Newport Beach Country Club Magazine Winter 2020 | Page 25

TAKE A BEHIND-THE-SCENES LOOK AT HOW THE GOLF COURSE MAINTENANCE TEAM
GETS READY FOR THE COUNTRY CLUB’S BIGGEST TOURNAMENT OF THE YEAR.
BY ASHLEY PROBST
Opposite page: Last year’s Hoag Classic; this page, from left: checking the course ahead of the 2020 tournament; dowsing rods help find pipes
W
ith the most prestigious event of the year quickly approach-
ing, members will begin to notice a bit more hustle and bustle
around the club. As team members and vendors prepare for
the annual Hoag Classic, a golf tournament on the PGA TOUR Champions
circuit that has graced the Newport Beach Country Club course for over 25
years. As the only PGA TOUR event in all of Orange County, the club takes
great pride in hosting this event as well as presenting a pristine course to the
PGA players, and its members throughout the year, too.
Here, the Newport Beach Country Club Magazine talks to Golf Course
Superintendent Scot Dey, Assistant Golf Course Superintendent Mike
Novak and PGA TOUR Competitions Agronomist Brian Maloy to get a
behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to prepare for the Hoag Classic.
SEASONED PROFESSIONALS
Maloy started working on golf courses after he graduated from Iowa State
University with a degree in agronomy. “I was a golf course superintendent
for a number of years in the north and in the south, … so you have a lot of
different situations to deal with,” he says, noting that he has handled every-
thing from weeds and insects to disease, and he simply loves it.
This passion is what led him to start working for the PGA TOUR in
2008. Now, Maloy travels around the world for over 200 days a year to
prepare various golf courses for tournaments. He works directly with the
golf course superintendent and general manager of each club he visits,
serving as a liaison between the club and the tournament director of the
PGA TOUR.
When asked how long he’s worked on the Hoag Classic, formerly the
Toshiba Classic, Maloy recalls visiting the club about 10 years ago, when
he first started with the PGA TOUR. “I hadn’t been back for the next 10
years, until just last season was the first season … [the Hoag Classic] was
back on my assignment sheet, and I’m going back again this year,” he says,
noting that he came to NBCC in December for his pre-tournament visit.
Maloy says that the purposes of these visits are “to see if there’s anything
we can do with growth regulation or all the things that we put out on
the golf course to keep it in great shape to prepare for, whether it’s weed
N E WP O R T B E A CHCC .CO M
control or insecticides or disease control, and still being environmentally
conscious at the same time.”
On the Newport Beach Country Club side of things, Novak has been
involved with Hoag from the beginning, and this is the third iteration of the
event that Dey has been a part of. “He is with me pretty much every day for
14 days,” Dey says of Maloy. “And then we’re talking and sharing what my
plans are, what kind of feedback he’s hearing from the officials and the play-
ers, and then collectively we just try to put all of our ideas together.”
And though Maloy visits countless properties throughout the year, this
sense of teamwork at the Newport Beach Country Club is an exceptional
attribute. “The thing that makes the golf courses stand out to me are the
teams that we work with, the guys behind the scenes that you really rarely
hear about,” Maloy says, explaining that these individuals are working extra
hard during tournament week. “… They’re trying to improve and increase
the attention to detail on their golf course to present the best product possi-
ble when the players get there, and these guys all do such a great job at that.
They work extremely hard during that morning and evening shift and we
really appreciate that because it’s time away from their families.”
And, as Dey says, there is good reason for this dedication: “We want the
golf course to determine the champion and the golf course to play and
show itself.”
MOTHER KNOWS BEST
Of course, no matter how much planning goes into any event, there is always
the potential for setbacks. In golf, these typically involve the one thing that no
one can control and is difficult to accurately predict: the weather.
“What we’re trying to accomplish is to provide the most consistent
playing conditions that we can for that week of the event. Now, granted,
that’s very difficult to accomplish because, you know what they say about
Mother Nature: She’s really the one in charge,” Maloy says. “One day [it]
might be raining cats and dogs, the next day it might be over 100 degrees
[Farenheit], another … instance, of course, might be going into it after an
extensive drought, so certainly that all impacts the decisions we make.”
Of course, ideally, he would prefer not to see any unusual weather events
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