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Resurfaced Taylors Creek greens about ready
TaylorsCreek1
Darrell Eshelman, PGA professional and general manager at Taylors Creek Golf Course on Fort Stewart, inspects progress of Tifdwarf Bermuda growth on the slope of the No. 17 green. Previously, downhill putts that missed the hole could roll completely off the putting surface. Temporary green is in background. - photo by Photo provided.

The pars, birdies and eagles soon will be dropping into the cups on resurfaced greens at Taylors Creek Golf Course on Fort Stewart.
And golfers will find the slope on No. 17 reshaped to be a lot more friendly and fair.  
A tournament celebrating start of play on the new greens is scheduled for Sept. 15.
“The re-sprigging on July 6 with Tifdwarf Bermuda grass on 12 of our greens took real well and those greens are about 95 percent grown-in right now,” said Darrell Eshelman, PGA professional and general manager at Taylors Creek. “But the remainder of the greens didn’t take so well, so we decided that we had to re-sprig them. We did the re-sprigging on July 26, and they are coming along well, although they are about three weeks behind the others in growth.”
      Taylors Creek golfers, who have been playing on temporary greens since June, are likely to find the new putting surfaces to be well worth the wait, Eshelman said.
“These greens will be so much better than what we have been playing on for many years that it will be a night-and-day difference,” he said. “The balls will putt truer and roll smoother. When we first start playing on them, the green speed won’t be tremendous. It will increase as the greens age.”
Eshelman said the new greens will make Taylors Creek “much more enjoyable to play. You will get a much truer roll, so you will make more putts now than you could in the past because of the ball bouncing off line on the rough greens.”
The No. 17 green’s back-to-front slope of about 21 degrees has been reduced to a 5- or 6-degree slope.
Eshelman said the green “still has some back-to-front slope to it, but not nearly as severe as it was before. It was so severe during the summer that when the greens were rolling really fast, if you had a ball above the cup — putting down the slope — and you missed the hole, the ball would roll clear off the green.
“It was not fair,” Eshelman said.  
Tifdwarf Bermuda is a denser strain of grass than the 328 Bermuda it replaced on the greens. It grows straight up, resulting in a much smoother putting surface. Maintenance requirements are similar to the grass it replaced, Eshelman said.

 Mathews is a family and MWR marketing publicity specialist on Fort Stewart.
      


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