Stanley Reedy has helped maintain the Country Club of Jackson’s golf courses during perhaps the most eventful two decades of its history. Since Reedy, CCJ’s golf course superintendent, arrived in 1997, the course has undergone a full renovation, a bunker renovation, and become home to the PGA Tour’s Sanderson Farms Championship. In September, the Sanderson likely will draw its strongest field ever — not to mention the attention that comes with blooming into arguably the fall’s biggest stateside Tour event.
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LYING FOUR: The Sanderson seems to welcome all kinds. Last year, Cameron Champ won, and everybody knows how he hits the ball. But the year before that, Ryan Armour won, and he’s one of the shortest guys off the tee on the PGA Tour. And a couple of years before that, Peter Malnati won, and he’s somewhere in the middle. What is it about the Country Club of Jackson that allows so many different types of players to compete?
STANLEY REEDY: When John Fought and Mike Gogel designed the golf course, they put a real strategic value on hitting fairways — and also, not just hitting greens, but hitting greens where you need to him them. A lot of times you’ll hear a guy say, “Well I aimed for the middle of the green.” Well if you do that on some of my greens, that’s not the place you want to be. The guys who are winning aren’t necessarily the longest or shortest; the better word is that they’re the most accurate.
LYING FOUR: How much different do y’all set the course up for the Sanderson compared to what your members play?
STANLEY REEDY: There’s really not a lot of difference. Sometimes the greens are actually faster for member play than they are for the Tour. We’re gonna change that up a little this year, I think, but regardless of what you hear on TV, the Tour doesn’t want a player to go from a place that’s rolling 15 or something and then come to some place that’s rolling 12. They keep it consistent, so hopefully the player will know, “OK, I just left East Lake, and now I’m going to the Country Club, and we’re gonna play fairly similar greens.” But for our members, my members just want fast, firm greens. You can’t get them fast enough. We roll greens on the weekends here in the mornings, which makes them speed up. The Tour really likes to roll them in the afternoon. Basically, they’re not so much worried about the speed as they are the smoothness. All in all, it’s basically the same — just the speeds of the greens are a little different.
LYING FOUR: How does the process of setting up for the Tour event start?
STANLEY REEDY: Here’s what happens. We’ll have a meeting with my Tour agronomist sometime in the spring, who basically comes out and says, “We’re gonna do this, can you try that,” that kind of thing — and we tell him what we’re doing. Like this year, for instance, we wanted to build a new tee on No. 17. We talk to him about any changes to the golf course. We’ll start off by doing that. Then the Tour officials start coming in, I would say, late spring or early summer. We’ll have a brief meeting about how things are going out on the golf course, and anything they want to change, we’ll do it. And then, as it gets closer — this year, since we’re starting a little earlier, we started right after July 4th — things, like, we put out like 3,000 bales of pine straw, doing the cosmetic kind of stuff. Because we’re already doing stuff for the grass, for the members. It just takes a long time. It’s gonna be down to the wire this year, for sure. We’ll talk probably monthly with the agronomist starting around late May, just to make sure everything is OK and that there are no surprises. They will actually come in the week before the event, and they’ll be here the next 14 days monitoring things and making little minor changes. And then we have the event.
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LYING FOUR: You’re about a month out from the tournament now. What do these last few weeks look like? What are you doing for most of the day at this point?
STANLEY REEDY: Really it’s the same thing we’ve been doing all along. All of our main cultural practices, like aerifications, and vertical mowing on fairways, and things like that — all that’s done. So now what we do is we try to concentrate on fine-tuning everything, and hopefully nothing goes wrong so you don't have a blemish or whatever. From there, there’s a lot of cosmetic stuff for TV, because we’re trying to showcase the club for sure. It just takes a lot of hard work.
LYING FOUR: During the event, what do your days look like?
STANLEY REEDY: We’ll get in anywhere from 20-30 volunteers. That in itself is an ordeal, because they travel from all over the state — students from Mississippi State, and students from East Mississippi Community College come down, and we house them and feed them. That in itself is a pretty big chore. Our schedule varies by day. Monday and Tuesday are pretty easy, because on Monday there’s a pro-am, but it doesn’t start until like 9. Tuesday is a practice round, and during the practice round, we have priority — so it doesn’t matter if a guy is hitting or whatever, we just blow right by him. Last year we came in at 6:00 those days, and we were out of here by 8 [p.m.]. So those are 14-hour days. Wednesday gets rough. We have two pro-ams on Wednesday, so last year we started at 4:30, and I left out of here at 9 [p.m.]. We do that Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. On Saturday, it’s 4:45 but they make a cut. When the cut comes, we can start a little bit earlier, and we got out of here about 8. Sunday, you just go, “OK, it’s over.” We got here about 6:30, and then the finale happens. And that all depends on Sunday, to an extent, on TV time. So TV says, “We’re gonna give y’all from 1 to 4,” and then at 4 they’re gonna finish, then they’ll tee off a little earlier. One thing we do, which most tournaments don’t, is we’ll do tee times off both No. 1 and No. 10. And they rarely finish. They’re gonna put 156 players on us this year, which is more than we’ve ever had, and we’ll have a little bit more daylight, but my guess is that the last three holes will have balls on them at the end of the day. Then we’ll have to finish that round before we can set up for the next round. That makes it even more difficult.
LYING FOUR: What get the most attention from you during tournament week?
STANLEY REEDY: Greens, by far. You do greens, and then from there probably bunkers, and then short grass, fairways, and tees, that kind of thing. Rough is taken care of by the week before — hopefully we’ll be able to stop mowing it, so it kind of is what it is. All the other short-grass areas are getting cut every day.
LYING FOUR: How much more difficult does rain during the tournament make your job?
STANLEY REEDY: It depends on how hard it rains. If it rains extremely hard, then it makes it more difficult. The course drains really well; we just had a bunker renovation, so all our bunkers drain really well. But if it rains to the point where you get a lightning event, they’ll stop play, and then what ends up happening is that instead of finishing with balls on the last three holes, you might have balls on the last nine holes. That might mean they want to start sooner or play later. And then, obviously, a dry golf course is a lot easier to set up than a wet one: you can’t get off the cart path, you have to do more things by hand. Dew removal is a big thing for them, and in the mornings we would normally mow — but if it gets too wet, then we have to figure out ways to get dew off fairways without getting a vehicle out there. It can be tough.
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LYING FOUR: Have you been surprised at how well the golf course has held up as a Tour venue? When the event moved to CCJ, there were questions about whether it would work.
STANLEY REEDY: No. I didn’t think they were gonna shoot 30-under or something like that, but I knew it wasn’t gonna be a Shinnecock or a Bethpage where maybe you’d shoot even. I thought it would be somewhere about where it is. Since basically anybody can come play now, it’ll be interesting to see what they do with it. Our greens have such small contours in them that they’re the real defense of the golf course. And our rough is gonna be pretty tough this year; Bermuda grass rough is about bad as it gets. It gets back to accuracy: the guy who hits fairways, puts the ball on the green where it’s supposed to be — he’s gonna shoot well. At first, we felt like the higher the score, the better. But if you watch golf on TV, you want to see people make birdies or you want them to make double bogeys. Anything in between is kind of dull. So it’s good if they make birdies. It’s good for TV, it’s good for the golf course. People enjoy watching that. That’s what it’s all about.
LYING FOUR: And now, there’s a whole generation of guys coming who all hit the ball like Cameron Champ. I wonder whether CCJ’s approach of using greens with a lot of nuance in them is the next step in defending Tour courses.
STANLEY REEDY: That’s correct. These guys now, with the equipment today — you know the deal. It’s just not like it was during the Palmer-Nicklaus heyday. It’s definitely gonna have to do with the greens. Bunkers today are so manicured that guys aim for the bunkers so they won’t go in the rough, so that’s not really a challenge. And again, with all the technology and equipment these guys have — without the greens as a defense, I think they would be shooting 30-under or something.
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