Unity & Union

A greenhorn greenkeeper’s diary entry on cohering and persevering along the path to greatness

The past two weeks, during which my familiarity with Fort Washington’s course and club have grown, have left me pondering. I am clear on Fred’s vision for the course. He is convinced that it can be in the top tier in California. Based on the land, the routing, and some of the architectural bones, I am firmly in his camp. The potential is there. The same seems to be true of the club itself. It has a history and rootedness in its community that other clubs in the state do not have. Some things cannot be bought or manufactured.

The question that remains for me is about the membership and its willingness to do what it takes to go, to steal a phrase from Jim Collins, from good to great. They had the sense to realize that change was needed and good judgment to hire a professional greenkeeper of Fred’s experience. But beyond friendly waves and a few very brief conversations, Fort Washington’s people are largely unknown to me.

I received a hint of a response to my questions, along with steak tacos, at a team barbecue attended by leaders from the club staff and Board of Directors. It was a pleasure and privilege to meet them and confirm that they have their sights set high. I walked away even more committed to giving them my best effort, as well as access to whatever aspects of my knowledge and network that might be useful, for my remaining days in Fresno. It was a short gathering in duration, but it reminded me that where unity and purpose exist, greatness becomes a very real possibility.

We’ve been busting our butts, sometimes with Fred’s foot planted squarely in them. It was a sign of solid leadership to balance the butt busting with bread breaking. The grounds crew toils in the wee hours, often in obscurity. Recognition of our efforts, even when we all know we aren’t yet producing results up to our shared quality standard, refuels the tank to persevere. Fred pointed out to the assembled group that half of our 20 person crew has been on the job for less than a month. That was a necessary house cleaning and reset, but the upshot is an experience gap. And even those guys who have been at Fort Washington for years are being asked to embody new values of quality, accountability, and honesty. Every one of us is on a learning curve. How quickly we climb is partly dependent on unity—team cohesion and support from our leaders. We are all in it together.

I can see progress in myself and within our team. I’m also acutely aware of my and our shortfalls. Fred may be regretting it, but he gave us his mobile number and encouraged us to use it. Among my steady barrage of texts to him was a note of frustration that our bunker presentation was slipping because the new guys don’t know what their part in the bigger picture is when they are assigned that job.

When I was 13 years old, the senior caddies at Old Elm Club taught me how to properly rake a bunker. Push to smooth, pull to pretty—no sand on the lips or faces. A rake is a powerful piece of equipment for producing beauty and playability, and it is not to be taken lightly. If you have not already had the pleasure, invite a superintendent to play golf, and if they hit their ball in a bunker, pause for a moment to watch them rake. It’s pure artistry.

I arrived the morning after my text to find “bunker school” next to my name on the job board. Fred clarified his expectations and off we went, me and my three students. We worked hard to uncover lips and recapture bunker definition while smoothing the surfaces for the day’s play. A step forward was taken and I am confident that we will continue in that direction. As I watched coverage of The Masters, I found myself obsessed with Augusta’s bunkers. Not so much the pure white sand or the manicured surrounding turf, but the little dark band between that adds so much to aesthetics. In the hands of a careless greenkeeper, the rake has the power to destroy that important detail. We don’t settle for carelessness at Fort Washington. We want guys who wonder, how do I make a rake do THAT?

My learning curve persists in exhilarating and exhausting me. Each week finds me splitting time between cross-training on new equipment and concurrently improving my skill in operating others. It is one thing to know how a tool works. That’s conscious competence. It is quite another to be able to make that tool translate vision into reality. That’s unconscious expression. With a rake I’m there. With the fairway mower? Still practicing.

My pal Jon of LinksGems posted an homage to greenkeepers on social media recently that not only sent me deeper down the rabbit hole of grass lines, but also got me thinking about the delta between where I am and where I want to be.

I’ve been fortunate to see dozens of America’s greatest golf courses and they share an exacting approach to presentation, the difficulty of which I understand more each day. They have healthy maintenance budgets, and that matters, but I have long believed that desire matters more than dollars.

I’m now getting an education on the level of skill required to produce world-class quality. I look at Jon’s photos and intuitively know that a reelmaster, triplex, or walk-mower can deliver astounding precision if the operator is up to the task. However, there’s no way around putting in the hours on the ground, including making mistakes, to level up. I’m all in on that challenge. I am the guy who wonders, how do I make the mower do THAT?

Unity is required to achieve greatness at the team level. There can and should be productive friction, but at the end of the day, cohesion to shared values and each other must win out. For the individual, mastery goes hand-in-hand with union. My daily reading in 365 Tao this morning synchronously spoke to what we find through forays into purposeful learning:

“The mind, if focused, can become the most powerful force we know…The primary means of exploration is through concentration of the mind…When you are first introduced to a subject, you must put attention to work in order to master the knowledge. Such concentration leads to absorption, like mixing liquids together in a bottle…With concentration, all the various aspects of the mind can be joined together into one superconscious mode…In this high concentration, there is complete union, and we feel the joy of total integration with all our facets.”

Perhaps it’s possible, through intentional and concentrated practice, to achieve a state of flow in my work in which I am one with the machine and the ground I’m tending. Like a player in union with his club, the wind, the target, and the vision of ball flight in his mind, that is the moment in which the approximation of mastery in craft translates into a glimpse of perfection in the presentation of the playing field.

Are we still talking about raking sand and mowing grass? Only at the same level that golf can be wantonly over-simplified into whacking a ball with a stick. What I’m getting at is yet another way that the game points us to that which is deepest and most profound about a life worth living.

Full disclosure: there are days when the alarm sounds at 3:30 AM and the urge to hit snooze and settle for good enough is strong. But I put my feet on the floor anyway because I decided long before Fred offered me a job keeping Fort Washington’s greens to pursue excellence. By showing up and working through challenges, I receive little doses of unity and union–rewards that far outweigh my efforts.