From the desk of GCM

Monday afternoon notes

First things first -- I have new photos posted to the photo album that can be accessed via the link on the right side of the page. Go crazy, folks.

Second things second -- I almost forgot to institute our traditional pick 'em contest for the tournament we're blogging from. So let 'em rip for the PGA Championship by clicking on the "comments" link below and making your picks. We need four golfers and the eventual winning score, either in a four-round total or in relation to par (for tie-breaking purposes, of course). The winner will pick up a few goodies from my week here at Southern Hills. So far, those goodies consist of a blue travel coffee mug with the Southern Hills logo on it, but I imagine the pot will grow larger as the week goes on. I'll post my picks Wednesday night before the start of the first-round, and be forewarned -- I won this year's U.S. Open pick 'em contest and I'm not afraid to do it again this week.

Monday afternoon, I spent some time hanging out with the maintenance team and then about 45 minutes cruising the course with Russ Myers, CGCS (photo above). Here's some of what I learned.

• I had a very educational conversation with Myers about temperatures and turfgrass. Specifically, I asked him whether there was really all that much difference between temperatures in the low 90s and temperatures in the upper 90s, as far as the grass (most notably Southern Hills' A1/A4 bentgrass greens) was concerned.  "Not really," he replied. "But bentgrass stops growing at about 86 or 87 degrees. So these prolonged stretches of temperatures above that really limit the time the grass can grow. And since most of the times below that threshold are at night, there's no photosynthesis going on. It's just really rough."
• After getting that explanation, it was interesting to hear Myers tell his team they would be "banging" the greens Monday night. A double cut on every green, except for Nos. 9 and 18. It was clear he was a little anxious about this decision, but he later told me he had been counseled by a number of folks that double cutting wouldn't put the greens under any more stress than they were already under from the extreme heat.
• Rough heights will remain at a consistent 3 inches across the board, but don't be surprised if they dial that back a half inch prior to the first round. Of the handful of players who played practice rounds on Monday, a large number reported lost balls in Southern Hills' gnarly U3 bermuda rough, and the PGA took note of this.
• During Monday afternoon's meeting, Myers cautioned those filling fairway divots to go easy. "Just fill 'em three-quarters of the way then smooth them out," he said. "If the mix is too high, the fairway units will kick it up and we'll have a mess." The PGA's preference, he said, was not to fill fairway divots at all, but Myers figured what else were they going to do with all that divot mix out behind the maintenance facility?
• Finally, equipment technicians had noticed some minor damage to reels following morning rounds. It was slightly more than an isolated incident, so there was some concern. Eventually, however, they determined that some of the sprinkler heads were catching the very edges of the reels when they passed over them. It wasn't damaging the sprinkler heads, but it was nicking the reel. Operators were told to make sure that passes over sprinkler heads were done at the center of the reel and not the edge to prevent this from happening again.

Day two in the books, baby. Tomorrow, I'm joined by another set of usual GCSAA suspects -- Director of Communications Jeff Bollig and Manager of Media/Public Relations Bill Newton -- and I make a plea to Myers to let me syringe a green.

One trip down ...

I've got the first round-trip trek to the maintenance facility here at Southern Hills under my belt. Need to refine it just a bit -- the congestion around the clubhouse and, by extension, the ninth and 18th greens figures to be a problem as the week goes on -- but all in all, it's pretty much a straight shot from the media center to the maintenance facility. I'll be repeating that walk in a few hours as I head back down to bring you all the details from the afternoon meeting of the maintenance team and the first full afternoon of work.

On the first day of practice rounds here at the PGA Championship, there are few golfers on the course. There are even fewer reporting to the interview room here in the media center -- native Oklahoman Scott Verplank is the only player of note scheduled to appear. Players could be avoiding the heat for a day or they might just be slow in arriving from Akron, Ohio, where most of the top players in the world spent last week for the World Golf Championship's CA Championship.

A couple of notes that I did pick up during my morning walk ...

• As you might imagine, they're keeping a close watch on how the heat is impacting course conditions. Team members are on the course and syringing where needed, and the fans that increase air movement around greens are already working hard. I'll give you a full rundown of exactly what steps are being taken to protect the health of the course tonight.
• I was unable to catch up with Russ Myers, CGCS during visit No. 1 to the maintenance facility, but I did spend some time with longtime Southern Hills assistant Roy Bradshaw, who was lounging in the air-conditioned staff meeting room/dining room. Aside from the weather, Bradshaw reports few concerns one day into the week. PGA of America officials, he told me, are giving the maintenance team pretty much free reign to do what they need to do to keep the grass alive during this brutal heat. Not much of an issue right now, considering traffic is at its low point for the week, but that is certain to change as the week goes on.

I'll post new photos to the photo album later tonight, along with a new post on what I learned during afternoon activities at the maintenance facility. Stay tuned.

I have arrived

I have made my way through the maze of security and into the media center here at Southern Hills. Right now, I share this massive room -- they have converted Southern Hills' normal indoor tennis facility into the media center for this event -- with just seven other people right now, so traffic is indeed light.

I'm as settled as I'm going to get, so now the real work begins. I'm going to make my way down to the maintenance facility to check in with Russ Myers, CGCS and the rest of his team. I'll have a first report, along with a few photos, posted later this afternoon.

In search of Walter Johnson

When I made the decision to eschew the hassles of air travel and a 35-minute flight from Kansas City to Tulsa in favor of making the 230-mile trek by car, I knew I'd be covering some familiar ground.

Several members of my wife's family call southeast Kansas home -- grandparents in Fredonia, for example -- so I've made more than a few trips down the same roads that I took to Tulsa on Sunday. In fact, just a week ago we rolled down to Chanute, Kan., just shy of the halfway mark between KC and Tulsa, for a family event. And back in the day (meaning the four years right out of college, between the fall of 1989 and 1993), I worked as the sports editor at the Ottawa (Kan.) Herald. That meant plenty of coverage of the local high school (the Cyclones, for those who care), and at the time, they competed in the Southeast Kansas League, which translated into almost weekly trips up and down U.S. Highways 59 and 169 to cover football and basketball games in towns like Iola, Parsons and Coffeyville.

As a general rule, there isn't a whole lot to see along the path that I took through this part of Kansas, as this photo demonstrates -- the whole route looks pretty much like this. But in my numerous trips down 169, there had been one thing that had always piqued the interest of the baseball fan in me, a crudely fashioned sing along the side of the road beckoning me to the little town of Humboldt, Kan. And since I was on my own time that afternoon (trust me, a blessing when you have kids) and had no pressing deadlines in Tulsa, I decided the time was right to venture off the beaten path. And since 99.9 percent of you will never, ever see Humboldt, Kan., let alone this historic site, I decided to take you along with me -- to visit the birthplace of Baseball Hall-of-Famer Walter Johnson.

Yep, the man they called "The Big Train," the man who won 417 career games and more than 30 games in a single season -- 30!! -- twice in his 20-year career, the man who led the American League in victories every year from 1910 through 1919, the man who was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936 was born (1887) and bred in this tiny southeast Kansas town. And if the sign along Highway 169, carefully constructed with plywood and spray paint (and perhaps some duct tape -- not sure on that one), was any indication, the monument to this baseball legend promised to be an impressive one (please insert sarcasm here).

In a town as small as Humboldt, I figured I wouldn't have any trouble finding this gleaming tribute to a baseball giant. Just a few minutes after leaving the main highway, I was in Humboldt's town square at the city's one and only stoplight. And a few minutes after that, I was driving out the other side of town, having missed any and all notices of directions to Johnson's birthplace. Perplexed, I swung around and went back into town, sure I would eventually see a sign or some notice that I was at the blessed spot.

No dice. So I stopped a convenience store for directions. Perhaps knowing what my reaction was going to be in a few minutes, the clerk did her best to temper my obvious expectations and pointed me toward Second Street. She told me to look for the signs and to keep a close eye on my odometer. I wasn't sure what she meant, but I soon found out when the sign instructed me to head "2.5 miles N, 1 mile W."

Hmmmmmmm.

Before I knew it, my Ford Fusion had rolled past the Humboldt Museum, past the nine-hole, sand-green golf course and onto a gravel road pointed directly toward the middle of nowhere. As I swung through farm fields and by pastures filled with cattle, I found only one more sign to guide me, then nothing more. After my third or fourth blind turn, I began to wonder whether it was time to abandon my search and how long I could survive on Diet Coke and Zone bars if I never found my way out.

But then, it happened. I came to the end of a gravel road that offered just one option for continuing, a right turn. And at this intersection was a concrete slab with a large rock on it. Not the opulent memorial I had been looking for or even the beaten, weathered old farm house I realistically thought I would find, but this was it -- Walter Johnson's birthplace (pictured at the top of this post).

All in all, it was pretty darn underwhelming. I may have been the first person to visit the site in some time. The significance of the most prominent feature of this "monument" (I use that term loosely), the large rock, wasn't explained. It appeared that there had been a plaque on the rock at some point in its past, but it had long ago fallen victim to vandalism. On the concrete slab, there was a section in the shape of a pitching rubber that carried a drawing of a farm house and the inscription "Frank & Minnie Johnson family farm -- Effie, Warren Earl & Leslie -- moved to Humboldt in April 1901," a date which contradicts the info from Baseball Reference.com that I linked to earlier (I'm sticking with Web site's info, for the record). On another section, in the shape of a base, some of Johnson's most prominent baseball accomplishments were acknowledged. Both are pictured here.

And that, I'm afraid, was about it, if you don't count the muddy drainage ditch that ran about five feet behind the monument. After a few minutes of snapping pictures and wondering when a combine was going to come along and crush my rental car, I hit the road. Part of me was disappointed in what I found. I like my sports monuments to have visitor's centers and gift shops. This one had a big rock.

But another part of me was satisfied with the successful conclusion to my search. As I said before, I'm pretty sure the spot saw few visitors, at least those who had traveled out there on purpose. So there is a fair amount of satisfaction in being a member of what I assume is a small club of baseball fans who have stopped to visit the birth place of Walter Johnson. The fun is in the journey, they say, and this had been quite a journey.

Time to get down to business now. Southern Hills and the brutal heat await.

Here we go again

Welcome to Tulsa, Okla., where the motto this week is, "Come for the PGA Championship, stay for the possible heat exhaustion!"

OK, so maybe it's not. But with the forecast for this week, it probably should be. For those who don't want to bother with the previous link, here are the Cliff Notes -- it's going to be hot here for the final major championship of the year. Dangerously hot. So hot that the National Weather Service has issue an excessive heat warning. And not just for Monday or the next two days. Nope, they've gone ahead and issued one for the entire week, all the way through Sunday.

Now, I hesitate to complain too much about the weather in this forum. Wandering the grounds at a major championship and calling it "work," even when the temperature is pushing the century mark while I'm doing said wandering, doesn't tend to illicit much sympathy from folks chained to their desks (like the rest of the GCM staff, who are hard at work on our September issue as I write) or superintendents dealing with almost identical conditions while managing operations on their own golf courses.

But like it or not, the weather is going to be a major factor this week, a specter that figures to hang over virtually everything you read, see or hear about this week's tournament. The heat is going to impact the players, the fans, the tournament officials and volunteers. And most importantly, it's going to impact the golf course (most notably the A1/A4 bentgrass greens) and the 100 or so volunteers and staff members at Southern Hills Country Club who have gathered to assist superintendent Russ Myers, CGCS this week.

So you can bet a lot of the questions I'll ask while I poke around the maintenance facility at Southern Hills this week will center around the health of the golf course, the health of those maintaining that golf course and how a punishing heat wave (Tulsa is hot in August -- who knew?) can effect both. I just promise that I'll ask those questions in a very benign, non-whiny sort of way. No need to alienate our readership here before the week even begins.

I'll have another post up in the morning to give you a little travelogue of my road trip to Tulsa on Sunday (sneak preview: the birthplace of a Baseball Hall-of-Famer will be actively involved) before heading off to Southern Hills to get settled both at the media center and the maintenance facility. Stay with us all week -- it promises to be a fun and sweltering (sorry, sorry ... not whining) ride.

K-State Field Day

Made a visit to the K-State field day in Olathe, Kan., today. Saw lots of familiar faces as well as test plots, flowers, insect research, you name it.

The best tidbit I learned today was about deer disliking bar soap. Next time you're at a hotel, grab the mini-bar of soap they have. If you have a tree that could be vulnerable to a deer, take the bar of soap, drop it in a thin sock or something similar, and tie it to a tree. When it rains, the soap will drip residue... the deer no me gusta (don't like) the soap. So it's a simple, cheap way to keep deer away.

That tidbit was courtesy of Charles Barden and his deer control presentation. Barden wins for best sense of humor at the Field Day. A little humor goes a long way at a Field Day, when a lot of the research can be a little dry. But Barden kept us on our toes with some good natured deer humor. For example, his recipe for "deer-off" was egg, capsaican and garlic... similar to what Burger King may use if they ever start making burritos. Hopefully, Barden joked, your deer weren't from Mexico, or they may actually like his spicy deer-off recipe.

Pictured above, Rodney St. John talks about rhizomatous tall fescue plots; below, Alan Stevens discusses what perennial and annual flowers are performing best in the transition zone.