Writing about superintendents

There is a great tradition of golf writing. Not enough of it, however, is about superintendents.

When I started the biweekly magazine Superintendent News in 1999 as an offshoot of Golfweek, one of the editors, new to the golf business, asked: What is there to write about the subject? My answer, which holds true today: There are 15,000 stories out there. We just have to go find them.

As I soon learned, there were two major obstacles. One was the reluctance of greenkeepers to talk about their work; they were seemingly shy by nature as a group to make much of themselves. Nor did it help that they were comfortable in technical, agronomic jargon but had a lot of trouble translating it into terms the everyday golfer could relate to.

The other obstacle was the hesitancy of editors and publishers to think that the topic could be made interesting. A trade-oriented publication focused on a readership of superintendents might make a go of it. The hard part was converting the material into stories that would be more compelling to a general readership of golfers and sports fans.

The widely accepted figure is that there are about 10,000 books on golf. I find curiously few that deal intelligently and non-technically in the work superintendents actually do. I’ve been lobbying for years for a retired superintendent to write his or her memoirs about everyday life for those who toil getting a golf course ready for play.

The one obvious exception is “Greenkeeper’s Tale,” released in 2022 by Gordon Moir, the former director of greenkeeping at St. Andrews Links in Scotland. But even that book, about running the famous seven-course facility, doesn’t quite do the trick. The unusual management orientation of the work involved and the tendency of the author to focus more on himself than on the issues and personalities he faced are not of a level to which the everyday superintendents can relate.

By contrast, consider two of my all-time favorite sports books. George F. Will’s “Men at Work” (1990) is about the labor process and daily grind that four baseball standouts endure in honing their craft: manager Tony La Russa, pitcher Orel Hershiser, batting genius Tony Gwynn, and the durable Cal Ripken. It is not a game narrative of World Series triumphs or an instructional book on the art of hitting. This readable book focuses on the labor process.

Equally revealing from an entirely different perspective is “The Game” (1983) by Ken Dryden, the Montreal Canadiens’ Hall of Fame goaltender. It’s a book I included in a university course on sports writing I taught because of its clarity and insight into the mind of a player as he goes through his weekly regimen.

That’s the kind of book that a superintendent still needs to write. The golfing public knows precious little about what motivates someone to go into the maintenance side of the business. The issues that really count when it comes to golf course setup and meeting the expectations — most of them unrealistic — about course conditioning desperately need to be explained in a clear prose.

That kind of writing is not about PKN rates or the causes of fairy ring. It would be about the physical labor involved in morning prep. About the sacrifices of family time as you slog midseason through the “100 Days of Hell.” Or having your professionalism questioned by a new committee member who thinks that scrutinizing the line items of a budget constitutes a way of peering into the character of your soul.

Walk through the press tent of a major championship these days and the chatter is all about a proposed merger of the world’s golf circuits or whether the time is ripe for Max Homa or Viktor Hovland to break through and win a major. Another group of writers spends its time studying the latest Twitter posts. But when it comes to the golf course, there is a curious neglect of what it takes to get a golf course into shape — though you can be sure that as soon as the rain falls, the talk will turn to the magic of SubAir.

Most of what it takes a superintendent to survive and thrive these days is stuff you learn on the job, not at turf school. Rarely do golfers show compassion for the physical labor and scientific expertise needed to undertake the job.

I’m not suggesting that a book or two will solve that, although it can help. It would certainly make for good reading, and with an audience of potential readers exceeding 20,000 in the United States alone, there would certainly be enough interest to guarantee the financial success of such a volume.

Maybe for my next book …