Irish Open Focus on Carton HousePhilip Reid views the work going in to ensure the course will be perfect for this week's Irish Open
The other day Gary Murphy was asked if he had paid a reconnaissance visit to the Montgomerie Course at Carton House in advance of the Nissan Irish Open.
"No, which I think is a good thing," quipped Murphy. "Apparently, it's a monster, so I'm probably not going to be as scared as people who've played it before."
Word, you see, has spread in the caddie shack and the players' locker-room on the Tour of what lies ahead, although, as is often the case, the scare-mongering is likely to be a tad dramatic.
Monster, or not, as you drive in through the gates of this demesne that once housed Leinster's aristocrats, you can't but be impressed by what unfolds before your eyes. The Montgomerie Course - designed by Colin Montgomerie in conjunction with Stan Eby, of European Golf Design - is a mesh of cavernous pot bunkers, large, undulating greens, mounds and willowy fescue grasses.
Aesthetically, it is a wondrous sight.
Its pristine conditioning hasn't just happened; it has taken an army of greenkeeping staff, under the supervision of course superintendent John Plummer, to ensure the greens will roll true (running at 11 on the stimpmetre); to ensure the rough - the first cut and premium - is uniform throughout, and that everything quite simply is perfect for the arrival of the first PGA European Tour event to be played at the venue.
Despite the advance warnings of its severity, Plummer believes the players will like what they find; and that they'll find it to be "a fair test of golf ... look if you set up the course too difficult it becomes unfair. All our preparation has been done for the past couple of months, you can't switch it on or off."
Plummer is a 42-year-old Dubliner who is part of the new generation of greenkeepers. He first developed an interest in the agronomy side of things when working with his father who was involved in developing soccer and cricket pitches and, then, started work at Hermitage Golf Club where the head greenkeeper was Jim Byrne. He trained at the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, moved on to Knockanally Golf Club in Co Kildare, broadened his education by doing a correspondence course with the Elmwood College in Fife, Scotland, before getting a job at Grange Golf Club.
It was there he developed an interest in USGA specification construction and started to attend Golf Course Superintendents of America (GCSA) conferences each year in the US - which he still does - to learn about golf course construction, green construction, course management and USGA greens. It was as the GCSA representative that he was first asked to visit Carton House and the rest, as they say, is history. Plummer has been at Carton since the first sod was turned.
Each day this week, Plummer and the 40-plus members of his greenkeeping crew will start work at 4.30am. Work that in a normal day would take around six hours to complete must be done within a two-and-a-half hour timeframe to meet the constraints of the tournament. Additional volunteer staff have been drafted in from the likes of The K Club, Fota Island, Mount Juliet, City West, Tulfarris and Castleknock to assist and to gain tournament work experience.
"The bottom line is that we have to have everything done, the course ready, for a two-tee start at 7.20am," says Plummer.
To achieve that, the crew will be out - working under lights on the practice range and the short game area - by 4.45am. "It's like an army operation," says Plummer. "You've to double-mow greens, roll greens, double-mow the fairways. You have bunker crews, irrigation crews. You've got to make sure that everything is bang on right! It just takes a lot of bodies . . . and, of course, you have to have contingency. What happens if a mower breaks down? Or someone doesn't show up? If you've over 40 guys out there, the law of averages is that something is going to happen."
Plummer's job is to make sure that nothing does go wrong, that the course is presented in pristine condition; basically, that the tradition of excellence that Tour players have encountered on Irish courses in the past - at Mount Juliet and the K Club, at Druids Glen and Fota Island, at Portmarnock and Baltray - and which they have come to expect is maintained.
"I don't believe they'll be disappointed by what they find," says Plummer, despite the fact that May is early on in the growing season. "You know, there's so many things that can go wrong, especially with an early-season tournament. You've disease growing issues, animal issues, etc, etc. It's a biological world out there and anything can happen. But the technology on golf courses is just improving at a tremendous rate. The quality of machinery, the irrigation systems, how the grasses are growing. The whole industry is probably moving faster even than the IT sector.
"For example, the O'Meara course here was built in 2000 but by the time we went to build the Montgomerie course (in 2002), another set of grass choices were available. All the time, you're getting newer specifications with better characteristics. It's exciting stuff in this whole area.
"Then there's the type of staff coming into greenkeeping. It's a much more fancied career than it used to be and many guys are choosing it as a career straight off the Leaving Cert. They're coming into the industry with very intensive training, very intensive work commitments. There's now a number of placement programmes available in the United States where they're doing third and fourth-level education in Penn State University and they're coming back and filling the superintendent jobs over here.
"Some of the staff we have here at Carton House have experience in Gleneagles and Valderrama and they are following the circuit, working at European Tour events, at US Opens. The result is that greenkeeping standards are getting lifted all the time. Mark Farragher, our head greenkeeper, is an example of this. He was at the school of excellence in Gleneagles and was here when the O'Meara was grown in and the Montgomerie course. He works his socks off."
How the Montgomerie Course has been set up for this week's Irish Open was mainly down to the European Tour dictate. In truth, they pretty much went along with how Montgomerie and Eby wanted it set-up, apart from tightening a couple of fairways. The first meeting was conducted a year ago when David Probyn, the tour's assistant director of operations, played the course and made some observations.
"The main thing they wanted was playable rough, the four-inch stuff," says Plummer. "It had to be the same all the way around the course. One of the thoughts was to bring the tall fescue grasses in very close to the fairways but it wouldn't have been fair, especially if the wind should blow very hard. The reality of a links-style course in a parkland situation is that it wouldn't have been fair to bring the fescues into play. To be honest, I think it is very fairly set up where the primary rough comes into play. It should be a penalty situation rather than a lost ball situation, and that is the way it is."
Naturally enough, Plummer - and his greenkeeping staff - are excited about the prospect of playing host to Europe's top players, even if it does mean little sleep. Rising before dawn, and working late into the twilight hours, their job is to ensure the course's conditioning will meet the demands of the players.
"If they start attacking the course, its main defence is its bunkers. But, as Monty said, 'nobody's going to be playing two- or three-irons out of them'. They're going to be penalties."
For the past number of months, Plummer and his crew have been, to use his own expression, "working our socks off."
The time to rest won't come until Sunday evening, by which time their preparation will govern just who will emerge as the latest in the line of Irish Open champions.
