![]() Last fall, Thrall began inter-seeding with A1-A4 bentgrass and repeated the process this spring. ![]() They become less interested in the other stuff.” Get them right and the end-user’s focus narrows. You focus on the greens, then the greens and then the greens. His other big message was that it’s all about the greens. We were going to do something to make it better. “Even it was a small improvement, it didn’t matter. “Jeffery would always start each day telling us that we were going to make the golf course better that day,” he says. Thrall was an assistant to Connell at Columbia Country Club and says he will always be thankful for two philosophies he carried away from that time. ![]() Thrall also “picked at” former boss and Carolinas GCSA past-president Jeff Connell, now at Fort Jackson Golf Club on the eastern side of town. They both said we needed a starting point, we needed to establish a baseline and work from there.” They confirmed that we were on the right track by just concentrating on the very basics. So Chris and Derek’s input was invaluable. “Most of the research over the past 10 or 15 years has all been geared to the ultradwarfs. “I mean, I was guessing basically,” Thrall says. Soon after, Derek Oglesby of Corbin Turf and Ornamental Supply, who had maintained Crenshaw in Memphis, TN made a similar visit in response to a call from Thrall. “Two or three days later he just showed up,” Thrall says. Williams managed bentgrass when he was across town at Spring Valley Country Club. So Thrall “leaned heavily.” He first called Chris Williams now with Helena Chemical Company. “It was the only time in the past 10 years when I questioned what I was doing. “There was a lot of self doubt in those first 90 days,” Thrall says. Not surprisingly, there were a lot of nights when sleep was hard to come by. “Talk about feeling like the one-legged guy in a butt-kicking contest,” he says. Thrall found one hose on the property, a leaky 40-ft. Dollar spot was rampant on the ageing Crenshaw and Penncross mix. On arrival three greens had barely 60 percent grass coverage and the rest were about 90 percent with the worst loss around the fringes and slopes. We did all we could to give ourselves a fighting chance. “I found this relic of a spiker at the shop so we pulled it out and got it going and we spiked the heck out of them religiously. “I was flying by the seat of my pants,” Thrall says. From a maintenance perspective it was “Zero.” And, by his own admission, his previous experience on bentgrass was limited to putting. That was all the reminder he needed to know that while he may be off his knees he was on a grass that had brought so many other superintendents to theirs. When he started last August 3 the mercury topped 100 degrees with an overnight low of 82. While they were now off growing ultradwarfs, Thrall would become the exception at The Windermere Club, maintaining the only bentgrass greens left in Columbia, SC. Really, it was more like walking in through the exit that everyone else had tromped out of. Eventually he found one but it wasn’t exactly the front door. So in 2014, he started poking around again, looking for a way back in. “I’d hang out there all day then get picked up at 7pm. “The cleaners had to unlock a door to let me in,” he says. Before a long commute to work in northern California his parents would drop him at their country club at 6am. Thrall had grown up in golf and was raised in part by locker room attendants and assistant pros. “If someone ever sees me kneeling again they need to shoot me.” “I felt like it was something that had run its course.” But then his knees started to hurt. “I swore off the golf business,” he says. Pro, superintendent, general manager, even course owner, he’d chewed each of those bones at some point over nearly two decades but in the end the game spat him out. He’d pretty much done it all up until then. Burned out, ticked off and fed up, he quit the only thing he knew and went laying tile for a friend. Life in the golf industry literally brought Troy Thrall to his knees in 2013.
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