Day: January 25, 2023

She has her favorite players, like Rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth. But when Dee Robideau goes to a golf tournament, she's not like most golf fans. Robideau usually gets to the course when the gates open so she can walk the course in relative solitude. Practice rounds are the best since the golf course superintendent isn't looking at the shots the players hit - she's checking out the bunkers and the tightly-mown greens. And the equipment. Robideau, who oversees the nine-hole golf course at the Hiawatha Sportsman's Club on the upper peninsula of Michigan, loves, loves, loves the equipment. "I think it was last year when I was at the Ryder Cup, I'm like, I want to get in their maintenance barn," she says with a chuckle. "I want to see the equipment now. What do I need? What can I put in my budget and on my wish list?" Robideau got her wish - and more this week — at the Farmers Insurance Open. She and Agustin Galvan are going behind the scenes this week at Torrey Pines as agronomy volunteers. The two were selected by the Diversity, Education and Inclusion Advisory Board of the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America to work at the event. The initiative also supports Farmers' commitment to continuing education, as well as to DEI. For Galvan, it was a short trip. He's the landscape manager at The Santaluz Club, which is about 20 miles away from Torrey Pines, the scenic municipal layout on the Pacific coast. But what happens at Torrey this week is on a much bigger scale than the Rees Jones layout he helps maintain. "We have golf tournaments here at work, but they’re just different," Galvan says. "This is professional. This is, everyone’s watching, everyone’s looking at the grass on TV. It needs to be perfect. I just wanted to get an experience for what that entails." The two have been on the property since a welcome dinner on Saturday night. They're working daily shifts from 5:15-8:30 a.m. and 2:15-7 p.m. doing a variety of assignments like bunkers, data collection, hand-watering and course cleanup. They can use their free time to rest, network with peers or check out the competition between the PGA TOUR's best. "They're all great to watch," says Galvan, who has a 15 handicap. "They’re like robots. Their swings are just, I mean, it’s all that practice. They do everything. It’s just, wow." Galvan came to the United States from Mexico when he was 4. He had his own landscape company until rising insurance costs compelled him to look for a job with benefits. He now works full-time at Santaluz and recently completed his Turf Grass certificate at Penn State. "It’s great," says Galvan, who gets up at 3 a.m. each day and drives 90 minutes to Santaluz from his home in Hemet, California. "I like to play golf and I do enjoy the whole aspect of the scheduling of, like, the fertilizer program, the mowing program. There’s always something to do." As the landscape manager, Galvan is responsible for the environs around the course outside the rough, fairways and greens. Among his responsibilities are tree-trimming, planting seasonal vegetation and removing plants that have seen better days. "I guess you could call it golf course maintenance but it's a separate division," says Galvan, whose crew also takes care of requests from homeowners who live on the golf course. Next, the 39-year-old plans to work on his Associates of Science degree. He hopes to move to the course maintenance side of the operation at Santaluz, an upscale private community that also includes a vineyard that makes Merlot and Sangiovese. Unlike Galvan, Robideau only works part of the year. The winter has been mild in the UP of Michigan - she saw patches of green when she walked the golf course over New Year's weekend. But she was still shoveling snow when she was interviewed last week. Robideau's family has been a member at Hiawatha, which encompasses five miles of shoreline along Lake Michigan, for three generations. Both sets of her grandparents had homes on the property. She remembers swimming with her cousins at one home and fishing and trail-riding at the other. "I always said I had the best of both worlds," Robideau says. "It’s 35,000 acres, so there’s a lot of big playground." After getting a degree in horticulture from Michigan State, Robideau worked in landscape design for 10 years and moved briefly to Florida. She went back to school after her divorce and got a degree in business, thinking she might start her own company, but the economic climate wasn't right. She continued to dabble in landscape design. She also started working in the pro shop at Hiawatha, and it didn't take long for her to know her heart wasn't in being inside, making tee times and collecting greens fees. "I’ve always worked outside. I’ve always done landscaping, garden centers, worked with my hands, and it would just drive me crazy being inside the pro shop wondering, how can I get out there," Robideau says. Luckily, the course superintendent, Gary Thrombley, needed someone to help out after one of his crew was having knee problems. He asked Robideau, who used to beg him to let her clean up flower beds that had been neglected, to fill in one summer as a mower, and suddenly, she found her niche. "I jumped on it and he was the one that saw my love for working outside and mentored me towards this path, really," she says. When Thrombley retired, the members at Hiawatha, which features trout ponds, hiking trails and rental cabins, didn't need to look far for a replacement. Robideau is in her second year on the job and has helped bring innovative projects like bee pollinators and butterfly preserves to the property. So, what's her favorite part of the job? It's not hard to guess. "I think when I come in first thing in the morning," Robideau says. "I’m usually the first one there. Just the quiet, getting on my golf cart, kind of tooling around in the morning ... just getting a feel for what the course needs that day."

LA JOLLA, Calif. - It's rare to make the cut in two countries in the same week. Veteran Scott Brown has that chance. Brown teed off Wednesday morning at the Farmers Insurance Open outside San Diego, playing in the first group off No. 1 tee at Torrey Pines' North Course. On the surface, it might have appeared a standard starting time. Further inspection reveals that was not the case. Brown began the week at the Korn Ferry Tour's Bahamas Great Abaco Classic, which featured a Sunday-Wednesday format. He carded rounds of 70-73 to make the cut, positioned to attempt a move up the leaderboard across the final two rounds. Then a twist occurred. John Huh withdrew from the Farmers around 8 p.m. ET Monday; Brown was the next man up. (He holds conditional TOUR status as a past champion, winner of the 2013 Puerto Rico Open.) Brown withdrew from Abaco, arranging travel for a Tuesday trip to San Diego, three time zones westward. He arrived in southern California around 9 p.m. Tuesday, with a quick turnaround for a 9 a.m. local tee time Wednesday at the North Course. Brown will compete at the Farmers without having seen the course this week, but the silver lining comes with familiarity - he has made eight prior Farmers appearances, highlighted by a T9 in 2019. And he certainly won't suffer from any sort of competitive rust.

Jason Day displayed a flashback of greatness on the greens last week at The American Express. He finished second in Strokes Gained: Putting en route to a T18 finish, his fifth top-25 in his last six starts. It was a successful debut for Day's custom Scotty Cameron F-5.5 Tour Black putter, which earned a place in his bag after a long road of experimentation. Day has experienced a downturn on the greens in the last few years when compared to his peak putting years of the mid-2010s, when he reached No. 1 in the world and won both the PGA Championship and THE PLAYERS. Day finished sixth on the PGA TOUR in Strokes Gained: Putting in 2015 and first the following year. Fast forward to 2021 and Day finished 95th in the category. He was 87th last season. Day has been experimenting with putters from various brands, searching for the right look, feel and performance. He used either a TaylorMade Spider Tour mallet or an Odyssey Toulon Daytona for the majority of last year, but he switched into a Scotty Cameron putter for the first time at the Shriners Children's Open in October. Day said he worked closely with Scotty Cameron tour rep Drew Page to find a mallet shape that better suited his preferences. Day told GolfWRX.com at the Shriners that although his usual TaylorMade Spider Tour and Odyssey Toulon Daytona putters both sat square to the target, he perceived that the putters actually aimed to the left, thus causing an alignment issue. The new Scotty Cameron mallet he switched to, though, had a more rounded shape, and Day was able to realign his vision back on target. Day used that custom Scotty Cameron mallet up until The American Express, where he then switched to a nearly identical Scotty Cameron F-5.5 prototype, with the only key difference being a new Tour Black finish. "Typically a square look on a putter makes it look more left," Day told GolfWRX. "Then, a rounded putter like the (Scotty Cameron) mallet looks more right. I don't know if that's something, but to me that's what it looks like." Day also found that his new Scotty Cameron had additional toe hang, which helped him establish a more free-flowing stroke and release through impact. "It promotes a more open feel on the way back, and closed on the way through," Day explained. "Right now, the weight feels pretty good. The face ... I would say the TaylorMade putter is softer. The Daytona is right between the TaylorMade and the Scotty, and I would say the Scotty is just slightly firmer, but it's still a solid feeling putter. I would say that I had 1.5-1.75 degrees (of loft) on both the TaylorMade and the Daytona, and my hands had got a little bit too far back. I think (the Scotty Cameron) has, I want to say just over 2 degrees, so I can actually sit the club a bit more forward, or neutral. I would say it's a little bit more forward, which is nice. Overall, the club swings nice, it feels good, it seems like the initial roll or bounce off the putter, it's rolling pretty quickly. "If you look at a slow-mo camera, you want a little bit of a skid, and then roll pretty quickly straight off the face, but it just depends what your flavor is. For me, personally, the Spider and the Daytona just were looking too far left to me. I don't know if it was just not enough degrees of loft, but either way it was looking left. I despise hitting it left, and missing it left. I'd much rather miss all my putts right because it's just easier for me to correct. This one is coming off straight." According to Page, Day liked the look of some other Tour Black putter models that he saw from Scotty Cameron, so he requested a new Tour Black version of the rounded-mallet putter that he previously switched to at the Shriners Open. Finally, after months and years of testing and experimenting, it all came back together on the greens at The American Express. And, when GolfWRX caught up with Day this week at Torrey Pines, he still had the new Scotty Cameron F-5.5 Tour Black putter in his bag. Will the new midnight colorway continue to help Day see the light? We'll find out this week at the Farmers Insurance Open, as he tries to win his third Farmers Insurance Open and his first win in five years.