One simple phrase served Mark Wilson well throughout his career as a golf course superintendent.
"Life is short, sod it," said Wilson, who spent 22 years at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, Kentucky, where he was the host superintendent of two PGA Championships and a Ryder Cup.
A few months ago, I ran into Wilson at a memorial service for his friend, the late Jerry Coldiron. Shortly thereafter, we caught up to take a look back over his long career as a golf course superintendent.
"I tried to make nature my friend, not my enemy," he said. "One of my strengths was I was always able to remember that the turf could always be fixed; problems were never permanent. Warm-season grass in spring can be downright ugly, but it will get better. On the other hand, cool-season grass in August can look pretty bad, but I knew September was close and it would get better in a hurry."
Turf conditions on golf courses might not always be on an upward plane, but Wilson's career path pretty much was. Since the 1970s, when he worked on the crew at Jackie Gleason's Inverrary Country Club in Lauderhill, Florida, through a work history that spanned parts of five decades at three clubs in Louisville until he retired a decade ago, Wilson's career was the stuff of legend. He worked for Gleason when Inverrary still was the site of what today is the PGA Tour's Honda Classic, and was hired by the Gahm family in 1988 at Jack Nicklaus-designed Valhalla. Hired shortly after grow-in at Valhalla, Wilson had been the superintendent at Audubon Country Club, a 1908 Thomas Bendelow design 20 miles away.
"Most of my career, in the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s and 2000s, it seemed like I had the wind at my back, and I was going downhill," Wilson said. "The industry was strong, and people were demanding new golf courses, and we were always trying to grow better grass.
"We had big intentions at Valhalla, but a lot of it was luck. The course was built at the right time during the golf boom and it was kind of early in Nicklaus' designing career."
His career at Valhalla included managing the turf for the 1996 and 2000 PGA Championships and the 2008 Ryder Cup Matches.
Jumping into high-level tournament golf wasn't necessarily a goal or a choice. It just sort of happened, Wilson said.
"As far as tournament golf, I just hopped on the bandwagon," he said. "I was at Audubon when the Gahm family built Valhalla. After the grow-in, they asked me to apply. I went from the oldest club in town to the newest.
"I grew up in northeastern Ohio, so my big treat was seeing Firestone. Then I got to play Arnold Palmer's Laurel Valley in Pennsylvania, so I came to appreciate great golf courses at an early age."
A native of Beloit, Ohio in the Cleveland area, Wilson went to turf school 350 miles away at Eastern Kentucky University, where he also was a walk-on on the school's golf team.
A 1976 EKU graduate, he remembers many of his teammates believing they had a future in professional golf. Wilson, who mowed greens before high school and college tournaments, had no such delusions.
The norm then was a quarter-inch on greens. When I left Valhalla, it was a tenth (of an inch), or lower. ... We had fans on all 18 greens. We can't grow grass now without fans? It seems like we complicated everything.
"Nobody I played with went on to play professional. It was a good thing I went on to a career in turf management," he said. "In fact, the other players on the team called me turfgrass boy. I remember mowing greens before a tournament, running to the car and getting my clubs and then playing in the tournament. I think it was the best tournament I ever had."
Wilson started working on golf courses during high school and interned at Louisville Country Club while attending EKU. He counts turf legends like former LCC superintendent Louis Miller among his mentors.
"He was the Daniel Boone of superintendents in Kentucky," Wilson said. "He had a degree from Penn State and was, as far as I know, the first formally educated superintendent in Kentucky."
A lot has changed in turf management between those days of working for the Daniel Boone of Kentucky superintendents and when Wilson retired from Valhalla in 2010.
"The norm then was a quarter-inch on greens. When I left Valhalla, it was a tenth (of an inch), or lower," he said.
"We had fans on all 18 greens. We can't grow grass now without fans? It seems like we complicated everything.
"I like to think I'm pretty organized, but it was frustrating. We had three or four acres of greens, but we had to maintain 430 acres. I was frustrated how much time and money was spent on greens compared to the whole operation. I wanted to manage the whole property, but the greens took away from that."
