Here at The Rock, we fear the top scientist in golf is about to make a mistake.  Our evidence for this prediction:  He made this mistake last year.

But we forgave him and we ask that you do the same this year.  Please overlook whatever foa paws pop out of his mouth, in the event he tries to debunk :  The Augusta Syndrome."

If he says, "There's no such thing" or "Quit whining and deal with it" or "UFOs Aren't Real", just cut him some slack.  After all, if one has never been a Golf Course Superintendent within range of Bobby and Alister's Grand Nursery, then it is possible the perpetrator has never actually experienced AS.

I think I can pinpoint when AS first surfaced.  The type of seed used for overseed down yonder seemed to change sometime around 1975 and the amount used increased substantially shortly thereafter.  (This was several years before the transition to bent greens.)  

It was in that period that I first heard, "I just got back from Augusta, why can't we do that here?"  Naturally, we laughed, thinking it was humor.  Dad took off and went over to see what he could do to mimic the conditions, (staying within our $185k budget) and came back in a state of depression.

"They're overseeding at a very heavy rate," Dad lamented.  "If I were to do that, we would have very weak bermuda in the fairways the following summer."  

By '92, it was as regular as clockwork.  The week after the Great Pilgrimage of Golf, the "Why can't we do that?" increased in both volume and intensity.  I tried explaining the difference in prepping a TV event of religious magnitude versus maintaining a course year round.  I told our customers of the fairly significant difference in budgets, the number of employees, the quality of employees, the ability to shut down not just on Monday, but for months.  It made no difference.

I began to make up stuff, like our government does.  "The azaleas are fake.  The whole town is in on the conspiracy, former employees that reveal AS secrets are tortured and then disappeared, like in Russia.  The greens have special subsystems--No wait, that one is real--and the club is only open for a few weeks before dissolving into the Twilight Zone."

(That last one seemed plausible, as Augusta members have a secret golf course with incredible year round conditioning to play in Atlanta, so they don't care if the Shrine is closed.)

Eventually, my only defense was to take a small piece of the driving range tee--about the size of a dining room table--and overseed it at roughly 50 times normal rate.  I roped it off, declared it a special area for the teaching pro, fed it iron and vitamins and whatever else the sales guys told me Ken Mangum and Mark Esoda and William Shirley were using and . . . waited.

The week after the Great Pilgrimage, I waited for the Big Question, then gathered the most influential members, the pro and anybody who would listen and took them to the driving range tee.  At that point, I grandly unveiled my special project, told them, "See, I can do it too!" and then instructed them to check back in July.

That's when my special microcosm overseed project was totally dead, devoid of bermuda and fairly hideous. I told them Augusta was in the same shape at that moment and there was no way they could disprove my statement, as it was a felony to look upon Augusta without her makeup in those days.  (This was before drones.)

So there you have it, a history of AS, and if our favorite scientist makes another incorrect statement concerning that place, let's just be forgiving, okay?

NOTE:  No video from Rockbottum CC this week, as we are currently retooling for a significant upgrade in equipment, script writers and on camera personnel.  Ludell has been permanently retired and Buddy was seriously injured goat rustling.