Quail Hollow Killed Its Greens Twice Before the PGA

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]Something is happening during the 2013 Wells Fargo Championship at Quail Hollow Club that no one watching on television knows. A golf course superintendent is standing on two of his greens watching his crew tear them apart. Not after the tournament, during it. Players are still on the course, cameras are still rolling, and what the superintendent knows that the broadcast won't say >> [music] >> is that these greens were already scheduled for complete demolition before the first tee shot of the week. The grass on those greens is Penn G-2 bent grass. It's a cool season cultivar that prefers air temperatures between 60 and 75° F. It starts to fail when overnight temperatures won't drop below 70.

[00:00:40]Charlotte, North Carolina sits in what the USDA classifies as hardiness zones 7B and 8A. That's the transition zone, the strip of the American Southeast where summers run hot and humid enough to push bentgrass to the edge of what maintenance can handle. North Carolina golf courses have been using bentgrass since the 1980s. Two brutal winters, 1976 and 1985, had killed Bermuda grass greens bare across the region. The industry stayed away from warm season grass for two decades. By the late 2000s, turfgrass farms had developed stronger Bermuda grass cultivars that could survive transition zone winters.

[00:01:17]But most established courses were still running bentgrass. North Carolina had a scorching summer in 2009. 2010 was worse. By 2013, the Quail Hollow superintendent had been managing greens that didn't want to be alive from June through August. This was a course that hosted a PGA Tour event every May. The USGA green section and turfgrass researchers at NC State have documented the biology precisely. Shoot growth in creeping bentgrass ceases when air temperature exceeds 90° F. Root growth ceases when soil temperature at the 2-in depth exceeds 77°. Charlotte's summer highs routinely break both thresholds, and the problem isn't just the temperature ceiling, it's the temperature floor. Bentgrass can survive brutal daytime heat if nights drop into the low to mid-60s. Charlotte in July and August doesn't offer that relief.

[00:02:07]Overnight lows stay above 70. The plant never recovers from the day's stress before the next morning's mow. Mowing bentgrass at 1/10 of an inch in that condition isn't maintaining a putting surface. It's cutting a plant that's already trying to die. NC State agronomy professor Fred Yelverton stood on the Quail Hollow greens during the 2013 Wells Fargo Championship. What he said afterward would define a decade of conversation in the turfgrass industry.

[00:02:34]He'd never seen greens fail like that before, and he'd never seen it anywhere other than Quail Hollow.

[00:02:40]Two of the greens had to be operated on mid-round. Not patched, the surface torn away. Several players withdrew. Club president Johnny Harris later told the Charlotte Observer it was the hardest thing he'd ever been through. PGA Tour chief of operations Andy Pazder called it an extraordinary step. The PGA Tour had stepped in to declare two of the greens unacceptable for tour play while the tournament was still being contested. What the television audience saw was patchy putting surfaces, and tournament officials choosing their words carefully. What the superintendent saw was a biological verdict that had been building for three summers. And what he already knew before the week's first tee shot was that the moment the last group finished on Sunday, all 18 were coming out. And if you've been watching and haven't subscribed yet, now is a good time. The first replacement was Mini Verde, an ultradwarf bermudagrass cultivar considered in 2013 the premium warm-season option for transition zone courses. Ultratwarf bermudas, Mini Verde and Champion and TifEagle among them, are products of natural or induced mutations in older uh bermudagrass varieties. The parent cultivar was Tifdwarf, itself a mutation selected from Tifgreen putting greens in South Carolina in 1965. The ultradwarfs tolerate the low mowing heights tournament conditions require, produce fine leaf blades, and survive the heat that kills cool-season grass.

[00:03:58]Superintendent Chris Diariso oversaw the Mini Verde uh installation after the 2013 Wells Fargo. When the 2014 tournament arrived, he described the course as so much better than the year before it was almost unbelievable. It was better for a while. The USGA Green Section funded research into what turfgrass scientists call off-type contamination in ultradwarf bermudagrass putting greens.

[00:04:24]The findings were not encouraging for courses that had treated these cultivars as permanent solutions. The problem is genetic. Ultradwarf cultivars are propagated vegetatively, not by seed, which means their genetic material isn't locked in place the way a seed-produced cultivar would be. Over several years of play and maintenance, off-type plants begin to emerge. Off-types can come from contamination in the original planting stock or from genetic mutation within the cultivar itself.

[00:04:52]>> [music] >> They grow differently from the surrounding turf. They respond differently to plant growth regulators, and they produce splotchy, inconsistent surfaces that look almost exactly like what Quail Hollow's bentgrass produced in 2013. The USGA was publishing research on this problem as early as 2009. Off-types have been found in ultradwarf planting stock distributed across the country. Mini Verde was not immune. By the time Keith Wood arrived from Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro in 2015, the Mini Verde was already going patchy. His assessment of the 2016 Wells Fargo, with the 2017 PGA Championship 15 months away, was four words: We got by. Quail Hollow had 15 months before the 2017 PGA [music] Championship. Keith Wood, Club President Johnny Harris, and PGA Chief Championships Officer Kerry Haigh sat down in early 2016.

[00:05:46]Haigh would later say he was glad they were seated when they heard what was on the table, not because something was wrong, but because of the scale of what was being proposed. On May 8th, 2016, the last group finished the Wells Fargo Championship. By the time those players reached the scores tent, construction crews were already on the front nine.

[00:06:05]The next morning, 800 trees came down.

[00:06:07]Keith Wood and his team had 12 weeks. A renovation of that scale would normally take 5 to 6 months at any other course.

[00:06:13]They removed all 18 mini Verde greens, rebuilt portions of three holes, reshaped fairways, and prepared the ground for an entirely different grass.

[00:06:21]This wasn't a patch. This was the second complete green replacement in 3 years.

[00:06:25]The pace was what the club president would call a calculated risk. A PGA Championship as the deadline. The replacement grass was Champion G-12, a newer strain of Champion Ultra Dwarf Bermuda grass, selected for high-density shoot growth and consistency under tournament conditions. It came from a farm in Texas in refrigerated semi-trailers. The soil bed waiting for it was a mixture of sand and worm castings from Southern Organics in Cheraw, South Carolina. The facility produces 50 tons of worm castings per day, what its owner describes as the largest indoor vermicomposting operation in the country.

[00:07:01]20 truckloads of that material, roughly 400 tons, were worked into the root zone at Quail Hollow before a single Champion G-12 sprig arrived. The average green at Quail Hollow covers 6,578 square feet. Multiply that by 18. Wood had to grow the new surface in and open the course to members by fall. A PGA Championship ready layout had to be ready in August of the following year.

[00:07:26]"I don't think I'll ever come up with any project like this again in my career," he said afterward. He'd been in the industry for 20 years. Now consider Augusta National. Augusta National maintains creeping bentgrass, a cool-season grass with the same 90° shoot growth ceiling at 77° soil threshold that killed Quail Hollow's Penn G-2. Augusta's climate in central Georgia isn't meaningfully different from Charlotte's. Summers are hot and humid. The biology is the same. What isn't the same is the engineering response. Augusta installed a sub-air system under every green, a network [music] of pipes that pulls moisture out of the root zone in summer heat. It can also push conditioned air down into the soil to reduce canopy temperatures when the numbers climb. And Augusta closes, typically from late May through early October, roughly 5 months, where no member traffic and no tournament preparation is asked of the bentgrass.

[00:08:19]That closure isn't about rest. It's about giving the grass enough uninterrupted recovery time to survive what both Charlotte and Augusta throw at their courses all summer. The plant needs weeks without mowing or traffic and soil temperatures low enough to let it rebuild what heat stress has been destroying since June. Quail Hollow hosted a PGA Tour event every May. It didn't have a 5-month closure window, and there were no sub-air cooling loops under its bentgrass. What it had was bentgrass in a climate that couldn't support it and a tournament schedule that couldn't accommodate the recovery window. The maintenance program couldn't replicate what Augusta purchases its way out of every summer. Augusta chose to keep its grass by engineering around the biology.

[00:09:02]Quail Hollow accepted what the biology was telling it and then replaced that replacement. The 2017 PGA Championship opened on Champion G-12 greens that had been in the ground for less than 12 months. Rory McIlroy had won at Quail Hollow twice on the previous surfaces.

[00:09:18]He called these the firmest greens he'd ever seen at a PGA Championship. Brooks Koepka said they were the fastest greens he'd ever played. Players estimated the Stimpmeter reading was near 14. Augusta produces that same reading every Masters week on bentgrass it's been conditioning for decades. The difference is sub-air, a 5-month closure at a budget with no public ceiling. Same stimpmeter speed, three different grasses to get there.

[00:09:45]The greens running at the 2026 Truist Championship this week are those same Champion G12 surfaces. The daily stimpmeter reading is 12 and 1/2. They held through the 2022 Presidents Cup in September. Quail Hollow's Bermuda grass rough made the course two shots harder than players were used to in May. They held through the 2025 PGA Championship.

[00:10:06]They're the third set of greens this course has installed since 2009. And most of the people watching on television this week have no idea. Every superintendent running a course in the transition zone is looking at the same biological clock. The bentgrass line, as turfgrass agronomists call it, moves north a little every decade. Courses in Virginia and Tennessee and Kentucky and West Virginia installed bentgrass in the '90s. They're now cataloging the same summers Quail Hollow cataloged in 2009, 2010, and 2013.

[00:10:37]Some of them are still trying to manage through it. Some of them have already made the call. The question your superintendent is asking isn't whether to replace. It's how many seasons of watching the grass fail before you accept what the biology's already telling you. Quail Hollow had that conversation once with bentgrass and once with Mini Verde. Both times the biology won. The third answer is still in the ground. Your superintendent, wherever he is running greens right now, knows exactly which summer he's watching for. Now, you know what they do before you tee off.