Game time

There are neither secrets nor simple solutions to cultivating a healthy marriage. Honesty is important. So is listening. So is communication. Carving out time for date nights. Perhaps reconnecting after the kids move out. Common interests. Your own pursuits. Separate televisions. Wait … separate televisions?

“I always joke about it, but I always say separate TVs,” says Jeff Smelser, the longtime golf course superintendent at Galveston Country Club in Galveston, Texas. “I’m a sports junkie and I’ll watch every sport there is.” Smelser loves to watch the Chicago Cubs, his favorite team since he was a kid, and the Houston Astros. But he’s not particular. Baseball, basketball, football, hockey, golf, auto racing, cornhole if it’s on. Everything looks good on his three-screen setup — an 86-incher atop a pair of 42-inchers. And to his wife, Kellie? Outside of playoff games, her viewing preference leans more toward true crime and paranormal.

The formula has worked for the Smelsers for more than 30 years, with one daughter, Karlie — a pediatric ICU nurse and a member of the Texas National Guard — and stints at two Texas golf courses mixed in.

Smelser worked at North Shore Country Club in Portland, Texas, for 19 years, almost all of them as the superintendent, then moved to Galveston Country Club, the state’s first private club, in 2007. His situation sounds perfect: Smelser leads a maintenance team of 16 that includes himself, assistant superintendent Santos Guzman, equipment manager Mark Barron and 13 full-time crew members. He works with an “outstanding” board of directors and membership. Equipment leases mean the facility is always filled with the latest tech and, thanks to a four-year turnover, very little equipment downtime. And there are early talks about a master plan that could feature a new irrigation system and reduce the club’s water usage by 40 percent — though there is no timetable for the project. It could happen next year or a decade from now.

“We’re lucky,” says Smelser, a central Illinois native who headed south in 1988 to escape Midwest winters. “They allow us to do our job and they don’t try to tell us how to do it. A lot of these boards of directors, they want to put their own stamp on the golf course. They allow us to do the jobs they hired us for. If we need something, we need to go through the proper procedures to get it, but we’re generally pretty good.”

Smelser has worked through professional challenges, of course. Earlier during his career, he traveled to both Florida and Mexico for extended work projects. The trip south of the border, to Playa del Carmen, where he worked 100-hour weeks growing in a golf course, instilled in him the value of working with whatever was at hand.

“We had such a hard time getting products down there,” he says. “There was a company, Bonus Crop Fertilizer out of Greenville, Texas, they shipped me two truckloads of fertilizer because you couldn’t get it down there. You just had to work with what you had.”

In Galveston, both the island city and the club have been hammered twice by hurricanes since Smelser arrived — Ike in 2008 and Harvey in 2017 — disasters only exacerbated by the course sitting just 2 feet above sea level. Aside from all the prep and cleanup that go with hurricanes, Smelser has learned the importance of good plant protectants.

“We have to be on a good fungicide program, a good growth regulator program, because we just don’t know what’s going to happen weather-wise,” he says. “We may not get back out there for a week, a week and a half, two weeks. We spray Legacy in all of our fairways — and a lot of it has to do with if we get 30 inches of rain and can’t get out there, we don’t want it growing wild.”

Smelser applies Legacy on tees and fairways every four weeks from April through October, 15 ounces to the acre. By his count, he goes through about 40 gallons every year. “PGRs,” he says, “are such a valuable tool for everybody.”

Smelser also employs Captain and SeClear algaecides across the course’s three ponds. He used to apply them himself, but he recently contracted an outside company to work on what amounts to five surface acres and 20 acre-feet.

“It would only take me two and a half hours, but I might get interrupted and only be able to do one lake right now, then have to do something else,” he says. “Also, I had to have a boat, and an engine, and the engine broke down. Now it’s one more thing for Mark not to have to worry about.”

And maybe a little more time to catch another game. 