Pulling it all together

The land where The Ford Plantation’s current back nine rests offers ideal conditions for growing rice, and the crop holds a prominent place in the exclusive Georgia club’s lore.

The club’s elegant logo is a rice sheaf drawn from a mahogany bedpost. The logo represents a connection to the land’s agrarian roots and a conundrum that regularly flustered the club’s 260 members: swamp-like conditions suitable for growing rice are terrible for maintaining a golf course.

Drainage, playable dates and quality of cut mattered little to ultra-wealth Saudi Arabian businessman Gaith Pharaon in the 1980s. Pharaon wanted a Pete Dye-designed golf course on the land once owned by Henry Ford in Richmond Hill, Ga., 22 miles south of Savannah.

Dye begrudgingly gave Pharaon what he wanted. “The man who built this never played golf,” says Dye, a World Golf Hall of Fame member. “He told me to come up here and build a golf course. I remember standing in this general area.”

Dye is standing in The Ford Plantation’s clubhouse, which features a panoramic view of the back nine. The front nine is hidden amongst the plantation’s towering oak and pine trees. “Everything north was water,” Dye continues. “I said you could build nine holes. He said, ‘I don’t want nine holes. I want 18 holes.’”

Pharaon received the course he wanted in 1986. When Dye returned to the property 23 years later, the club’s members, who are also Ford Plantation homeowners, were spending big money to play golf on a property that had developed into an agronomic nightmare.

Two inches of rain didn’t temporarily halt play. It kept golfers off the back nine for two days. The triple crown of a club’s events – the member-guest, member-member and club championship – became front-nine affairs.

Director of golf course maintenance Nelson Caron, who arrived at the club in 2008, says members lost 60 playable dates per year on the back nine because of flooding. The staff often spent more time pushing water than riding mowers and operating trimmers. Steady rains meant 21 of 26 crew members would be assigned to water-related duties.

“The golf course maintenance staff ended up being a construction staff,” Caron says. “We turned our attention and focus away from applying turfgrass maintenance to a staff that was manning a ship, a ship that had holes in it. By 2011, and in 2012 in particular, we had all of our hands in the ship and it was going down. It was time to make some changes.”

Major infrastructure changes on a golf course aren’t cheap. Convincing dues-paying members why the changes must be made isn’t easy.

Led by Dye, informed by Caron, supported by influential club members and aided by dozens of others, The Ford Plantation opened a new golf course on Oct. 1.

It took five years and produced spirited internal discussions. The final cost of the restoration was $7.2 million. The project has few recent peers on the renovation Richter scale.

“Over the past 10 years, there have been very few major renovations such as this occurring in the industry,” says longtime USGA Green Section Southeast Region agronomist Patrick O’Brien. “This is by far the biggest I have seen in the past decade in the Southeast Region.”
 

Planning time

Heavy rains closed The Ford Plantation’s golf course for three days in 2010. The inconvenience led to then-club president Bill Weil giving a sharp directive to greens committee chairman Dr. Bill Thompson – find a way to fix the nagging problem.

A year earlier, Dye and fellow golf course architect Tim Liddy visited the club multiple times. Realizing the poor condition of the course’s infrastructure, Dye requested Liddy to guide the club through a master plan for improving the course. Creating the master plan represented a collaborative effort, as Liddy worked with Caron, the greens committee, Ford Plantation members not associated with golf and the club’s professional staff. The master plan committee listed five objectives for any major golf course restoration effort:

• Restore the detail of Dye’s features
• Make the course more playable
• Address infrastructure issues
• Reintroduce Ford Plantation to the marketplace
• Increase environmental sensitivity of the area by implementing best management practices through infrastructure upgrades
   

“The infrastructure had to be done,” Liddy says. “This gave them a chance to make the golf course more playable. But it couldn’t be more playable if the infrastructure wasn’t there.”

The club’s leadership entrusted those involved with the greens and master planning committees to educate the membership about the importance of modernizing the golf course. Committee members studied the American Society of Golf Course Architects Remodeling University program before hiring an engineering firm to assess the course’s deficiencies. The committees held small group meetings with members and distributed a DVD featuring Caron discussing the infrastructure challenges the course faced. Thompson says the club was spending close to $300,000 per year repairing broken drainage and infrastructure. The well-spoken Caron understood the back nine’s technical shortcomings better than anybody, yet he knew describing the X’s and O’s of drainage and irrigation wasn’t the best way to sell the project to members.

“I had to put it in terms of golf,” Caron says. “Mother Nature was doing the work for us. It was selling the project for us. The fact that the golf course would go underwater during a not very significant rainfall and would keep them from playing golf … They wanted answers. Sometimes the answer wasn’t what they wanted to hear because of the cost it would take to fix it.”

The renovation’s original cost was pegged at $8.3 million, causing membership trepidation. The committees thoroughly analyzed every piece of the proposed project. They leaned on industry veterans such as O’Brien and fellow USGA Green Section staffer James Moore and MacCurrach Golf Construction CEO and founder Allan MacCurrach when managing costs.

Dye’s interest represented a coup for the committees selling the project. His name recognition, hands-on approach and enthusiasm toward the golf course flipped skeptics into supporters. Dye’s portfolio rivals any living architect, and Thompson had an existing relationship with Dye because of the duo’s involvement with Crooked Stick Golf Club in Carmel, Ind. “Getting him was the final piece of the puzzle,” Thompson says. “That’s what really made it go for the membership. He came in here and embraced the membership.”

The proposed assessment to complete the project was a massive $35,000 per member, a startling sum to even the most hardened industry veterans. “There was some serious opposition,” current club president Paul Wickes says. But the combination of a failing golf course, organized greens and master planning committees, and a willing Dye eventually produced widespread support. Through a club vote, the project was approved by more than 75 percent of the membership.

Construction started on Oct. 1, 2013. Crews had a year to complete the work.

“It’s nerve-wracking,” Thompson says. “I said, ‘Boys, I hope this turns out well.’ All of you working here can leave and go to another golf course. But we are here for the duration. I don’t want to hear about it on the first tee. Every time I tee it up, I don’t want to hear guys talk about how awful it is. It’s scary.”
 

Getting dirty

The enduring image from The Ford Plantation’s restoration will be Dye, who turns 89 this month, dropping to his knees and shaping dirt with his hands. The scene became a reoccurring event. Dye spent more than 40 days at the course during the construction, a huge total for a legendary architect possessing the clout to devise his own schedule.

“I was really, really enthused with the enthusiasm he had for this project,” says McCurrach, who has worked regularly with Dye since construction started at TPC Sawgrass Stadium Course in 1980. “I was surprised actually. He would come for a site visit and I would say, ‘See you next month.’ And two weeks later, he would call me and say, ‘I’m on my way.’ Then, I would say, ‘I will see you in a month.’ And two weeks later, he would say, ‘I’m on my way.’ He just kept coming in, coming in. He wanted to be here. For the whole job to get its energy from an 88-year-old was pretty amazing.”

Caron calls Dye the “centerpiece” of the construction team and he considers Thompson the linchpin in matters relating to the membership. The project also needed technical leadership, something provided by Liddy, MacCurrach, engineering firm Thomas & Hutton and irrigation consultant Bob Scott.

The team faced a daunting project. MacCurrach says the first step involved understanding the drainage, which he calls a “New Orleans-type” of situation, meaning parts of the back nine sit below sea level and water flows to one spot.

Lake Clara, one of eight lakes on the property, borders three-quarters of the back nine. The nine holes surround wetlands. The drainage system added during the renovation allows water to flow to a central wetland and into a levee. Caron says the drainage system keeps the water at minus-1 sea level. Rain triggers a storm water pump system capable of dispersing 16,000 gallons of water per minute from the levee into Lake Clara. The average storm water pump system can handle between 1,200 and 1,600 gallons per minute, according to Caron. Ford Plantation’s system is designed to handle the 25-year storm, an accumulation of 8 inches of rain over a 24-hour period.

“It’s a massive pump station,” MacCurrach says. “It’s very capable of dropping that area down very quickly. It’s on as soon as the rain starts. It doesn’t have to build to a certain level.”

Although it lacked the glamour of other parts of the project, Caron and Thompson spent long hours on-site, watching the creation of the pump system. Caron and Thompson reported progress to the membership, with Caron posting regular updates explaining construction specifics on The Ford Plantation’s agronomy blog. The club also distributed a publication to members called “The Plantation Press,” which provided progress reports and photos of the work.

To avoid distractions, Dye requested the club control the volume of visitors to the site. Caron, Thompson and golf professionals conducted monthly member tours. The more dirt shifting members saw, the more fascinated they became in the nuances of the project. “I thought they would get tired of it over time,” general manager Nick Cassala says. “What was amazing was that they actually just got more excited about it.”

The majority of the club’s members only live on the property in the fall and winter, but the club had to find ways to satisfy entertainment needs during construction. The club developed a program designed to reintroduce members to Ford Plantation’s other outdoor options such as fishing, hiking, shooting, biking, horseback riding and kayaking.

But the club had members who wanted to golf. The professional staff made arrangements with other clubs to conduct events such as ladies day and men’s blitzes at other clubs. Thompson says he played Savannah-area public courses he didn’t know existed. Wickes says some members belonged to other clubs, including Chechessee Creek Club and Secession Golf Club in nearby South Carolina, and they used those clubs more than in previous years. The initial inconvenience bothered some members.

“The downside of that was that it took a whole day to play golf instead of half-a-day,” Wickes says. “When the renovation started, they literally just came in and bulldozed everything to begin with. It ripped the place apart. People were really unhappy.” Attitudes started changing when sod trucks arrived in May. “I happened to be here when the first sod truck came in and I took a picture of it on my phone,” Wickes adds. “When the grass started to appear, people finally started to think that it was going to happen. Your sort of don’t believe it until you see the sod.”
 

‘A new golf course’

Crews brought a bunch of sod. And pipe. And wire. It evoked memories of the massive construction projects of the 1990s. A year of work left The Ford Plantation with 1.7 million square feet of Celebration Bermudagrass sod, 29.5 miles of drainage pipe, 28.6 miles of irrigation pipe, 280.5 miles of irrigation wire and 3,464 irrigation heads. Completing the project required moving 94,000 cubic yards of soil.

The statistics don’t account for the changes made by Dye, who received a rare golf course architecture mulligan. Dye added 304 yards to the layout, stretching the back tees to 7,409 yards. He repositioned greens, tees and fairways and reduced the number of bunkers from 91 to 51, making the course easier to maintain and play.

Considering the cost and what was at stake, everybody involved in the project experienced angst. Plus, no master plan is safe once Dye roams a site. Liddy and MacCurrach’s familiarity with Dye eased concerns surrounding Dye’s spontaneous dirt-drawn alterations. A memorable change involved Dye moving the 10th green to a hidden piece of available land along Lake Clara.

“Everything was drawn in dirt,” course superintendent Kyle Johnson says. “He would get up to a green and get on his hands and knees, wipe out a spot with his hand in it, and say, ‘This would be the shape of the green and bunker.’ Then, he would go to the next hole. The man saw everything going from pure dirt to grass. Now, we know what he saw. When it was all dirt, it was hard to tell what he was looking at.”

Asked about the construction process, MacCurrach says, “It was every bit as bad as we expected.” The project had its last-minute curveballs, and Thompson says the first six greens were still in grow-in mode when the course reopened on Oct. 1. Seven original workers remained on the maintenance staff throughout the restoration. As the reopening approached, Johnson had to train more than a dozen new crew members.

The post-construction staff will perform different tasks than the pre-construction staff. Heavy rain has occurred since the reopening, and Caron says the revamped course has yet to experience a bunker washout. “Now it’s about us learning Nelson’s theories and practices,” Johnson says. “It’s a new golf course.”

Caron envisions The Ford Plantation developing a reputation as a firm and fast course. The putting greens exceed speeds of 13 on the stimpmeter and members are noticing sudden increases in driving distances. Achieving desirable conditions required an investment. The roots of such investments extend beyond the soil and into arguably the most important places at clubs: meeting rooms.

What would have happened if a communication gaffe had killed the project? Or if members never grasped the value of a functioning golf course?

“I guess if we didn’t do the whole thing, we would have done it piecemeal, a little here, a little there,” Thompson says. “We would have never achieved the goals what the goals of the master plan were if we had done it like that.”