In The Fairway

The next day, a truck delivered the Ventrac 4500Z tractor.  Along with a slew of attachments that would help us turn Mr. Taalay’s farm into a golf course.  He’d spent his life steering a plow behind an ox.  He was like a kid at Christmas the first time he sat on the Ventrac.

I didn’t turn Mr. Taalay into a golf addict.  I turned him into a golf course superintendent addict.  Every golf course needs one of those.

 

The contour mowing attachment can cut an 8 foot swath and the three independent mowing decks will follow uneven terrain with a minimum of scalping.  We wouldn’t need the triplex reel mower until later.  That would be used for mowing the greens.  

The greens are the most challenging part of a golf course.  I’d never built one and had no idea how.   I bought Michael Hurdzan’s Golf Course Architecture, 450 pages of everything you need to know to design and maintain a course.  

Mr. Taalay and I would find out that creating a golf course is no simple task.  We started small and learned as we went along.  He was able to bury many of our mistakes with the Ventrac.  Between the V-blade plow and the power bucket, we slowly molded the property into the shape we would need.

But I was a golf addict and in need of a fix.  While Mr. Taalay was learning how to use the tractor, me and the posse designed our first course.  Google “pasture golf” if you want to see what it looked like.

Daniar, Macha, Aijan and I walked all over the farm that first weekend and layed out the course.  It took Mr. Taalay three days to mow all the fairways.  It was as basic as it gets.  We used rocks for tee markers and there were no greens.  Just 18 flags we stuck in the ground where the greens would be someday.

We had a 15 foot length of rope and a case of spray paint.  We tied the rope to each flagpole and used it as a guide to paint a circle.  In regular golf, your goal is to get the ball into the hole in as few shots as you can.  In pasture golf, the 30 foot circle is the hole.  

That first round of golf was a blast.  The kids had a great time.  I kicked their asses.  It would take a couple years for Daniar to get better than me.  Macha was not far behind.  Aijan will never be much of a golfer.  But something else became apparent that day.  Aijan is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.

I’d gone over the mechanics of the golf swing during the lessons.  It is not a natural movement and a lot of different things have to be done in the right sequence.  I figured I’d have to spend a lot of time re-explaining the basics to the kids.  But not to Aijan.

On the third hole, I hit a nasty hook that sailed 60 yards to the left of the fairway.  Aijan said, “At the top of your backswing, the fingers on your left hand came off of the grip.  When you started your downswing you had a stronger grip and that caused the hook.”

To this day, Macha likes to tell that story.  She always ends it with:  “When Aijan told you what was wrong in your swing, you looked at him like he was from Mars.”  In addition to golf, I made sure the kids were well versed in American slang.

Aijan was right.  He had spotted one of the glitches in my swing.  Every golfer has them.  

It did not take long for me to start thinking of him as my coach.  I would have him watch me while I warmed up.  Golfers tend to drift with their technique, and an objective set of eyes can detect small problems before they become big ones.

Aijan teamed up with Mr. Taalay to tackle our most difficult challenge.  Figuring out how to get grass to grow really well, yet at the same time, cut it ridiculously short.  And keep it healthy while people pelt it with golf balls and walk all over it.  That is a golf green.  We needed 19 of them, one for practicing and the rest for the course.  

I knew the computers I bought for the orphanage would be an essential part of the children’s education.  The internet would open doors for them and make the distance between them and the rest of the civilized world irrelevant.  When Aijan told me about the golf turf research he was doing, I patted myself on the back.

Between Aijan’s brain power and Mr. Taalay’s green thumb, we had a healthy putting green by the end of the second season.  The kids had begun to master the technique of the full swing, I was impressed by the progress they were making.  I had my work cut out for me teaching them how to putt.  It is a completely different game from the full shots.

Aijan took to putting like a champ.  It was the one part of the game where his size and the bad leg was not a handicap.  He and Daniar got really good, even better than me.  They practiced for hours.  As with everyone else, Aijan became Daniar’s putting coach.