Debunked – Artificial turf and the future of the game

When we think about golf courses, we think of acres of rolling green hills, scrutinizingly manicured mow lines, crisp white sand bunkers, looming trees and incredible club houses. When we think of golf courses we think of Augusta National, but the reality is there is only one Augusta National, and that private golf courses with million dollar maintenance budgets only make up a fraction of all the golf that’s played, all over the world. The reality is, most golf courses look like your local muni, bunkers with no sand, greens battered with spike and ball marks, tee boxes with barely any grass, and a maintenance staff that year after year fights a losing battle with enough budget, not enough staff, and not enough resources. Everyone wants to play on a golf course that looks like Augusta National, but only a few of us ever will, without winning the lottery that is.

The wide swaths of everyday golfing public has therefore become okay, even accepted these conditions as par for the course. A mutual agreeance, an unsaid understood, between the cost to play and the conditions of the course. It is what it is. Golf is golf. So why does the average golfer always have to settle? Simply because they always had to.

But not anymore.

Artificial synthetic turf geared specifically for golf has come leaps and bounds into the 21st Century. No longer is it the football stadium wispy plastic grass that leaves residue on the bottom of clubs. It’s no longer the same stuff you could break your wrists on if you hit it a little too heavy. It’s no longer the same stuff used as driving range targets that when you hit a ball into it you get a rocket ricochet off the concrete base. It’s no longer the cheap, frayed, fringed and bumpy felt you see at your local mini putts. Artificial turf has come into the new age, and it’s the future of our game.

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There are the givens about artificial, its environmentally friendly, it can be manufactured out of recycled material, it doesn’t require any watering, pesticides or fertilizers that leak into our watersheds, and the quality of the play experience on synthetic turf has come a long way.

So, with all that modern day synthetic turf has to offer as its advantages, why don’t we see more of it in our common golfing space beyond the backyard or driving range putting green? Well, it’s about perception. A study by Golf Digest surveying twenty renowned golf course architects found that only two believed that a full length artificial golf course would be built in the next ten years. The other eighteen sited issues about heat radiation/regulation, caution over the cost of synthetics and their comparative lifespan against grass, and most commonly, playability.

Those four issues with artificial over grass for a golf course are by no means wrong, but they are a little dated.

Technology in the composition of synthetic has come a long way since the days of AstroTurf, and no longer do the blades melt or mat together when exposed to extreme heat, no longer does standing on an artificial turf field in the summertime leave you feeling like it’s ten degrees hotter than it is. Developments in turf blade composition has been very successful, so the turf is now engineered to absorb and disperse heat, not radiate it.

Secondly, in line with popular perception artificial turf is expensive, but USGA research finds it’s no more expensive to build and install than its real grass equivalent. On one hand you have a very similar start-up cost, but an artificial golf installation requires less than 10% of the maintenance requirements of its grass counterpart, not to mention the savings on equipment, aerators, mowers, rollers, multi-million dollar irrigation systems, knowledgeable turfgrass professionals to take care of it, all artificial turf needs is a leaf blower.

In addition to that startup cost being similar, so is the lifespan of artificial versus grass. The ASGCA estimates the average lifespan of a healthy grass green is between fifteen and thirty years. Research done by Dave Pelz, lifelong proponent of artificial turf, finds that a quality turf product can look the same as the day it was installed twenty-plus years later. Pelz notes from research done in his very own backyard that there is no discoloration from the sun, no rainwater damage, nothing other than a “perfect playing surface, day after day, year after year.”

The most common hesitancy or resistance to synthetic turf is that it just doesn’t feel or play like the real thing. Traditionally, artificial installations have either been okay to putt on, or okay to hit shots into, but never both. So naturally, people steered away from it in the past for anything other than driving range targets or backyard putting greens, and that perception has stuck in the common understanding of what artificial is. Although this might’ve been true at one point, it’s not anymore.

Dave Pelz and his company, Pelz Player Greens, have developed over two decades of testing a system they’re calling “ShotStopper” that’s a composition layer of rubber, sand and foam that goes underneath the turf. Dave say’s that “Without the ShotStopper base layer, artificial turf wouldn’t be nearly be good enough for the Phil Mickelsons and Patrick Reeds I teach, that’s was the impetus for creating it, to create a zero maintenance short game facility that I can have my guys hit every shot under forty yards in the world on, and the ball reacts exactly like it would in the real world and on real grass.”

ShotStopper can be adjusted by their designers and installers to create greens that are firmer and faster, or softer and more receptive based on playing conditions, and does not affect the quality of turf that is found on the surface. Putt, chip, pitch, full swing, you won’t be able to tell the difference in playability between modern synthetic turf and traditional grass, and you’ll get the same perfect conditions, every single day. Technology is beautiful isn’t it?

ShotStopper Technology in action.

So, what now can be said about artificial, other than there is just a lack of understanding about what the product is, and how it can be applied to our growing game. Cost savings that can be both passed down to the player and passed onto the owner, solidifying golf as a game that can be understood by the wider public as undisputedly environmentally friendly, and giving the golfer, no matter where, no matter when, realistic and Augusta level playing conditions.

A fully synthetic golf course is not just a possibility, but a certainty, and it will certainly have a big role to play in the future of golf.

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