I just had spent a few minutes talking with Zach Reineking, Erin Hills’ director of course maintenance, about what has been an eventful first two full days of U.S. Open preparations. And instead of getting all flowery with my prose, let’s get right into what he told me.
The weather: Erin Hills has absorbed slightly more than two inches of rain since Monday night. About one and three-quarters of that fell last night, with another quarter-inch plus coming down this morning, which delayed maintenance operations by about two hours.
In the end, though, Reineking said the rainfall caused few serious problems. “We had to pump out some of the low areas on the course where we had standing water, but everything else really came out OK,” he said. “We didn’t have any bunker washouts to speak of and the course drains pretty well, so once we were cleared to return to work this morning, we really just wrapped up the normal work that we hadn’t been able to finish before the rains came.”
The fescue: Around noon, word came out that the USGA had requested several areas of fescue roughs be cut back. This on the heels of plenty of comments and concerns — fairly or unfairly — from competitors about the height and the thickness of those areas.
As a result, crews took to the course to cut them back approximately 10 yards off the fairway. Wide-area mowers were brought in to make an initial cut, then they were raked back up to reveal areas the first cut missed. The entire area was then string-trimmed, re-ranked, and then push mowers came in to clean them up one final time.
“Then you add in the rain we’ve had yesterday and today, those areas are laying down even more than they might normally. It was just a perfect storm of sorts.”
The morale: Reineking says despite the challenges his team has encountered during the first two days of the week, spirits remain high, which mirrors what I have observed.
“Listen, our logistics and our planning have all paid off. Monday couldn’t have gone any better up until the skies opened up, and clearly, we have no control over that. We also don’t have any control over how unusually wet and cool our spring was and then how hot and humid it turned in the last week. We went back into the records for the past 10 years, and we never had a stretch with this many days of hot, humid weather.
“It is what is, and we’ll just worry about what we can control.”
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