They made it

Cal Roth guides golf course superintendents and crews through the meticulous process of turf stress. Faster, firmer, lower are part of the vernacular at PGA Tour sites.  

The stresses Roth, the PGA Tour’s senior vice president of agronomy, has witnessed at The Greenbrier during the past year extended beyond the ones placed on high-performing bentgrass. 
Roth is one of multiple PGA Tour officials spending early July in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., where The Greenbrier Classic returns following the historic 2016 floods in the region. Last year’s event marked one of three PGA Tour tournaments cancelled in the past 25 years. “It was important to get this opened and get the tournament back here this year for the resort, for the valley and for the people of the area,” Roth says. 

The Greenbrier director of golf course maintenance Kelly Shumate, The Old White TPC superintendent Josh Pope and a veteran crew worked closely with Roth throughout the past year. Shumate called Roth shortly after the historic flood of June 23, 2016, and Roth visited White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., a week later. “It was total destruction,” says Roth, who has worked The Greenbrier Classic since its inception in 2010. “The only thing I can compare it to was going into New Orleans after Katrina. It was that kind of devastation in a smaller area. Just surreal.” 

Rules official Ken Tackett was the first PGA Tour representative to visit The Greenbrier after the flood. Tackett, who lives in Charleston, 120 miles from White Sulphur Springs, says the decision to cancel the 2016 was a “no-brainer,” although the PGA Tour exhausted all options before making a public announcement. “My first impression was just pure shock,” Tackett adds. “Obviously with the toll of human life and the whole state … It hit us even in Charleston. We had folks die. The flood was bad there too. Just with getting here, the enormity of what was going to happen next was hard to kind of grasp.”

Others followed the situation from afar. Greenbrier Classic regular Davis Love III and other players participating in the previous week’s Quicken Loans Invitational, the tournament held during the week of the flood, traded text messages with Tackett and other PGA Tour officials about the situation in West Virginia. Responses and photos created doubt whether the region would host the 2017 tournament. 

“What I then started thinking as an architect was that the irrigation had to be replaced, the drainage is going to have to be replaced, and I’m going, ‘They’re going to have to rebuild the whole golf course basically.’” Love says. “It is amazing what they have done, not only with the golf course, but the whole community.”

Architect Keith Foster, who has extensive experience restoring classic courses, led The Old White TPC rebuilding efforts and crews from Maryland-based golf construction company McDonald & Sons arrived in West Virginia in late July 2016. Greens were seeded with V8 bentgrass by Sept. 16, while 16 of 18 fairways were seeded with T-1 bentgrass. Roth says he started feeling confident about the PGA Tour returning in 2017 when he heard the names involved in the project. His confidence increased upon touring the course five weeks after the final fairway was seeded. “The consistency on the fairways and greens was incredible,” Roth says. “They did an amazing job of growing it in.” 

Parts of the project not involving seed carried into this past April, May and June. The final sod total reached 2 million square feet. A dry stretch leading into The Greenbrier Classic further taxed a crew exhausted from repairing their lives and a golf course simultaneously. 

But the revamped Old White TPC hosted its first full day of golf Monday July 3, three days before the tournament’s first round. The course received instant praise. “I always thought it was good before,” says Zac Blair, a 26-year-old player who studies classic architecture. “But the little details and the scale of some of the bunkers and some of the greens are a little more where I think they needed to be.”

Love, who owns a golf course design firm, noticed subtleties around the greens resembling those created by original architects C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor when playing the course for the first time during a Monday pro-am. “As an architect and somebody who likes historical architecture, old-school architecture, you couldn’t have done any better,” he says. “They did an incredible job. It has to be one of the top courses on Tour now for sure. It was on my top five before and it probably moved up.”

Players and officials are treating The Old White TPC like a new venue, with Tuesday practice rounds continuing deep into the evening maintenance shift. The Greenbrier Classic will be the first PGA Tour event contested on V8 greens. The newness of the surfaces will likely result in greens being managed “a little bit on the conservative side,” Roth says. The redesign, Tackett says, will produce “some really cool, creative hole locations.” 

A week of discussing turf varieties, green speeds, hole locations and scores represent a welcomed respite – a sign of a return to normalcy – for people in the recovering region. “It’s a great story here and it’s a tribute to who the people are and the type of people that live in this area,” Roth says. “They are resilient, hard-working and a terrific group of people.”

Guy Cipriano is GCI’s associate editor.