The April issue of GCM was scheduled to include a feature written by free-lance writer Art Stricklin about Houston's Redstone Golf Club and the way they prepare their course for the PGA Tour's annual Shell Houston Open.
Scheduled the week before the Masters, the tournament had long been skipped by the world's best players who were content to rest up before the first major of the season. But ever since the maintenance team at Redstone, led by Class A superintendent Randy Samoff, began to tweak their preparations so their south Texas course would mimic many of the conditions that golfers would face at Augusta National — an idea that originated with Samoff's former boss, Roger Goettsch, CGCS, who now oversees maintenance at Barton Creek in Austin, Texas — more and more players have headed to Houston to play in the tournament and tune up their games for the Masters.
It's a well-written, intriguing story about how golf course conditioning can play a vital role in the quality of the field that is attracted to a professional golf event. It's also a story that, unfortunately, didn't make its way into that issue. In the world of publishing, we're slaves to the size of each issue of the magazine and in the case of April GCM, we just didn't have enough space to publish all the stories we wanted to publish.
But we weren't about to let this story die. So with the Shell Houston Open teeing off on Thursday, we're happy to publish the story in its entirety here on the blog. Part one posts today, with part two going live tomorrow morning. We hope you enjoy the story.
Transforming conditions at Redstone Golf Club, outside of Houston in the bayous of southeast Texas, into a close copy of those at Augusta National Golf Club once seemed impossible and even unthinkable to Redstone superintendent Randy Samoff.
But the once unimaginable has become the doable, and he and his team have been given a large amount of the credit. They’ve made the once-forgettable Shell Houston Open, held annually at Redstone the week before the Masters, into a must-play PGA Tour event, thanks to the hard work of Samoff and his crew.
They don’t serve peach cobbler and grits at the Houston Open and there isn’t a green jacket in sight, but Masters-like conditions have attracted the world’s best golfers to Houston each spring to see Samoff and his team practice the art of what’s possible with an open mind and a hard-working unit.
“It does make you feel really good to see what we have accomplished,” Samoff says. “It isn’t easy and it’s not a one-week thing, but it’s something we have been able to pull off.”
Samoff, a GCSAA Class A superintendent, received some hands-on appreciation after the 2008 Houston Open.
“I remember we were at the Masters last year (2008) standing in the gallery and a golfer came off the 18th tee. He walked over to where we were and just shook our hands, thanking us for preparing him so well,” he recalls. “What golfer doesn’t dream of playing in Masters conditions? Maybe we can play a small part of getting them there.”
That Augusta look
On the surface, Augusta National, opened in 1933 by architect Alister MacKenzie and co-founder Bobby Jones, and Redstone, opened in 2005 by architect Rees Jones, share very few design characteristics.
The hills of Augusta are replaced by the flat southeast Texas soil. Rae’s Creek at Augusta is replaced by Greens Bayou in Houston. But Samoff focused on what his team could change.
All around the greens, the Redstone superintendent and his staff mowed in chipping areas much like those at Augusta National.
In the fairways, the grain of the grass is mowed toward the golfers’ drives and the rough (the second cut at Augusta) is mowed down to 1 1/2 inches. Most important, the greens were speeded up to 14-15 on the Stimpmeter, much like Augusta National without the giant green contours.
“We know we can’t replicate the look of Augusta National, but our goal is to get the turf conditions as close as possible,” says Sarnoff, who’s been a GCSAA member for seven years.
The idea for the course superintendent to turn his new PGA Tour layout into conditions as close as possible to Augusta National came in late 2006 from Tour officials living in the Houston area.
Roger Goettsch, CGCS, then head superintendent at Redstone and now overseeing operations at Barton Creek in Austin, Texas, was one of the first to get a hint of an idea.
He knew the revised PGA Tour schedule would bring the Houston Open to his course the week before the Masters, and local tournament organizers were looking for ways to increase big-name player participation, which had historically been sparse.“We started brainstorming (about) what we could do and I started walking off places on the course we could change with Steve (Timms, Houston Golf Association executive director),” recalls Goettsch, a 32-year GCSAA member.
When the idea was first explained to Samoff, then Goettsch’s first assistant, he had little confidence in its ultimate success.
“At first I was skeptical,” Samoff admits. “It sounded kind of cheesy. I mean, how could we do this?”
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