Aside from Carl Spackler, the slack-jawed, gopher-obsessed stoner of Caddyshack fame, the world of golf-course maintenance has not supplied us much in the way of archetypes. Ask the average golfer to describe a superintendent, and they’ll likely come up shy on specifics. A guy on a mower with a Border collie? That’s one image, but it’s incomplete, and not just because not all supers are men.
“We’re legitimate scientists,” Matt Guilfoil says.
Guilfoil is the superintendent at Desert Canyon Golf Club, in Fountain Hills, Ariz., and the co-host of From the Jingweeds, a podcast devoted to the turf-care trade. Like a lot of greenskeepers, he has gotten an earful from golfers through the years, mostly in the way of comments about course conditions but also in the form questions that often double as complaints, as in: How much longer on the frost delay? Or, why’d you have to punch the greens today?
What Guilfoil hasn’t heard is much evidence that golfers have a firm handle on his profession.
“Your superintendent isn’t just the guy riding around the golf course with a dog that just seems to be getting in everybody’s way,” he says. “There’s a lot more to it.” Okay. But what? How about some details?
Earlier this year, at an annual convention staged by the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America we asked Guilfoil and a group of his peers this question: What is it about your job that golfers just don’t get?
As you’ll see from this video, their answers were as varied as the work they do.
