Ask a Super
This visual trick makes Augusta National's fairways look greener. Why don't more courses do it?
JD Cuban
Of all the characteristics that make Augusta National stand out from other courses, it’s the hues of deep green when looking down the fairways that hits different (at least for this author). While we can credit much of this aesthetic value to a very large maintenance budget, the club also uses a unique mowing trick to achieve the deep shade.
To learn more about this, we caught up with Chris Flynn, the director of grounds at Bay Hill Club and Lodge in Orlando. Flynn is a Certified Golf Course Superintendent and has been a member of the Golf Course Superintendents Associate of America for 27 years.
Golf Digest: Chris, as you know, Augusta National has a unique fairway mowing style, where the fairways are mown from the green to the tee. What effect does this have?
Flynn: Mowing in one direction from green to tee will get players hitting into the grain. Aesthetically, looking down the hole from the tee box, the grass will have a deeper shade of green. It’s all based on how you’re looking at the hole. When you’re at the green looking back to the tee, it will look lighter, and from the tee looking to green, it will look darker.
There’s no doubt that with a warm season grass that has a lot of grain like Bermuda, it’s going to be more penal to mow everything from green to tee. It makes the course play significantly longer. Augusta National has a Ryegrass overseed, but the mowing will still make it play longer.
Ben Walton
How much shorter will drives go when the fairways are into the grain?
Flynn: It’s hard to put a number on it because there are so many factors, but it is definitely significant and could be a club or two difference into the greens. It works great for a major setup, but for a typically PGA Tour event, we’re not trying to have the setup be quite as penal.
Is mowing the fairways all in one direction common?
Flynn: No, it’s typically reserved for tournaments. At our PGA Tour event at Bay Hill, we mow our fairways all in one direction, but we go from tee to green. Even on tour, every place is different. Most places are just striped, normal mowing. You don't really see mowing in all one direction as much week in and week out on the tour. Probably more so with majors.
For us, mowing in one direction is an aesthetic decision. It looks a little cleaner. We only mow like that for our tournament, and we only start doing that the Saturday before tournament week. It’s 100 percent for aesthetic value. The rest of the year, we mow our fairways up and back, changing directions every time to create those stripes.
From Golf Digest Architecture Editor emeritus Ron Whitten:
I've always been fascinated by the design of Bay Hill, Arnold Palmer's home course for over 45 years (although Tiger Woods owns it, competitively-speaking, as he's won there eight times.) For one thing, it's rather hilly, a rarity in Florida (although not in the Orlando market) and dotted with sinkhole ponds incorporated in the design in dramatic ways.
I always thought the wrap-around-a-lake par-5 sixth was Dick Wilson's version of Robert Trent Jones's decade-older 13th at The Dunes Club at Myrtle Beach. Each of the two rivals had claimed the other was always stealing his ideas. But the hole I like best at Bay Hill is the par-4 eighth, a lovely dogleg-right with a diagonal green perched above a small circular pond. OK, I admit that it reminds me of the sixth at Hazeltine National, another Trent Jones product, but I don't think Wilson picked Trent's pocket on this one, as both courses were built about the same time, in the early 1960s.
Why don’t you mow into the grain like at Augusta?
Flynn: The ball would not travel nearly as far. If we mowed green to tee, or into the grain, there would a clear statistical result of driving distance greatly decreasing because they would not get the rollout. So, it’s always tee to green for us, so players can get a little rollout.
Why isn’t one-direction mowing more common?
Flynn: To mow in one direction with normal staffing levels at most courses, it would take too long. You’re not going to have enough staffing or the mowers to get it done quickly. When it’s done at a PGA Tour event or at a major, you’re using loaner equipment to get it done in time.
You'll see the funny pictures for majors where they have so many fairway mowers that they can line up the whole fairway and each machine does one pass and they're done. We don't have that luxury and most people don't.
DON EMMERT
That makes sense. So what’s the fastest way to mow fairways?
Flynn: The fastest mowing pattern is where you go down one side and come up the other, splitting the fairway in half. Then, from a color standpoint, you just have the two shades—dark on one side and light on the other. One side is mown fairway to green and the other is green to fairway. This method is super common.
On a typical week not during the tournament, we stripe the fairways, which takes slightly longer. We use three fairway mowers, and it generally takes five hours to mow all the fairways. If we used the same three mowers and split the fairway in half, going up one side and down the other, it would go considerably quicker.
Who knew there was so much thought that goes into fairway mowing. Anything else worth noting?
Flynn: Yeah, one thing that’s important to consider is there is a big difference between warm season grasses, like Bermudagrass, and cool season grasses, like bent grass. With warm season grasses, it’s way more important to change up your mowing directions. If you mow in the same direction over and over again, you’re making your grain issues worse. You don’t have that issues on cool season grasses because those blades grow up and down, so there is less grain to worry about.