LA QUINTA, California — When the No. 1 men’s golfer in the world says your greens are among the best, it’s a compliment to be taken seriously.
“They may be some of the best surfaces I’ve ever seen,” Scottie Scheffler said last January of the greens at La Quinta Country Club, one of the three courses played in The American Express PGA Tour event. “They’re really, really good. That’s consistent. It’s been like that — I think this is my fourth time here at this event — and they have been like that every time I’ve been over there. It’s pretty amazing what that superintendent and the club can do with those greens.”
What Scheffler and the other golfers in The American Express might not have known last January was that the greens on the back nine of La Quinta Country Club had been stripped down and had new grass planted in the summer of 2022. That same process is taking place at the club this summer on the front nine, with superintendent Tim Putnam certain of the same results.
“If you look at the data, they were virtually identical, for the speed of the greens, the firmness of the greens, all that,” Putnam said of the back-nine greens from 2022 to 2023. “They were virtually identical.”
Putnam, approaching his 21st anniversary at La Quinta Country Club, said swapping out the tifdwarf Bermuda grass on the greens for basically the same kind of tifdwarf is needed to help the course and keep the greens receiving rave reviews from tour players.
“(Hybrid Bermuda grass) starts to mutate and revert back into its parent types, which were 328 (variety),” Putnam said. “And then you get a lot of contamination that comes in through various processes.”
The ninth green is seen dug out for renovations with the clubhouse in the background at La Quinta Country Club in La Quinta, Calif., Friday, June 23, 2023. Photo: Andy Abeyta/Desert Sun/USA Today Network
Part of an overall project at the club
The process this summer includes stripping all of the grass from the putting surfaces, with the help of some herbicides.
What’s the secret to La Quinta Country Club’s pristine greens once compared to Augusta National’s?
“Then we come in and we punch a little bit, stir it up a little bit and we apply a little granular fumigant to it,” Putnam said.
The tifdwarf being replaced now has been on the course since 1999, the year of a major renovation to the La Quinta course. While Putnam says players in The American Express should see no…
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