tournament

David Bataller organized a seminar in the VIP tent behind the 18th green on Thursday morning during the Catalunya Championship. Measuring air temperature, humidity, and wind speed on the 18th green just after sunrise.

The KBC Augusta tournament (#KBCオーガスタ) is coming up, and as in past years, I find it extraordinarily interesting. There aren’t many tournaments like this one, from a grass and playing surface perspective.

I’ve sometimes explained the temperature-based turfgrass growth potential (GP) of PACE Turf in relation to the grass conditions at the Masters Tournament. The playing conditions at the Masters are superb, and the cool-season grass in that season is growing at near optimum temperatures.

Andrew Thomson is the author of Bridge to the Gods: Tales from Kyushu. That very book happens to be sitting beside my computer as I write this. I’m bringing it to read this weekend when I’ll be on a small island in the Andaman Sea.

Last week I had a couple conversations about green speed. Green speed and surface hardness My column in the June 2018 issue of Golf Course Seminar magazine discusses the relationship between effective mowing height and green speed.

I’ve been at Keya Golf Club for the KBC Augusta tournament this week. Yesterday afternoon I watched some shots during the first practice round, and took a few videos of ball reaction on the greens.

You may recall that I went shopping for golf magazines at 4 a.m. on August 23. What was that about? There was a feature article in that week’s new issue of Weekly Golf Digest about Andrew McDaniel.

I did this analysis in 2016 and repeated it in 2018. I figure that tweets by the golf course superintendent, Alejandro Reyes (@Reyes_golf), or tweets that mention the golf course superintendent, must be about the course maintenance.

Maybe you saw this from Jeff Johnson a couple days ago. He’s not kidding. Ok, maybe he was kidding, but we sure had a great time. Alejandro Reyes, the golf course superintendent at Le Golf National for this week’s Ryder Cup, was kind enough to document our discussions in 2016.

On August 23 at 4 a.m., Andrew McDaniel and I walked into a 7-11 in Fukuoka to get the latest issue of Weekly Golf Digest. Golf magazines in Japan are pretty amazing to begin with.