A golf course superintendent runs the strangest maintenance job in the sport: the Coeur d’Alene Resort’s 14th hole in Idaho, the only movable floating green on earth, reachable only by boat.
Built in 1990 by resort owner Duane Hagadone, it is the first and only movable floating green in the world. It weighs more than four million pounds and rides on four cables: two run down to ship’s anchors sunk in the lake bed, and two run back to shore, where winches drag the whole green along a dial marked in five-yard steps. That’s why the 14th has no fixed yardage. It can play as short as ninety yards or as long as two hundred twenty, depending on where the crew parks it that morning. The surface on top is bentgrass, the same high-maintenance, disease-prone turf as the finest cool-season greens in the north.
There’s no cart path, because there’s no land, so everything the green needs travels by boat. The walking mowers, the topdressers, the aerifiers, the fertilizer, the bunker sand, every tool and material makes the trip across the water and back, and even the players ride out on a little cable-guided boat named Putter. Over the years the crew has added roughly a hundred tons of sand to keep the platform right, and the cables that hold four million pounds against the wind and current get inspected and replaced, because if that system fails you don’t lose a green, you lose a green into a lake. Meanwhile the lake collects everybody’s misses: divers go down every couple of weeks in peak season and pull something like twenty-five to thirty thousand golf balls off the bottom each year.