Harding Park's Greens Still a Concern

Imagine you're throwing a birthday party for your 13-year-old daughter. You have pony's set to carry the lucky kids around the yard. A clown that is going to paint the faces of the children and tie balloon animals. And the cake is as delicious and frosted as anything you've ever placed in your rumbling stomach.

Now imagine the pony has a bad back. It carries children the same way it would carry an international Space Station. Poorly ... very poorly. The clown shows up, but he's drunk and keeps painting phallic symbols on the kids faces as he laughs into his flask. Oh, and that cake? Yeah, turns out yours got mixed up with one from a vegan party, and it tastes the same way Tara Reid's stomach looks ... not great.

That is what the Presidents Cup is currently facing at Harding Park in San Francisco. With just five weeks until the United States team hosts the International team in the seventh playing of the team event, the municipal golf course is still reeling from what is now being deemed Fertilizergate.

As Thomas Bonk explains, two workers were out fertilizing the greens at Harding Park in late July with one of four machines the public club has to help grass grow. Three of the machines are set by letters. This one was set by numbers. The workers guessed on what number to use, and guessed poorly. This wasn't the first bad news coming our way with Harden Park. Chris DiMarco played the course and said it was far from the conditions it needed to be. We wrote back in March, " Until we hear some positive news, however, we can only expect to see some furrowed brows and bowed heads come October."

Well, that seems to be a realistic conclusion if the weather doesn't help the course out over the next month. As Bonk reports ...

The green at the 200-yard, par-3 11th hole is located at the far, northeast corner of Harding Park Golf Course, but you know you're there soon enough, right after you see the pieces of six-inch wide sod filling in the front and left side of the putting surface.

"We had a little boo-boo happen," said Steve Carman of the PGA Tour's competition and rules department.

While that is one cute way to describe the travails of Harden, the realistic golfer that has ever dealt with bad greens understands that it takes only time to fix blemishes. The 11th hole might have sod filling parts of the surface, but it isn't the only one with problems. While nine greens were affected at time of Fertilzergate, the first, third, seventh, 11th and 13th were hit the hardest.

Temp greens have been put in for the public as the crew looks to restore what they've been left with, but this sort of thing could be spell doom for municipal golf courses attempting to host championship events in the future.

While I'm all for tournaments at public golf courses, I do think that crews that know what they're doing should be brought in. I'll excuse this as human error, but if we have some city people working on a golf course that is set to host Tiger Woods, Vijay Singh and Geoff Ogilvy over the next month, people with expert agronomist knowledge should be taking the reigns with stuff like "putting things on a green that could potentially poison the grass."

That being said, if everything works out, and the greens roll true come October 6, all this will be is something the PGA heads can laugh at as they watch the teams battle for the cup.