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For years the Florida golf course superintendent begrudgingly attempted to maintain
bentgrass greens. Northern golfers came here in the winter, when the northern
bentgrass was looking its finest, and the Florida bermudagrass was looking its shabbiest
after months of cloudy weather. There was tremendous pressure to use bentgrass.
The expectation was that bentgrass would putt faster.
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For years, bentgrass was used in winter overseeding, until it was eventually replaced
by perennial ryegrass and later roughstalk bluegrass, or Poa trivialis.
A few Florida courses actually tried to maintain bentgrass greens year-round, at
the expense of at least $50,000 per year in fungicides. But bentgrass was prone to
spectacular performance failures, including a major televised tournament.
The other side of the dilemma is that
bentgrass can be hard to get rid of, as shown here. This was a 6-year-old planting
of Penneagle bentgrass, on a Tifdwarf bermudagrass green. The bentgrass refuses to
go away on the patches of this one green. So, since we had a side-by-side comparison
of the two grasses under the same mowing height, we asked, "Which is fastest?"
A shortened Stimpmeter was used to
measure ball roll distance, in 10 pairs of up-slope and down-slope measurements for each
grass. When the distances were transformed to an estimate of a USGA (United State
Golf Association) standard 76-cm long Stimpmeter, the bermudagrass was 5 inches
"faster" (longer ball roll) than the bentgrass. The values were 9 feet 0.4
inches for bermudagrass, compared with 8 feet 7.0 inches for bentgrass. The
statistical probability of Type I error was less than 1%.
The results confirm what most
superintendents have said, which is the only reason bentgrass is "faster" is
because it tolerates closer mowing. |
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