terms, this meant they could be mown appreciably tighter than the old greens.

For instance, where the prudent limit of the cut on the old greens was 3.2 millimetres, the new grass could be cut to 2.5 millimetres without fear of long-term damage. And if required, the blades could come down as low as 2.0 mm. This would mean regular, Stimpmeter speeds of 10.0, which would be considered highly desirable for a European Tour event.

On being asked last summer to review the design of the course, Jack Nicklaus, Jeff Howes and a design associate of Nicklaus's in Brussels, came up with recommendations. They agreed that the greens were no longer performing to USGA specifications and there was also a deterioration in the rooting system.

The first move was for Howes, an established architect and a member of the Nicklaus design team at Mount Juliet, to make a computer record last autumn of the precise contouring and shape of all 18 greens. Then work began on stripping and re-sodding them.

For his part, O'Hara prepared a nursery of 15,000 square metres, complete with drainage, behind the ninth tees, where the new grass for transplantation was sown in May and June of last year.

Play was not affected until late last November when the greens at the short sixth became the first to be ripped up. From then on, members and visitors were moved gradually onto alternate greens (they don't have temporary greens at Mount Juliet, just as certain upmarket cars are previously owned, as opposed to secondhand). By January of this year, 18 alternate greens were in operation while re-sodding was being completed on the original surfaces.

The approaches to all the greens were also re-sodded. Then there was extensive work on the bunkering, from re-draining them to taking the sod off the faces, where sand had built up over the last 10 years. So, they too have been restored to their original quality while an additional four bunkers have been added. There is now a large bunker in front of the 16th green and three other bunkers have been added at the long 17th.

Before the new turf was put down, Howes checked the various levels to ensure that they were being restored to their original shape. Having worked on the original design team, he was in a position to interpret the various design principles which Nicklaus would have applied to greens.

As he observed: "He had general rules of thumb and I can recall things like his APs - access points on greens - and how he (Nicklaus) would like a certain steepness at a specific spot so as to make for a tough up and down from a bunker."

The new greens and approaches were opened for play on June 1st. Surveying his handiwork, which looked superb under a bright, afternoon sun, O'Hara conceded: "Believe it or not, we're moving the greens at the same cutting height as we did for the Irish Open, but they're slow at the moment because they need to firm up. They need traffic.

"As the work progressed, it became a huge learning experience for me and I don't think I'd like to do it again. The pay-off, however, will come in about a month's time when I'm confident the average player will notice a marked difference."

And, as O'Hara indicated, there was other upgrading. "In designing a course now as opposed to 10 years ago, Nicklaus extends the anticipated length of a drive by 50 feet (about 17 yards)," he said. "In other words, because of ongoing improvements in clubs and balls, he believes that the extra yardage is necessary to maintain the strategic relevance of fairway bunkers.

"So, he has recommended new tees on eight holes here - the first, second, fifth, seventh, eighth (70 feet back), 10th, 12th, 16th and 17th. This amounts to an additional 125 yards overall, extending the course to about 7,250 yards off the back tees."

Satisfied with his work at Mount Juliet, O'Hara will have no time to rest on his laurels. His employer, Tim Mahony, saw to that by purchasing Fota Island and so becoming the first golf-course owner to have the country's premier event staged at two of his venues. Having re-built and re-seeded all of Fota's greens to specifications by Howes, he is now supervising preparations for the Irish Open.

"It's essentially a matter of fine-tuning, of applying the lessons I learned when preparing Mount Juliet for three successive Irish Opens," he said. "All of the important work has already been done by this stage and we are now concentrating on making the rough as tough we possibly can, through constant mowing. Not long, but hard to escape from.

"But, of course, it's all down to the weather - and we know how unpredictable that can be. It means that, until the first ball is struck in this year's Irish Open, I will be making my decisions almost on a daily basis. It's hard to plan. But we can fine-tune things, whatever the weather."

With that, O'Hara's thoughts returned to his first love. And he talked about how gratifying it was to learn about the complimentary things Mark O'Meara had to say about Mount Juliet after a visit a few years ago. And how the 1998 US Masters and British Open champion had felt moved to convey his comments to the Bear himself.

At that point, there was no need to mention the close relationship between O'Meara and Woods. And the probability that Tiger had also been told nice things about the scene of a rather special assignment, 15 months hence. But, as in everything else in golf, O'Hara knows that Woods will have his own opinion.

And he can't wait to hear it.