Ernie Els champions green issues

Just eight days after Paul Casey won the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth, the diggers will be moving on to the West Course today and ripping up all 18 of its greens. It may seem like sacrilege, but it will be the start of a £4million project designed to bring an old masterpiece into the 21st century and to quieten the critics among the professionals, who have argued that the putting surfaces no longer come up to scratch.
The work, which should be completed by the end of August, will be overseen by Ernie Els, who has a house on the Wentworth estate and knows the course intimately, having won the World Match Play Championship there seven times in all.
But while the rebuilding of the greens will capture most of the imagination, the former Open champion is also remodelling what is one of the finest inland courses in Europe.
His ambitions, like his golf, are of the lofty variety. “This could be Europe's Augusta National,” Els said. “When Harry Colt designed the course, there were no sprinkler systems, so the greens needed to be able to hold water in the winter to provide moisture for the summer.
“So they put a layer of clay underneath [the topsoil]. But with sprinklers, and with the rain we get early in the year, the water is unable to go anywhere and it comes towards the surface. And that creates sponginess and an inconsistent roll.”
The answer is to rebuild all the greens to a standard developed in the United States, and that allows for good drainage all year round. In profile, the construction will look like a layer cake. On top of a firm base, there will be a series of drainage pipes, a layer of gravel, and what gardeners would think of as topsoil, made up of a mixture of sand (up to 60 per cent), soil and peat. And on top of that will be a specially grown layer of turf.
“You can't do a green here, a green there,” Els said. “We've got to do this job properly and in one go. That said, we're not making dramatic changes to the shape and size of the greens. We're going to take out the tiers on the 3rd green and we want to make the green at the 8th a bit smaller and bring the water in front of it into play. But for the rest of the course, we will try to leave the slopes as they are.”
When it is required, the turf - 20,000 square metres of which is being grown in Lincolnshire - will be cut, transported to Surrey and laid within 24 hours.
Els has already been responsible for a number of changes to the West Course in recent years. He has lengthened a number of the holes and added 37 bunkers, some of which are about to be removed.
“What Ernie does not want to produce is a course that has no respect for Harry Colt,” Julian Small, the chief executive of Wentworth, said. “What we are trying to do is restore and modernise, not create something new.
“The greatest compliment we could get is if somebody comes back and says the playability is fabulous but in some ways it is hard to see what the changes are.”
Source:The times