Why The Zurich Classic Plays on Grass That Shouldn't Be There

The grass you watch the best players in the world putt on at the Zurich Classic at TPC Louisiana is not supposed to be there yet. The golf course superintendent at TPC Louisiana knows it. His name is Tyler McCool. Every fall, he overseeds a cool-season grass called Poa trivialis into his dormant warm-season Bermuda grass greens. The Mini Verde ultradwarf Bermuda base underneath those putting surfaces is still dormant when the Zurich Classic of New Orleans arrives in April. It is not ready to roll at tournament speed. So McCool does not wait for it. He lets the only team event on the PGA Tour play on the fill-in species. What you will see on television this weekend is not the grass this course was designed to grow.

Two Hundred Fifty Acres of Reclaimed Wetland

That is the first thing you did not know about TPC Louisiana. The second is that the ground itself does not belong there either. The course sits on two hundred fifty acres along the Mississippi River Delta, about fifteen minutes southwest of downtown New Orleans in a town called Avondale. Twenty-two years ago, most of that acreage was swamp.

Pete Dye, the American golf course architect who designed TPC Sawgrass, was asked to build a tournament course here. He worked with two PGA Tour player consultants, Steve Elkington and Kelly Gibson, a New Orleans native. They did not find high ground to build on. There is no high ground in Avondale. Every fairway you are going to see, every bunker, every tee, every green sits on hydraulic fill. The dirt was dredged out of the Mississippi River, piped to the site, and laid down on top of former wetland. The soil conditions listed on the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America tournament fact sheet describe it in two words. Pumped river sand.

Pete Dye’s Signature, at Sea Level

Dye opened TPC Louisiana in two thousand four. The signature Dye elements are all present. Railroad ties framing bunkers. Waste bunkers larger than some municipal courses have in total. One hundred six sand bunkers covering twenty of the eighty-plus acres of playable area. Five ponds. Water in play on eight holes. Alligators sunning at the edges of water hazards.

What most viewers will never notice is how small the greens are. The average green at TPC Louisiana is five thousand two hundred twenty-five square feet. Most PGA Tour venues put more putting surface than that on television every week. Dye built the original greens even tighter. He did not want the bunkers up against the putting surface, so he set them off with chipping areas in between. The result is a greens complex that looks generous on camera and plays tighter than anything the field saw at the Masters.

The 2019 Regrass

Small greens on a course built on pumped river sand in a region that averages seventy inches of annual rainfall. That combination should not hold up to PGA Tour conditions. It does because Tyler McCool and his crew regrassed the entire property in twenty nineteen.

The fairways, approaches, practice tee, and some of the rough were replanted with a cultivar called Celebration Bermuda grass. The tees and the rest of the rough stayed with a cultivar called TifSport. The twenty-nineteen regrass was a reset, not a refresh. McCool and his team stripped out years of accumulated organic matter. They reset the growing medium. They replanted with a Bermuda grass aggressive enough to push through the winter and grow back to playing density by April.

Before the regrass, the course used to lose tournament balls to saturated fairways. McCool has a phrase for those balls that nobody outside Louisiana agronomy uses. Flood balls. Shots that stopped cold in the fairway because the turf underneath was holding too much water.

Since twenty nineteen, the Celebration Bermuda has held. McCool mows the fairways and approaches at four hundred twenty-five thousandths of an inch. Tees at four-tenths. Collars at twenty-six hundredths. Rough at two and a quarter inches for this year’s tournament. The greens, overseeded with Poa trivialis, are rolled and managed to a Stimpmeter reading between twelve and twelve and a half feet.

TPC Louisiana vs. Augusta National

Compare what you are looking at to Augusta National. Augusta is private. TPC Louisiana is public. You can book a tee time there any weekday of the year that the course is not shut down for tournament setup.

Augusta is built on rolling Georgia clay, on high ground over deep native soils. TPC Louisiana is built on sea-level swamp fill. Augusta has a subsurface vacuum system called SubAir buried beneath its greens. It lets the committee regulate soil moisture from a control room green by green through the night. TPC Louisiana has surface drainage and a crew with shovels.

Augusta plays on bentgrass greens in conditions the club controls to the square inch. TPC Louisiana plays on Poa trivialis overseeded into dormant Bermuda. The course averages seventy inches of rain a year. Hurricane season peaks four months before the tournament arrives. Augusta is a laboratory. TPC Louisiana is a bayou.

Four Hurricanes in Twenty-Two Years

And the bayou has tried to destroy the course four times. The first attempt came in August of twenty oh five. The course had been open one year. Hurricane Katrina made landfall near the Louisiana-Mississippi border on August twenty-ninth. TPC Louisiana closed. It stayed closed for six months. The two-thousand-six Zurich Classic of New Orleans could not be held at the TPC. It moved back to English Turn Golf and Country Club for one year. The PGA Tour has noted that the two-thousand-six Zurich Classic was the first professional sporting event in New Orleans after Katrina.

The tournament returned to TPC Louisiana in twenty oh seven and has stayed there ever since. Hurricane Gustav hit in two thousand eight. Another closure. Hurricane Isaac hit in two thousand twelve. Another closure. On August twenty-ninth, two thousand twenty-one, sixteen years to the day after Katrina, Hurricane Ida came ashore as a strong Category Four. The eye passed fifty miles west of the course at one in the afternoon. Ida dropped more than twelve inches of rain on TPC Louisiana during the storm. Winds at the course peaked at one hundred twenty miles per hour.

When McCool and his crew walked the property afterward, they counted approximately one hundred fifty large bald cypress trees toppled or snapped in half. Hundreds of oaks and magnolias joined them. Four course buildings had roof and interior damage. Total tree loss at the facility pushed close to seven hundred.

The bald cypress is the tree that should have survived this. It is native to swampy ground in the southeastern United States. It is hardy in exactly the conditions TPC Louisiana was built on. Ida knocked down one hundred fifty of them in a single afternoon. One of those losses was the bald cypress on the eleventh fairway. It stood one hundred five feet tall. It was about ninety yards in front of the green. Golfers and television cameras had been using it as a visual reference since the course opened. Ida uprooted it and knocked it across the fairway. The course reopened after two months of cleanup on November first. Where the tree had stood, there was only a large ground-under-repair circle.

That was the fourth time the bayou won.

The Only Team Event on Tour

McCool has been at TPC Louisiana for eight years. He came to the course after four years at the Preserve Golf Club in Mississippi. He holds a degree in agronomy with an emphasis in golf management from Mississippi State University. He was hired at TPC Louisiana as an assistant and was promoted to superintendent in twenty twenty-one. He has prepared the course for the Tour four times now as the man in charge.

Every April, he lines up the same problem. He has a course on pumped river sand in a hurricane zone with seventy inches of annual rainfall on a Bermuda grass base that is still dormant. And it has to deliver PGA Tour conditions for the only team event on the schedule.

The only team event. That detail matters. The Zurich Classic is the only official FedEx Cup event on the entire PGA Tour calendar that is played in a team format. Thursday and Saturday, the seventy-four two-man teams play a format called fourball. Each player plays his own ball, and the better of the two scores counts on every hole. Friday and Sunday, they play foursomes, also called alternate shot. Each team plays one ball, and the two players alternate strokes.

No other Tour venue has to prepare a golf course for this. Every other Tour course is prepping for a field of individual players moving ball by ball through the layout. TPC Louisiana is prepping for a week where the wear pattern itself changes every day. On fourball days, every one of the one hundred forty-eight players in the field is playing his own ball through the course. On foursomes days, the number of balls in play is cut in half.

Advance Week

The regular TPC Louisiana grounds crew is supplemented every April with approximately forty additional volunteers. Some of them have been coming every year since the course opened. The club closes to the public for what staff call advance week, the week before the tournament, when the full crew can set the course without members or daily-fee players on it.

They verticut. They top dress. They roll. They set pins. They mow the collars at twenty-six hundredths of an inch. They mow fairways at four hundred twenty-five thousandths. They roll greens to twelve feet on the Stimpmeter Monday through Sunday. They check irrigation. They check drainage. They watch the radar. In Louisiana in April, you always watch the radar. Afternoon storms are standard in south Louisiana at this time of year.

By Thursday morning, the Poa trivialis putting surface will be mowed, rolled, and painted with a morning dew. The crew will drag that dew off before the first tee time. The Mini Verde Bermuda underneath will still be dormant. It is weeks away from taking back control of the greens, when the Poa trivialis starts to die off in the heat of May.

The Celebration Bermuda fairways will be cut tight enough that nobody finds a flood ball in the short grass. The Mississippi River sits roughly two miles north of the course. The levees and flood walls keep it there the same way they have kept it there every April since the tournament came back.

This is a twenty-two-year-old golf course on ground that has been redrawn, flooded, regrassed, blown down, and rebuilt. The course is part of the Audubon Golf Trail and a certified Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary. Pete Dye designed it. Steve Elkington and Kelly Gibson helped route it. Tyler McCool and a full-time crew, supplemented by forty volunteers every April, maintain it. The Golf Course Superintendents Association of America writes the fact sheet on it. The PGA Tour plays it once a year for one week in a format that does not exist anywhere else on the schedule. The grass underneath them was planted last fall for a tournament held in April.

Augusta National is the Masters. TPC Louisiana is everything the Masters is not. A Bermuda grass course in a wetland at sea level in a town most viewers have never heard of. A course that has to earn its conditions from scratch every single April.

That is the course you are going to watch this weekend.

Sources

Now you know what they do before you tee off.

Why The Zurich Classic Plays on Grass That Shouldn’t Be There