Turk Pipkin

BIO

Turk Pipkin has had an eclectic career indulging in everything from comedy--he once toured with Rodney Dangerfield--to acting--he appeared in Christopher Guests' Waiting for Guffman, HBO's The Sopranos, Disney's The Alamo, and the upcoming film Friday Night Lights. He is the author of eight books including the critically acclaimed novel FAST GREENS. Turk's writing has also appeared in such notable publications as T&L Golf, Golf Digest, Playboy and Texas Monthly.

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ESSAY

Putting Greens Direct Saves the Day
by Turk Pipkin

I was standing on the Putting Green at Pebble Beach on the first morning of the AT & T Pebble Beach Pro-Am when I received word that my father was on his way to hospital and that I'd better come fast. Rushing back to Texas, I was only able to spend a few hours with him, time that we spent talking about golf and fishing and all the things we both loved.

At the time, I didn't have a clue that this sad day would send me back to Pebble Beach to play a round of golf in my father's memory, that my round at Pebble would go so terribly wrong, or that I would spend the next year of my life in a crazy attempt to take ten strokes off my game.

If you're not a golfer, by the way, improving your game by ten strokes in a year is almost unheard of, especially for a guy who's been playing the game for forty years. But why, I wondered? Why couldn't I be a good golfer?

What if I took lessons from David Leadbetter, Dave Pelz and Ben Crenshaw? What if I tested my game on some of the world's best ocean-side tracks like Turnberry and Dornoch in Scotland and Cabo del Sol in Mexico. What if I hit a couple of hundred practice balls every day, and holed a hundred putts every day to boot?

All I had to lose, I figured, was a year of my life.

I was more than six months into that year when I had to admit to myself that one part of my game was not improving the way it needed to --- and that was my putting. By the time I hit balls at the range, I rarely had time to hang out even longer and putt. On instructions from Leadbetter, I was also working at home on a series of full swing drills he'd given me. These drills were working wonders on my long game. I did not, however, have drills for my putting that didn't require a green.

A decade ago, I dreamed of installing a putting green in my backyard, but it had not taken long to learn that grass greens are super expensive to build and a complete hassle to maintain, requiring constant watering, fertilizing and --- worst of all --- mowing. A real green has to be mowed every day, day after day, for the rest of your life, which is why I gave up on my idea of a backyard green.

But halfway through my year-long quest to take ten strokes off my game, I met Gary Poole, President of Putting Greens Direct, one of the nation's leading installers of artificial putting greens. Using a variety of synthetic putting surfaces, Putting Green Direct's greens provide the same kind of roll and speed as real bent grass greens, but have none of the maintenance hassles. And since Putting Greens Direct has installed artificial greens at the homes of PGA pros Davis Love III, Paul Stankowski and Joe Durant, you know these things have to be good.

As you can tell, I was pretty much hooked.

The spot I chose for my new green has always been the barest, most sun-burned part of my own yard. I'd tried to grow grass here for years and only ended up mowing weeds, so the idea of replacing those weeds with evergreen artificial turf seemed doubly attractive.

To install my new backyard dream green in Austin, Poole sent Jason Meersman and Michael Zumpone, both installers who'd previously converted back yards all over the country into golf fantasies.

I'd already laid out the basic outline of my green with a garden hose, a shape that Michael refined with a can of spray-paint before using a gasoline-powered sod cutter to remove the existing grass and weeds. After Jason shaped this area with a double-tracked bobcat, a big-ass dump truck dropped 18 tons of crushed aggregate which would serve as the foundation of my green.

Once this gravel base had been rough-shaped, then compacted with a ride-on roller ---in other words, after all the really heavy work was done --- I joined in to help with the final shaping of the green. Using a large, flat rake, Jason, Michael and I all took turns adding a little gravel here or taking off a little in another spot. Jason assured me that tour pro Paul Stankowski had also done the final shaping on his big green, though I'd have to say in retrospect that my influence was probably as much of an interference as it was a contribution.

Lucky for me, Jason turned out to be a low handicapper who once held the course record at the Fazio Treetops course in his home state of Michigan, and who really knew what he was doing.

“The green is going to be faster than you realize and you want it to be good, not goofy,” he had to remind me as I got a little tricky with shaping the breaks.>

After one last compacting of the surface, we rolled out the putting surface, a single gigantic piece of rubber-backed nylon turf which immediately transformed the site from glaring white rock to a lush green putting surface. By the time Jason had created some graceful sweeping curves around the edges and installed matching artificial fringe turf from which I could practice my chipping, I could barely wait to try out my new green. But a little more work remained: the installation of the cups, and the spreading of a layer of fine-grained sandblasting sand on the putting surface which would keep the fibers standing tall and give the whole green a uniform roll.

There are a wide variety of artificial putting turfs, but the nylon green I chose seemed to be the best choice. Not only did it require less sanding than many of the polypropylene turfs on the market, PGD's nylon turfs come with a 12-year warranty which is twice the guarantee of most poly greens.

“Bottom line,” Gary Poole told me, “I could have built any green at my house and chose nylon. To maintain it, I just blow it off occasionally with a leaf blower.”

I could hardly believe how smoothly the whole installation process had gone. 48 hours after construction began on my new green, Jason and Michael were helping me finish my rock landscaping and cleaning up the mess. There was no doubt that my yard looks better and needs less maintenance than before, but the real question remained: would the green help my putting?

For the next few weeks, I spent an hour on the green every day, working on the pace of long putts the way Ben Crenshaw had shown me earlier in the year and knocking in an endless succession of two to four-footers, the kind I always used to miss. And let me tell you, my putting really improved. I still may not make them all, but for the first time in my life, I feel confident over every putt.

Some of my improvement is probably due to my new Callaway's Two-Ball Putters ---and some to great lessons from Crenshaw and Dave Pelz --- but much of that improvement is definitely due to my new green.

If you want to find out whether I actually knocked ten strokes off my score and my handicap, you'll have to read THE OLD MAN & THE TEE.

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