Things we lost (and found) in the fire

Every couple years, Pat Daly likes to tour the Framingham Country Club grounds with members of the local fire department. After more than two decades as superintendent, Daly knows every wire, every potential hazard, and he wants to share that information.

During one of those walks a decade or so ago, Daly highlighted a secondary maintenance facility, referred to affectionately as a barn and filled with plant protectants and fertilizers. Because water from that building ran downstream to a Stage 2 emergency water supply for Boston, he told them that should it ever catch fire, they should “just let it burn.”

Which is why the Framingham Fire Department approached carefully when a fire roared out of the building shortly after 10 p.m. on Saturday, April 2, 2022. Firefighters arrived within minutes of the call, but the garage doors were locked for the night and they were unable to enter the building — which was located about 100 yards from the primary maintenance facility and about 50 yards from the clubhouse — so they attacked the blaze defensively, approaching it from the outside, heeding Daly’s reminder about the water supply. The 5,000-square-foot building, which also housed offices, cold storage, workspace for equipment maintenance and an overflow variety of specialty equipment, burned for more than four hours. Four sprayers, four aerifiers, a pair of tractors and a new blower that had never been used were among the more than $1.2 million in damages.

Daly and the rest of the maintenance staff slept the sleep of the blissfully unaware.

The New England Patriots have won enough Super Bowls — and snuffed out the dreams of enough other teams — that the use of the adjective “Belichickian” as admiration is rather limited geographically. It is most certainly praise in Framingham, Massachusetts, though, where it has been used by more than one colleague to describe Daly.

Now in his 24th year at Framingham Country Club, Daly tends to share a stoic visage and an even disposition with Patriots coach Bill Belichick — who started his current job exactly 29 days after Daly started his. Daly is not as surly or as curt as Belichick, and his wardrobe tends to include sleeves, but there are similarities. “He’s level,” second assistant superintendent Alex Foster says. “He’s like Belichick. That’s the highest compliment you can give someone, right?”

Daly probably sleeps at least a little more than Belichick, too. He turned in early the night the fire burned down the barn — he and his wife, Judy, had planned to travel the next day with their son, Nathan, to William & Mary in Virginia, for a day for admitted students — and woke up around 4 a.m. to “a bunch of messages, a bunch of missed calls, and a video of the building burning down.” “Needless to say,” he says, “I didn’t go to Virginia.”

Instead, Daly pivoted immediately to work toward solutions. He talked with the fire department. He attended a board meeting. He “basically started from scratch,” he says, to figure out how to recover from the kind of hurdle that can derail a season.

The first step was handing over day-to-day course operations to assistant superintendent Ryan Boudreau, who started at the club in 2010, and Foster, who returned in 2017 after working there earlier during his career. Both had rushed to the course that Sunday morning after hearing the news — Boudreau from home, Foster detoured from a breakfast stop with his teenage daughter at Muffin House Café in nearby Hopkinton. “I read the text,” Foster says, “and I told her, ‘We’re going to go a different route.’”

When they arrived, Daly talked with both for less than five minutes then turned back to everything except the course. Go home, Boudreau and Foster remember him telling them. It is what it is. There’s nothing we can do today.

“He’s always cool, calm and collected, but this was next level and I didn’t know how we were going to get through because we lost a lot of key pieces of equipment,” Boudreau says. “When the pressure ramps up, he’s at his best. He thrives under pressure. He takes a lot of the weight off our shoulders. We try to do the same, but he takes the big load. He’s taking the heavy punches.”

“He handled everything,” Foster says. “Everything. We just dealt with the course and tried to keep it as normal as possible for the guys and to not take any problems to him.”

Daly calls Boudreau and Foster “very in tune” with the course and the property. “They took the lead on a lot of stuff, which helped me out a ton, because I thought my head was going to explode.”

Daly also relied on Rick McHugh, a former second assistant who started working at the club in the 1980s and retired from fulltime work a few years ago. McHugh is more of a foreman these days, able to go anywhere and do anything across the course. His experience helped maintain the quality of daily maintenance delivered by a crew that normally numbers 15 to 17.

Outside the club, Daly received support in various form from a spread of local superintendents and industry professionals. Bill Sansone of Wellesley Country Club in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and Tony Girardi of Rockrimmon Country Club in Stamford, Connecticut, both loaned the kind of specialty equipment lost in the fire. Howard Meredith of Meredith Chem-Farm Sales had recently fabricated a pair of sprayers and sent both to the course. Shane Cornicelli of A-OK Turf Equipment and Nat Binns of Turf Products Corp. added help. Another nearby superintendent stopped over one day with a six-pack of Guinness and a bottle of Bushmills Black Bush Irish Whiskey. “It’s a tough job but the industry really takes care of each other,” Daly says. “Every day, I was getting phone calls from guys around the area: ‘What do you need?’”

As Daly lined up equipment loans, he also figured out how to replace the burned building, at least for the short term. No fewer than a dozen storage containers — one of them later heated to accommodate various temperature-specific products — appeared on the grounds. After the insurance company determined cause, cost and what could be salvaged, Daly was able to coordinate demolition and surround the hole with concrete blocks supplied by a member that resemble Lego bricks. Later, some of the burned equipment was carted away by a third party.

“When the guy pulled up to salvage the equipment, everything was just melted and burned,” Foster says. “It reminded me of Pirates of the Caribbean. It looked like zombie golf.”

Later in the season, Matt Staffieri of MAS Golf Course Construction came in to help rebuild the 14th green, a project that wrapped up in just three weeks — and which could have wrapped in two weeks if not for rain. More course improvement projects had been planned but time and that relative lack of equipment interfered.

“We were fortunate that it happened early in the season,” Boudreau says. “If it had been a little later, we might not have been able to get a sprayer and we could have had disease outbreaks or weed populations growing. The quality of the golf course would have drastically changed if we weren’t able to get sprayers, because we go out and spray every seven to 10 days. Those playing surfaces could have drastically changed in quality if it was a little later in the season.

“And if it was in the summer, we would have been out watering and wouldn’t have had as much time to help Pat as much — his stress levels probably would have been much higher and it could have changed how he handled things. It could have just had a snowball effect on the operations.”

Despite all the support, Daly realized that, with 145 acres to maintain to the standard demanded by an East Coast private club, he wouldn’t be able to just borrow equipment from friends for as long as he would need it. “Other guys are working, too,” he says. “Sooner or later, you have to say, ‘I just can’t do this.’ There was stuff we didn’t do because we didn’t have the opportunity or the equipment to get it done.” Fairways weren’t core aerified because the club lost the equipment needed to clean up that process. Natural areas were left a little more natural “because we didn’t have a tractor to tow around a Super 600.” But the inability to perform such tasks instilled a more important lesson in Daly.

“These are first-world problems,” he says. “I’m at a private club, I have a great budget, membership and staff. These are all nitpick things. They’re the icing on the cake.”

People mattered more than ever. All those relationships developed over the last two decades reminded Daly how great the industry can be. Watching Boudreau and Foster handle more responsibility encouraged him for future seasons — and making sure they took at least one day off every week gave him hope that future generations might balance life and work better than his did. Weekends are normally split, with Boudreau and Foster working together on Sundays, and Daly working with the newer second assistant on Saturdays. After that assistant left in May, Daly was left working solo.

“Pat was handling his weekend day by himself,” Boudreau says. “He was doing pretty much everything Alex and I do on a Sunday by himself on top of all the other added stresses. He just takes any added responsibility.” Both offered to work doubles but Daly refused, telling them to spend the day with their families — Boudreau’s children are 6, 4 and 1, and Foster’s are 14, 10 and 8. “It’s huge to have a leader like that,” Boudreau says, “who makes sure it doesn’t impact your family life as much as it could.”

Daly tried to spend extra time with his own family. Driving to the course three or four mornings every week this past summer with Nathan, who worked maintenance, energized him more than anything. Some mornings, the duo would listen to podcasts. Some mornings, Nathan would nod off for a nap. Daly loved seeing how his teenage son would choose more work — and more cash — at the end of the day rather than hang out in the maintenance facility, and he hopes they can work together one more summer. They are currently negotiating pay and hours.

At home, Judy was both a “life saver” and an “angel.”

“The times I went home and I would just sit down at the dinner table and eat and not say anything, that kind of stuff, it’s brutal on families,” Daly says. “I’m very fortunate, believe me, and I know it.”

Boudreau and Foster both say Daly never showed stress. He stayed calm after the fire and throughout the recovery. He never panicked. He made a list of problems and their solutions. He delegated. Like the best gridiron coaches, he developed a game plan and executed it.

And now, Framingham Country Club is on to the next season.

Matt LaWell is Golf Course Industry’s managing editor.