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Jim Croxton, the chief executive officer of the British and International Golf Greenkeepers Association, mentions how a greenkeeper’s job can be quicker and easier at the moment. “There are no flagsticks and no tee markers to worry about,” he says. Then, after a pause and a chuckle, he makes a fond addition to his list. Namely, members. As it turns out, any number of his BIGGA greenkeepers are longing for the return of their members – and that’s regardless of how the members are sometimes inclined to get in the way of the greenkeepers’ latest spate of mowing.
Just listen to what Jack Hetherington, the course manager at Boldon Golf Club, had to say last week. “It’s an absolute pleasure and a privilege to be managing my course but I’m beginning to miss the members more and more. I almost laugh at myself when I see them going for walks across the course. I don’t just go across to talk to them but I find myself trying to hold their attention. It’s going to make me appreciate them more when they’re here.”
Croxton took me back to the confusion which reigned on 23 March. The Home Unions had agreed that that golf courses had to close, only no-one had a clue as to what that meant for the greenkeeping brigade. “I know,” said the CEO, “that the government were inundated with queries of one sort or another at that time but I couldn’t fault them for the pace of their response in this instance. They got back to us the very next day.”
The official line was that a minimal staff could carry out essential maintenance work. Straightaway, Croxton, who was brought up on the Cold Ashby Golf Club in Northamptonshire, England, joined forces with the R&A to come up with guidelines concerning what constituted “essential” duties. They soon arrived at a list which included tasks such as continuing to cut the managed rough whilst leaving the wilder stuff alone, and looking after the greens with the emphasis on keeping them properly irrigated. Keeping the edges of greens and bunkers manicured were featured on a ”not-to-do” list.
Croxton has heard rumours to the effect that courses could begin to open in mid-May – a date which will be some time after courses which were shut down in America have started to open up. Who knows which of those two approaches will prove the better. Whatever, in Croxton’s eyes, it will be some time before UK golf is back to how it was before the advent of COVID-19.
“My own feeling,” he added, “is that a maximum of nine holes will be allowed at first. You won’t see clubhouses opening at that point any more than you will see a full complement of greenkeepers. Things will happen in phases.”
“We’ve always thought of golf courses as places which come to life at night but now we’ve got rabbits sitting happily on the fairways in the middle of the day. They’re not scared anymore.”
Jack Hetherington
Back to the greenkeepers. The aforementioned Hetherington was on his own for the first three weeks of the lockdown but was allowed to bring back a second member of his normally four-strong team thereafter. First and foremost, he notes that the Boldon greens are benefiting from their rest period. “We’re giving them less feed and fewer cuts. I’m not saying they’re better than they’ve ever been. It’s just that they’re less stressed – and that it’s only going to take a couple of cuts and a couple of rolls for them to be ready for play.”
The Boldon fairways feel empty but quiet they are not. “When anyone rings,” says Hetherington, “they must be thinking I’m in an aviary. Also, there’s any amount of other wildlife taking the place of the missing members. We’ve always thought of golf courses as places which come to life at night but now we’ve got rabbits sitting happily on the fairways in the middle of the day. They’re not scared anymore.”
He’s also noticed a new trend among those of the members he meets. Originally, he worried lest a lot of them would not want to renew their memberships for 2020. “That’s what I thought, but I was wrong,” he says. “The fact that they’re not out on the course as per usual would seem to me to have brought them all more together. They realise how much their club and their memberships mean to them.”
Mal Mitchell at Patshull Park picks out the way in which BIGGA members are supporting each other on social media. “I’m humbled when I look on social media and see how everyone is helping each other,” he says. At a time when there is concern about getting through the current work levels, the message going the rounds is along the lines of “just do what you can and stay safe.”
Mitchell is working on his own when he usually would have three men at his side, along with a part-timer in the busier seasons. He longs for the usual camaraderie at break times but, on the other side of the coin, he finds plenty in the way of job satisfaction. He likes to be at the club at 6 a.m. or even earlier for the sunrise and, in line with the club’s policy towards families, to check on new arrivals of the feathered category – mallards and their young.
“Today,” he says, “the sun’s shining and the course is glowing. It’s looking magnificent. It’s not quite as nice as I’d like it to be but I’d love to think that if anyone were flying over it, they’d be saying to themselves, ‘That looks so nice.’ ”
Anthony McGeough, the course manager at Richmond in Yorkshire, is no less in awe of his place of work, which is something of a rural retreat. As one week slides seamlessly into another, he marvels at the changing habits of the deer. Pre-coronavirus, they would make themselves scarce in the surrounding woodland; now, rather like the rabbits at Boldon, they hang about outside the clubhouse without a care in the world.
As he is on his own, McGeough enjoys the freedom of doing an hour on this and an hour on that where, previously, he and his men would work to a schedule: “There’s no push to do everything in a day,” he says.
As to how he is coping with his lonely existence, he, like the others, misses his colleagues and his members whilst finding the experience more than somewhat exhilarating.
“In many ways,” he said, “I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. You’re king of your own castle; you’re out there with your own thoughts.”
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