It's Storytime.  

My personal record for running off golf pros is 13, if you count my getting Dad fired twice.  The first time was an accident, but the second time was more Dad's fault.  He should have run a background check on me.  I hit a real winning streak in my forties, with seven pros abdicating their crown during a ten year period.

The one pro I wanted to stay, however, was Larry Nelson and I think he left because of me.  (Actually, Larry was a Pro Golfer, not a golf pro.)  I had great respect for Larry, and not just because of his three Major titles or going 4-0 against Seve Ballesteros in Ryder Cup play.  There was also the fact that Larry had served in the infantry in Viet Nam.  When he took over a golf course that we had been trying to resurrect, we enthusiastically followed his lead.

Larry instantly became a major influence on my philosophy of golf architecture and maintenance.  His strategy was not at all what we expected of a tour pro.  Right from the start, Larry instructed us to make the course less penal.  It was a long, narrow hallway of a course with a few too many trees.  (About 20,000 too many.)  He also told us to abandon the platinum bleached blond bunker sand and replace it with a more natural brunette sand.

Next, Larry ordered the downsizing of a couple of unnecessarily giant greenside bunkers and to reconstruct two high-flashed bunkers that had been carefully designed to wash out in a heavy fog and top-dress the fairway.  One penal monster became a grass bunker and a particularly obnoxious twit of a septic sand pit turned into what we would later term "an inverted bunker" or "mound".

We dropped 7,000 trees, widened fairways, reduced rough and generally dried out the course...

We dropped 7,000 trees, widened fairways, reduced rough and generally dried out the course.  (Wasn't that difficult in the middle of a three year drought and an irrigation system originally installed by Sumerians.)

Play increased substantially, at least until the acting GM guy pushed through his brilliant plan to double the green fees, en route to going "private" in an area not shown to be successful in that business model.  *Note:  Acting GM guy was the patient who inspired the original medical diagnosis, "Augusta Syndrome".

Larry Nelson probably thought he would relax from the stress and tension of playing tour golf and run a quiet, calm little golf course.  He did not realize he would encounter oddballs like me, always cranking up the stress with comments like "You know, Boss, we don't have a spray rig . . . or a fairway mower.  Probably gonna need that stuff."

Things always went sideways whenever Larry went off to play a tournament.  Acting GM guy would immediately countermand Larry's orders.  "Put that sand trap back like it was or--your little dog gets it!"  Operating under those conditions was kind of like getting a substitute teacher with no experience in the subject . . . or teaching.

In addition to Larry and that guy, our chain of command was fortified with a Japanese golf management company.  Although it was my first encounter with a golf corporation, it wasn't a problem, as my last employer had been pretty corporate, too.  Not long after the corporate folks arrived, I was given the assignment of training a young fellow from Tokyo in the mystical art of golf maintenance.  His name was Hiro and we all liked him right away, especially when he confessed his dream was to wear a cowboy hat, cowboy boots and drive an American pickup truck.

Hiro was doing great until the day a triplex sprung a hydraulic leak and heat-striped a bent green.  Panic-stricken, Hiro locked himself in the tool room and refused to come out, shouting things like, "I am shamed! Golf course work is too hard!  And Mike will kill me!"

Well, Hiro was right.  Golf course work was pretty hard, especially that one . . . and my brother Mike, fresh back from four years in the Ranger Battalion, might have given folks the impression that damaging a green could be uncomfortable.

Hiro escaped and went straight to Larry.  The next time we saw Hiro, he was on TV, toting Larry's bag.  I was furious.  Not because Hiro ran off, but because I should have thought of the caddie angle first.

Without Larry Nelson, there would be no Rockbottum Country Club, no Skeletal Golf Theory . . .

Sadly, we were not prepared when Larry won the '87 PGA.  I had never seen him practice, and with his reputation as a range fiend, I just assumed he was easing into retirement.  Later on, I realized Larry must have been secretly practicing, in order to get away from running a golf course with a curse on it, the constant bickering between us and the substitute teacher and . . . putting up with me.

The moral of this story?  There isn't one, but I can tell you this:  Without Larry Nelson, there would be no Rockbottum Country Club, no Skeletal Golf Theory, no cast of goofball characters dwelling deep within the TurfNet Zone . . . and instead of being an international playboy film producer, Ludell would still be just a Night Waterman, howling at the moon.