When did I first have thoughts of packing my job in and travelling the world? Was it when I was getting up at 4.30am on a wet Saturday morning to change holes for a club competition, or sat at a greens committee meeting explaining, for the one hundredth time, why we need to topdress the greens? Or that cutting the greens shorter and shorter is NOT the right thing to do? Or maybe it was when I was out working on the golf course and a golfer would look in the other direction and criticise the course just loud enough for me to hear? Perhaps a bit of all of them.
Colin Robinson, former Head Greenkeeper at John O’Gaunt Golf Club, has a bit of a rant about green speeds
The course was extremely well run and I would recommend it to anybody, but what did I have to put up with during break times? Where all the other students were going to travel too during their gap year.
All the feelings of wanting to travel the world came rushing back, after all when I have my degree I’ll be entitled to it. So much for trying to lessen the feelings of wanting to leg it!
When I first mentioned it to my wife she was very much against it. Why give up what we have? But, over time, she began to change her mind. She worked in a world renowned heart transplant hospital seeing patients who would have loved the chance to travel the world but who didn’t have the choice - some who were perfectly fit one week then needing a heart transplant the next. There attitude was do it if you can. So we agreed to travel.
What made it better was, when we told our close friends, they asked if they could come with us. That would be great, friends to share the experiences and safety in numbers.
Approaching Mumbai COLIN ROBINSON GOES I
have always done the best job I could and, like most people who work with sportsturf, I take criticism personally. Who of us goes home at the end of the day and doesn’t think about how the surfaces are playing or is it going to rain? It’s a full time job - and I mean 24 hours a day!
So off I go to Cranfield University in
Bedfordshire to meet Alex Vickers, the course leader and a very nice bloke to boot. He tells me that he thinks the course is for me and that I was capable of doing it. To cut a long story short, three years
I could have a hundred people tell me that the course is great but it’s the one moan that I would remember. So how could I put myself above criticism and get away from the feeling of wanting to leg it? I know, I’ll go to University and get a Masters Degree in sports surface technology. This will surely prove to one and all that I know what I am talking about.
50
later, there I am, having photos with my family in my mortarboard and gown. Don’t get me wrong, it was not easy;
there were times I felt like giving up. It was very hard work and there were also times I didn’t know my rear end from my elbow. But stick at it I did. If I am one thing, I am a determined person who sees things through. I suppose I have to be being a Leeds United fan. Looking back, University was great.
AWOL
October 10th 2006. Our first flight took us from Heathrow to Mumbai India, the first of, what turned out to be, 29 flights world wide. A word of warning at this point. If while walking around the sea front in Mumbai, a holy man wants to bless you, let him do it and give him a decent tip. Then you might be spared the coconut falling out of a tree and landing straight on your head. I swear to god I thought I had been hit over the head with a piece of 2 x 4! After the wife and friends knew I was okay much p*** taking was the order of the day. They weren’t laughing though, a few days later, when we all got chased down the road by a heard of bulls. My wife and best mate started running first which left me and my mates wife. She said “Are you scared? Aren’t you going to start running?” “Not yet,” I said, “because I know I can run faster than you!” What has all this got to do with turf management you might ask? Well, not a lot, but what it does raise is the pressure that most, if not all of us, are put under. Yes, I know there are some turf managers who are not up to the job, these I suppose deserve the criticism they get but they are few and far between. The majority of turf managers are hard working, dedicated, people who are happy to give up their home time to ensure that their turf surfaces are at their best.
The biggest problem, certainly in golf, is this ridiculous need for green speed. Actually, to say a green is fast is nonsense; I can get a ball to move fast across any green if I hit it with a 4 iron. What is measured is how far a ball will roll over a green when started at a set speed (enter the stimp). This then allows a comparison to be made between greens.
But who says what is fast? Only 30 years ago articles in golf magazines talk about greens being exciting to play on because they had a roll of 6 to 6.5 feet. Now, I’m pretty sure that, today, if any
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