The Golf Course Industry crew grilled burgers and more for the team at Durand Eastman Park in Rochester. Want a 2023 cookout? Submit a recipe for our next Turfheads Guide to Grilling.
Don Bloom eats grilled food in the middle of ultramarathons.
“Cheeseburgers are the best at about mile 50,” he says.
We’ll take Bloom’s word on this one. We’ll also take grilling and life balance guidance from the western New York turf manager.
Bloom is the supervisor of park and golf course at Durand Eastman Park in Rochester, New York. His team maintains 10 miles of marked trails, an arboretum, picnic shelters and an 18-hole golf course where Donald Ross and later Robert Trent Jones Sr. worked.
Away from the park and course, Bloom trots through the woods — and he’s running a 100-kilometer race later this summer. Bloom also enjoys cooking and grilling for family, friends and co-workers. His passion for food brought Golf Course Industry and AQUA-AID Solutions to Durand Eastman on May 18 for a #TurfheadsGrilling cookout.
National sales manager Russ Warner served as the grill master, with a veggie assist from managing editor Matt LaWell. Entrées included pulled pork, hot dogs and, yes, cheeseburgers. Bloom submitted a wings recipe (he lives in western New York, after all) for the inaugural Turfheads Guide to Grilling published in our December 2021 issue and Durand Eastman was selected as the site for a #TurfheadsGrilling cookout.
The #TurfheadsGrilling campaign returns in 2022. All are encouraged to submit a recipe for the published guide. Everybody who submits a recipe receives #TurfheadsGrilling swag. Industry professionals whose recipes make it to print receive a spices and sauces kit and a chance to have us visit and feed your team in 2023.
Heck, you might even get to sign an autograph. Bloom’s brother, Brian Bloom, is a trained chef, yet the trained agronomist became the family’s first published cook. “When the grilling guide came out, I autographed it and gave it to him,” Bloom says. “He was pissed.”
“Growing up, we cooked,” Bloom adds. “We always had a lot of food in the house and friends would always come over before football or soccer games. I then cooked in college for roommates. I now cook almost every night at home. My brother went to culinary school and it’s always a competition to see who can cook better.”
Camaraderie isn’t the only side benefit of cooking. Bloom started trail running with his father, Doug Bloom, in 2010. The pursuit has blossomed into Bloom running thousands of miles and burning millions of calories.
“I wish I would have started it earlier,” he says. “I try to live a healthy lifestyle. I still eat like crap. But if I go for a run, I don’t feel so bad about it. Make time for yourself. It’s been a challenge to figure out how to work to live instead of live to work. Everything from family to your health improves if you figure out how to work to live and do something else away from the golf course. You’ll figure out you’ll enjoy the golf course a little bit more.”
Bloom has one more item to determine over the next few months: the recipe he wants to submit for the 2022 Turfheads Guide to Grilling.
“I really want to figure out poor man’s burnt ends,” he says. “I have tried it a couple of times. It’s not great … yet.”
Whenever you tweet out your grilling handiwork, be sure to include the #TurfheadsGrilling hashtag and mention @GCImagazine or @Solutions4Turf and your food shots will almost definitely be shared on our Twitter page and certainly included for consideration for our second annual year-end grilling guide and a 2023 team cookout. We’ll also ship out tasty spice and sauce boxes to select grillers whose recipes and images are selected for the guide. You can formally submit recipes and images for consideration by CLICKING HERE or via email to editor-in-chief Guy Cipriano at gcipriano@gie.net. The program is open to ANYBODY and EVERYBODY in the industry.
Bradley S. Klein visits The Country Club to learn more about Dave Johnson’s unlikely path to becoming a U.S. Open host superintendent.
Dave Johnson led a four-person maintenance team eight years ago at a 9-hole course in a sleepy central Massachusetts former mill town. Now, he’s in charge of a legendary 27-hole club in a tony Boston suburb with a full-time crew of 36 preparing to host the U.S. Open
Careers take many different paths. Johnson’s has been on an upward trajectory for 25 years. When the USGA sets up its tents — actually, a temporary stadium — June 16-19 in Brookline, Massachusetts, for the 122nd U.S. Open, Johnson will be responsible for his first big-time championship.
No worries there on the part of the country’s ruling body of golf. “He’s extremely organized, outwardly calm,” USGA director of championship agronomy Darin Bevard says. In the three years they have been working together in the run-up to this year’s national championship, Bevard has come to appreciate Johnson for his open-mindedness, willingness to ask questions and responsiveness to requests — even when it appears that there’s need for adjustment in mowing lines, trimming trees, or on-course traffic patterns. “He’s always asking a lot of questions. He’s always interested in learning,” Bevard says.
The fact that Johnson has no direct experience with prepping for his own major, let alone a U.S. Open, has never been an issue. For one thing, Johnson has been a regular visitor to USGA championship setups since he arrived at The Country Club in 2018 and attended that year’s U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills.
Bevard has been working with superintendents at majors for 15 years and has a perceptive take on those who exude outer confidence versus those who run deeper in their thinking. “The guys who say they get it don’t,” Bevard says. “The guys who ask a lot of question get it.”
Johnson, 47, has been asking questions of recognized industry experts for years now.
A native of Worcester, Massachusetts, Johnson earned a degree in plant and soil science in 1997 from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He was assistant superintendent at Wachusett (Massachusetts) Country Club for seven years, then took the head job at 9-hole Whitinsville Golf Club in 2004, where he stayed for a decade. The Donald Ross-designed gem from 1923 is widely regarded among architecture purists as among the best examples of virtually original Ross work.
Johnson started seeing a regular stream of course raters from various magazine panels stop by. In 2009, Whitinsville had the foresight to hire Gil Hanse to map out a master plan of restoration. The experience of accompanying Hanse and his design associate around the course was “an eye-opener,” Johnson says. The restoration work involved minimal intrusion limited to tree work, expanded fairway lines, greens recapture and bunker edging. Along the way, Johnson complemented his agronomic expertise with a master class in architectural subtlety.
“I learned a lot from Gil” Johnson says. “Humility, respect for the land, not to bite off more than I could chew. Learned about the relation of the fill pad to bunkers, about the importance of fairway contours.”
He also learned how to do green expansions. Johnson recalls the first time he undertook an expansion under Hanse’s tutelage. “We were on the first green at Whitinsville,” Johnson says. “We needed more room for a hole location on a very sloped surface. We had a few guys with us with rakes and shovels. Gil started up the sod cutter and tore into that back portion. After a while he turned to me and said, ‘OK, you guys can finish it from here.’”
One manifestation of the work: Whitinsville made it onto Golfweek’s Top-100 Classical List. It has been a stalwart ever since.
Johnson, meanwhile, had his eyes opened to a larger world of possibilities. With a modest club budget to start and the effects of the recession still restricting what was possible at Whitinsville in terms of major bunker work, Johnson started casting about for other job opportunities. Good fortune hit in 2014 with Wianno Club in Osterville, Massachusetts. It helped to have a recommendation from Hanse, who had already been hired by Wianno for restoration work. But the kicker in Johnson getting the job, he says, is the visit the search committee made to Whitinsville the day after he interviewed for the new post.
“We were in the maintenance shop,” Johnson says. “One of the search committee members opened a drawer in my toolbox. He took one look at how everything was perfectly organized, neat and clean. He closed it right away, but I knew I had the job. Turns out I was my own mechanic there at Whitinsville and I’m a particularly anal person when it comes to stuff like that. I knew where every tool was in the shop.”
In his four years at Wianno, Johnson again worked closely with Hanse, this time on an ambitious master plan that involved green expansion, major tree work and a complete overhaul of the bunkers.
Wianno is one of those old line, well-established clubs with considerable ties to The Country Club through shared membership. When the job in Brookline opened, Johnson joined a long list of applicants. But what he might have lacked in experience setting up for majors he more than compensated for with his record of meticulous care and respect for making the golf course better.
Now he’s about to build that resume with a U.S. Open. He’s made the adjustment to managing 36 full-time employees, with a volunteer crew of another 100 about to back him up for the week. The golf course has seen a big improvement these last three years in the growing environment. Working yet again with Hanse on a restoration program, Johnson and the club added 40,000 square feet in surface to its push-up greens. The leading edges of the bunkers have been reshaped to allow for tighter integration with fairway-height mowing cuts rather than being saddled with a heavy collar of surrounding rough. And a short, drop-shot par 3 has been completely restored that will play as the 11th hole.
It's funny in golf, how skills you learn early in your career form the basis of ongoing learning and adaptation. What served as an “eye-opener” 15 years ago are what now allow Johnson to get ready for one of the biggest events in golf.
Bradley S. Klein, Ph.D., is a former PGA Tour caddie, a veteran golf journalist, a noted author (“Discovering Donald Ross” among others), a golf course consultant and the Golf Therapy columnist for Golf Course Industry.
The project aims to restore the Prohibition-era course to its original William P. Bell design.
The two-time Italian Open host course chooses Capillary Bunkers liner and adds Wash Box to protect sand.
The Castelconturbia course in Piedmont, Italy, recently completed the first phase of a bunker upgrade that involved replacing drainage and adding the Capillary Bunkers liner system and associated Capillary Wash Box technology to the course’s greenside bunkers. The second phase of the project, which is expected to follow shortly under Italian contractor Giuseppe Scaffa, will see the fairway bunkers upgraded similarly.
Designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr., the 27-hole Castelconturbia complex opened in 1987. Located close to Lake Maggiore, about an hour from Milan, the club has twice played host to the Italian Open.
“Castelconturbia is the third Italian course to install Capillary Bunkers on the entire course, but the first to choose the Wash Box, which enables pressure washing of bunker sand, and thus helps keep sand quality high for longer,” says Edgardo Ticozzi of UNMACO, the Italian distributor for Capillary Bunkers. “It will help superintendent Alberto Peonia keep his sand white and clean.”
“For many years, Castelconturbia has been famous for the bunkers built by Jones, but after more than 30 years, they needed to be rebuilt, especially those at the greensides,” GM Giovanni Malcotti said. “Given the need to rebuild, and the cost of doing so, it was sensible for us to put in the best lining system we could find, to assure us that water would not remain in the bunkers after a storm and reduce maintenance demands. We tried out a number of different lining methods, but none were as effective as Capillary Bunkers. When our contractor explained the benefits of the Wash Box to us, it was an easy decision to add it, one we took in an instant.”
Four Bridges Country Club represents the company’s ninth acquisition in less than a year.
Arcis Golf has added Four Bridges Country Club in Liberty Township, Ohio, to its growing portfolio. This is the ninth club acquisition completed by Arcis in less than a year.
The Four Bridges community has 3,200 residents within Liberty Township, located in Ohio’s Butler County, and is in the center of the fast-growing I-75 corridor north of Cincinnati.
The purchase of this private club from HPA Development Group Inc. and its partners, Doug Herald and Graham Parlin, closed on June 6. Arcis assumed ownership and operation on June 7.
Four Bridges becomes Arcis Golf's 65th property under management and the fifth in Ohio, where the company already owns The Club at Tartan Fields in Columbus and three others in the Cleveland area.
“Four Bridges is an exceptional private club, and we are thrilled to be expanding our footprint in the Ohio market and, specifically, in the Cincinnati area,” Arcis Golf founder and CEO Blake Walker said. “This addition to our portfolio of clubs will build upon our strategy of owning and operating outstanding properties within each of our respective hub markets.”
The club is known for its rich variety of sports and family-centric activities. Designed by Bob Cupp and opened in 2000, the par-72, 18-hole golf course plays to 7,200 yards from the championship tees.
"We intend to bring our operational expertise and unique approach to delivering extraordinary experiences across the entire club,” Arcis Golf regional vice president of operations Jeff Raffelson said. “Our vision is to build upon Four Bridges’ great facilities by expanding the breadth and scope of amenities, programming and services.”