A golf course superintendent’s crew was blamed for the broccoli greens at the 2015 US Open. Four years later the USGA itself published: “Sometimes Poa annua Is The Answer.” Here’s what happened next.
The greens were seeded with fine fescue and a small percentage of colonial bentgrass in 2007, built on a former sand and gravel mine in Poa annua country on Puget Sound. USGA agronomist Larry Gilhuly wrote that Poa control was a critical program from the very beginning, and that the plant growth regulators which stop Poa seedheads are exactly the ones fine fescue cannot tolerate. Darin Bevard documented five to twenty percent Poa in those greens at the Open. Henrik Stenson said broccoli, Rory McIlroy said cauliflower, and the crew ran the fine fescue protocol by the book. After the championship left, the mowing heights stayed down for the daily fee golfer, a thinned fescue canopy is nothing but light, and the Poa did what it does in University Place.
In early 2017 the seventh, tenth and thirteenth greens were stripped and resodded with local Poa annua as a test. General manager Matt Allen told the Associated Press that July that the decision to convert had been made with the USGA’s blessing: if Poa is an inevitability, why go backward in any way. The original plan was a gradual takeover, but a slow conversion grows in unevenly green to green, and uneven is the one thing a putting surface cannot be. So Pierce County, which owns it, and KemperSports, which runs it, closed the course on October 1, 2018. Bos Sod Farms in British Columbia supplied farmed Poa annua by the roll, superintendent Mark Trenter and director of agronomy Eric Johnson laid every green in five weeks, and the course reopened April 3, 2019. The News Tribune put the bill at $238,000, against a 2015 US Open measured at $134 million in regional economic impact.