Golf course management at a professional tournament has been referred to as a "circus" on more than a few occassions. But nowhere is that description closer to reality than at TPC Scottsdale during the week of the PGA Tour's Waste Management Phoenix Open, which teed off today.
With apologies to the U.S. Opens, PGA Championships and British Opens of the golf world, no week in professional golf is bigger than this week in the Valley of the Sun. And I mean that very literally — with weekly attendance numbers that have been known to exceed the half-million mark, the Phoenix Open is the most attended event in golf. It's not uncommon for more than 150,000 spectators to cram the Stadium Course on a Saturday afternoon.
I got my very first look at this circus on Wednesday, less than 24 hours before the official start of the tournament, courtesy of a few hours spent with Jeff Plotts (@azturfdawg), the GCSAA Class A director of golf course maintenance for the TPC Scottsdale, pictured here. And as a veteran visitor to several other PGA Tour events and more Opens and PGAs than I care to remember, I can safely say that I have never, ever seen tournament golf done the way they do things in Scottsdale.
Mind you, I visited on what was a fairly tame day, at least by Phoenix Open standards. The stars were out in force on the golf course for the day's pro-am — we saw Phil Mickelson, Bubba Watson and TV star George Lopez during our drive around the property — but the crowds weren't overwhelming in number and were fairly well behaved. Typically, that changes, on both counts, as the weekend goes on.
But it doesn't take a wave of rowdy humanity to tell you that this isn't your typical professional golf event and that the challenges Plotts has faced in his seven years prepping for this event at TPC Scottsdale aren't your typical agronomic riddles. All it takes to tell you those things is a visit to the small city that has grown up around the Stadium Course's 163-yard, par-3 16th hole.
It is, without question, one of the wildest things I've encountered in my time around tournament golf — a relatively nondescript par-3, just 163 yards long, completely surrounded on all sides by bleachers and hospitality suites, enough to accommodate more than 20,000 spectators, making it the closest thing to stadium golf than you'll find anywhere in the game. Players enter the tee through a tunnel, then exit the green through a tunnel. I think I described it on Twitter (@GCM_Magazine) during my visit to 16 with Plotts as "crazy."
When you view 16 through the prism of golf course management and the things that Plotts and his team have to do to get this hole ready for tournament play, it gets even crazier. Construction around 16 typically begins in October, Plotts told me, and isn't completely cleaned up until May. Part of that is by design, allowing more time for paying customers to get the experience of playing inside this arena. But that doesn't make it any easier for maintenance crews trying to keep the turfgrasses alive during those eight months of the year.
The structures that rise up all around this hole, some as much as three-stories high, create obvious agronomic problems, too. Air movement can be restricted or, at best, greatly altered. Winds will swirl around inside the seating areas in some instances. In others, those same seating areas completely restrict air movement. There are also obvious shade issues, especially at this time of the year when the sun is lower in the sky, that require Plotts' constant vigilance.
And those concerns aren't limited to just inside the arena. As we roll past a large planter filled with colorful flowers, Plotts points to it. "Just look at that," he says. "When we planted it, there wasn't a three-story structure blocking sunlight for most of the day. Now, golfers come by and ask me what's wrong with the flowers. Well ..." He didn't need to finish his thought.
Despite all of the challenges and headaches that come with hosting the largest golf tournament in the world, Plotts wouldn't have it any other way. He fell in love with tournament golf during a stint at Eagles Landing CC in Atlanta early in his career, carried it over to his first job in the TPC system at Southwind in Memphis and those feelings haven't changed in the seven years he's worked this event.
"Sure it's tough at times, but it's something I really enjoy and something I think all of our guys really enjoy," Plotts says.
Circus or no circus, that much is obvious.
Comments