Late spring and early summer can bring excessive growth in the rough. A few challenges with thick rough include slower pace of play, turf health issues, and maintenance teams struggling to keep up with mowing. Recently, areas throughout the Northeast have experienced heavy amounts of rain. Although cool temperatures have slowed growth a bit, the ability to mow has also been limited. When mowers cannot get around the golf course, the rough can quickly become tall and thick. When it rains at the end of a week, mowing all the rough before weekend play can be impossible, and even if mowing occurs, excessive clippings can be an issue.
Whether it’s setting up a golf course for regular play or for a national championship, those responsible may decide that golf balls lying just inches off the fairway should generally not be as penalized as shots that land many yards from the short grass. One tactic we utilized during the recent U.S. Amateur Four-Ball Championship to create a gradient from fairway to deep rough was the “bevel-cut.” Veteran golf course superintendent Travis Pauley was at Plainfield Country Club during the Gil Hanse restoration of this Donald Ross design about 10 years ago. After the project, the intermediate cut of rough was eliminated but the club did not want to overly penalize golf shots that ended up just off the fairway, so the bevel-cut was introduced. A dedicated rough mower is set with a low height of cut on one end and the primary rough height at the other end. The low end might start at 1.25 inches and increase 0.50 or 0.75 inch at each adjustment point ending up at the primary rough height. The bevel-cut rough mower makes one pass around each fairway and keeps the edges crisp and playable without a defined step in height, resulting in a smooth transition that worked out very well during the championship.
This technique may not be feasible at all golf courses and can also result in scalping at first on the lower end of the bevel-cut as turf adjusts to the new height. However, when the rough is actively growing and challenging to keep up with, setting a machine to bevel-cut rough around fairways might be an option to reduce the penalty for missing a fairway by inches. Sometimes you can’t get to all the rough before the weekend, but if you can make a quick loop around all the fairways with a mower like this, it makes a difference.
Northeast Region Agronomists:
Darin Bevard, senior director, Championship Agronomy – dbevard@usga.org
Elliott L. Dowling, regional director, East Region – edowling@usga.org
Brian Gietka, agronomist – bgietka@usga.org