Long lauded for having some of the best playing conditions on the PGA Tour, the historic La Quinta Country Club doesn’t rest on its laurels.
With PGA Tour pros John Rahm, Patrick Cantlay, Brendan Steele, and this year’s Ryder Cup captain, Zack Johnson, giving an annual tribute to the quality and consistency of club putting surfaces, the La Quinta turf team begins its journey and prepares members for peak season long before it’s over. He hit the first ever American Express ball.
“For me, getting the greens ready for seed in the first week of October is the most important thing,” said Tim Putnam, director of agricultural engineering at La Quinta Country Club. “Everything we do to create that surface that we plant on, that’s what I spend the most time worrying about and ensuring we get exactly the right information.”
This year’s 64th edition of American Express is a far cry from Putnam’s first rodeo. A desert superintendent since the late 1990s, he began his tenure as an agronomist at La Quinta Country Club in 2002. With the club poised to co-host the PGA Tour’s annual leg in the desert for the 51st time, Putnam’s “secret sauce” for the state of the greens Rahm’s Augusta National Golf Club, once earned good comparisons for the game’s fanciest course surfaces during its 2018 triumph in the desert.
Lawrence Hughes’ design at La Quinta that opened in 1959 is considered a time-tested “classic,” over six decades in the making. With distance scarce by today’s tour standards (7,060 yards), combined with tight fairways and a burden on iron accuracy, the pro’s scoring lens often focuses on the flat.
“It may be one of the best surfaces I’ve ever seen,” said Scotty Scheffler, number two in the World Golf Ranking. “They’re really good. That’s consistent. It’s been like that – I think it’s my fourth time here at the event – and they’ve been like that every time I’ve been there.
“It’s amazing what this superintendent and club can do with these greens,” Scheffler said. “If you spin it well — there’s a little oomph in there that can be hard to read sometimes — but once you start making some rollers, that hole can look really big because those greens are nice.”
A maintenance team of two dozen works across a relatively small 113-acre turf, and Putnam’s specialty is defined on every blade and every grain.
La Quinta Country Club green leaves are rolled with Tifdwarf hybrid bermudagrass and fed in October with a mixture of poa trivialis and perennial ryegrass.
“Ryegrass really helps early on, helps the Poa establish itself, provides a little shade for the Poa and helps with traffic stress,” Putnam says.
Depending on its focus in the fall, Putnam trailing preparation includes growth regulators and vertical cuttings that run at very shallow heights.
“The key for me is to get rid of enough Bermuda tissue so you’re creating a good seedbed,” Putnam said. And using vertical cutters to help lift and peel the Bermuda better. And then I like to use something I found a long time ago, a brush, called Grain Master, and it has multiple really stiff bristles. When I drag that around, it stands up the Bermuda up and also works great alongside Combined with the use of machetes on mortar roofs to burn Bermuda green tissue.”
With the course reopening from abroad and the calendar entering the holiday season, Putnam is planning ahead.
“In December, I’ll have them run at 10 ½ or 11 (on the Stimpmeter) to play the organs, and then head out to AMEX, really watching the weather,” said the agronomist. “If it’s going to be as great as it is now, I have to make sure they don’t get too fast in the championship, because they won’t get too big. Over the course of rolling the greens for five or six straight days (during championship week), they can get really fast.”
Around the beginning of the calendar year and the imminent return of the American Express, Putnam and the staff work a delicate dance to control the speed of the greens. For the Championship, the La Quinta green runs a shade slower than Putnam measures 11 ½ (or even 12) on the Stimpmeter for members who play the rest of the season.
Given that for a uniform layout, pin positions remain the same on all three courses for the first three rounds until each golfer has played each of the holes, Putnam must also consider not making the setup too difficult for the amateur players in the event and keeping up the pace of play in tact .
For American Express week, Putnam is working alongside the PGA Tour’s agricultural engineering team to ensure decks are laid at speeds comparable to the other two PGA West tournament tournaments – the Nicklaus Tournament Course and Pete Dye Stadium.
“The Tour wants the three courses to be as comparable as possible to each other, and speeds of about 11 is where they settled,” Putnam said. “Maybe a little closer to 10 ½ on the PGA West, with a few big slopes on those greens.”
In addition to the speed of putting greens, the PGA Tour team also pays close attention to lawn mower heights for continuity and quality.
“We were once mowing greens at about 100 or 115 thousandths of an inch—a height we needed to be no more than 10 speed—but if you had a pitcher rolling through multiple mowing lines, there was very little grain impact with ball movement,” Putnam said. “So I explained that to the agronomist on the PGA Tour, and told him we really needed to be 105 thousandths of an inch apart to avoid that phenomenon.”
January was cooler than average in the Coachella Valley with daytime highs of less than 70 degrees this month. Given the cooler conditions, Putnam is looking forward to getting back up to the 110 mow height with the addition of another bite of that secret sauce.
“Poa trivialis is interesting because it grows vertically, whereas most grasses grow a little more sideways,” he said. “With Poa triv (ialis), you actually get the grain from the mower. When the mower moves, it puts it one way and then when the mower comes back, it puts it the other way. We figured out the process for using this little brush on the mowers, and now we’re going to Already by mowing upstream, or against the previous line. We’re trying to get the grass to stand straight everywhere.”
During the tournament, Putnam and his staff will spur the greens in the morning and afternoon, to make sure they don’t speed up too much.
“But I want to be able to roll the greens every day,” he said, “because with the pins staying in the same place, there’s a lot of footprint around the hole.”
While Putnam appreciates annual accolades from PGA pros, he’s quick to acknowledge that pristine conditions are not only unique to La Quinta Country Club but to a number of the 120 desert courses.
“There are six pitches here in the valley whose greens are as good as mine,” he said. “And for an entire region, the courses here in our desert are in as good or better condition than anywhere in the country.”
Of course, Putnam is equally aware that the nation’s eyes are annually glued to his terrain, expecting to see a full lap.
“When you see a close-up of hitting the ball on TV, and the ball starts to slow down, I want to see it retrace over the same arc,” Putnam said. “That’s when I know I got those greens really well.”