6 minute read
The Grass Is Greener
Superintendents are the Soul of the Soil
EPISODE 2
By Tony Dear • Special to CG
Eric Johnson • Chambers Bay University Place
Chambers Bay is staging its third USGA event — the 2021
U.S. Amateur Four-Ball Championship (May 22-26 and will be played at the time this is printing) — and if he’s feeling any anxiety about it, Eric Johnson is hiding it very well. The course’s 58-year-old Director of Agronomy sounds as cool as a cucumber.
“Yeah, things are going really well, and the course is looking great,” he says in his typically unhurried, soft-spoken manner before allowing what, for him, must be an impassioned grievance. “We could use a little more warmth though, to get the rough growing.”
Johnson arrived in University Place in July 2012. Before joining the Pierce County-owned facility, he spent eight years at the Bandon Dunes Golf Resort as superintendent of both Old Macdonald and the resort’s eponymously-named original course. Prior to that, he maintained Pebble Beach for nearly five years.
Matt Allen, then Chambers Bay’s General Manager and now the Kemper Sports Vice President of Operations, says Johnson had been the obvious choice for the job. “Eric had been at Bandon Dunes for several years and had proven his ability to grow and maintain fescue turf. He also had terrific business acumen, and an affable nature that would allow him to build rapport with his colleagues.”
Johnson’s biggest task in his new role, of course, was getting 18 fairly uncooperative greens in U.S. Open-shape, while simultaneously maintaining them for daily public play. He had two and a half years before the eyes of the golf world bore down on the Pacific Northwest, which might sound like plenty of time, but those all-fescue surfaces had curiously under-performed since the course opened five years before.
Within a year or so, however, Johnson had them rolling noticeably smoother. They would never be the ultra-consistent, perfectly-uniform surfaces of exclusive private clubs whose bentgrass greens benefitted from substantial maintenance budgets and limited play, but they were so much better than they had been and increasingly worthy of a major championship.
But the course received no rain for weeks leading up to the event, and the USGA eased on the water in search of the fast surfaces it prefers. By the time the world’s best golfers showed up, the greens were getting various reviews from players and press — some favorable and understanding and some were quite critical.
But that was six years ago, and Johnson has moved on. “It could have gone better, sure,” he shrugs. “There were things we could have done differently, but hindsight is always 20/20. It seems like 20 years ago now and, to be honest, I really don’t think about it anymore.”
None of this surprises Josh Lewis, the Superintendent at Sharon Heights GCC in Menlo Park, Calif. Lewis worked under Johnson at Chambers Bay for a little over three years and remembers a very calm, very even-tempered boss. “I’m a hybrid of all the superintendents I’ve worked for,” he says. “I try to model the best traits of them all, and I learned two very important lessons from Eric.”
The first of them, says Lewis, was patience. “I’m something of a Type A personality,” he says, “occasionally inflexible, and quick to become agitated if things don’t go according to plan. Eric is the complete opposite of that. He really doesn’t let things ruffle him. I mean, he’s super-passionate about agronomy and turf, and he desperately wants to do the best job possible, but he has an enviable ability to sort of float above problems. If something went wrong or came up unexpectedly, he always said there was another way to do it. He showed me the importance of staying cool.”
The second truth Lewis learned from Johnson was the importance of family. “I’ll never forget how devoted he was to his wife and four kids,” says Lewis. “Imagine needing to get a golf course ready to host the U.S. Open while satisfying thousands of public golfers and also having four, three-sport athletes at home. We’d be finishing up an important job, and he’d say he had to go and get his son a new baseball bat, or some new basketball shoes. He never missed a game and kept all the game scores himself.”
Johnson’s ability to balance work and home life would have been sorely tested in the fall of 2018 when he embarked on his second major project at Chambers Bay — re-grassing the greens alongside the current golf course superintendent, Mark Trenter. With input from various stakeholders, including Johnson whose voice had perhaps been the most influential, the County decided to replace the fescue with Poa Annua, or annual bluegrass as Johnson prefers to call it. “We decided the fescue was too inconsistent,” he says. “It just wasn’t able to bear so much traffic. We deliberated over the timing, and considered doing three greens at a time and spreading out the work/ cost. But that would have meant waiting several years for the finished product.”
Johnson and Pierce County preferred it done sooner rather than later and committed to closing the course entirely then reopening only after all 18 greens had had time to settle. The new turf was sourced from Bos Sod Farms in Abbotsford, B.C., Canada. But there was a problem. Chambers Bay’s greens cover 247,000 square feet, but Bos Sod had only 105,000 available. “We had to harvest the seed and develop our own sod farm here,” says Johnson. “We grew the new turf over the summer of 2018 and, after closing the course in October, spent five weeks re-sodding every green.”
It was a highly labor-intensive project carried out by the entire maintenance team, pictures showing as many as eight crew members rolling out and positioning sods on the largest greens while others knelt cutting patches of sod to fit the putting surface precisely. The course reopened in April 2019 and the reaction to the new greens was almost entirely positive. “There’s a small number of golfers who will always prefer fescue,” says Johnson. “But the vast majority of our guests prefer the new turf.” It will be interesting to see what the players and press say during and after the U.S. Amateur Four-Ball. If the comments are positive, Chambers Bay and Eric Johnson’s chances of landing the second U.S. Open they deserve, will surely improve. Whatever happens though, rest assured Eric Johnson will be cool with it.
