Q. Talking about the tree program, two questions. One, how difficult is it to get your membership to sign onto that, and two, can you talk about did you go all the way back to pictures of the course when it was first built to try to keep the design integrity, or what did you use historically to determine that?
TONY MANCUSO: Well, we have looked at a lot of photos from back in the 65 Open, and frankly, there's literally hundreds, maybe thousands, more trees than there were when the course was finished. So, for us to go back to that, I'm sure that that's not an agenda that anyone wants to do because this was a pretty open piece of land apparently back then, and many of the trees that have been planted are wonderful. There are big oaks that are between holes, and we certainly don't want to take away from that look.
But, you know, the membership, I think, is really beginning to buy into this program that we're on, and really the big reason is because of the improved conditioning on the golf course. You know, Old Warson undertook this program a few years ago, and they've taken out probably three or four times more trees than we have, and the response over there has been outstanding. As you all know locally, Old Warson's conditioning has improved tremendously over the last few years, and it's simply because good sunshine and a little bit of water and the grass -- you're going to be successful.
I think it's been a maturing process. There's always a lot of resistance to cutting a big old tree down, and I don't even really want to do it, but there's times when you have to decide whether it's going to be trees or grass, and where we want to play the game and where we want good grass, you know, that's where we don't necessarily need the trees.
When you plant a tree 30, 40 or 50 years ago, it's just very hard to anticipate how big it's going to get and how wide it's going to spread, and again, I think -- I know I've told Tim this story, a very good member friend of mine and I were out playing golf one day this spring after we had gone through this pretty aggressive program over the winter, and we started on the first tee, and I made a little bet with him. I said, "We're going to finish each hole and turn around and look at the hole, and for every tree that you cannot identify that has been removed, I get a quarter.".
We got to the fourth hole and I was $3.25 up, and we decided it was time to stop that little game because really there's a lot of instances where you look at an area and you don't think there should be a tree there, and, in fact, there was a tree there.
So, I think our membership is seeing that the course -- the design is kind of coming back into focus. There's plenty of trees behind the trees that -- in most cases we're taking out trees that are in front of other trees, and many of our members don't even notice that the trees are gone because they're being flanked by other trees.
So we try to be sensitive to that and not really take out any trees that were out to themselves, not real signature trees. In most cases it was just to push our turf quality out a little bit.
Q. Since 99, have you planted any trees here?
TONY MANCUSO: We've planted a number of trees here actually. We have a program here that sometimes members will plant -- we will plant a tree in memory of another member, and we have plenty of good locations for those trees, and so we're very selective where we go with that. There's other instances where we've planted trees that might have a good flowering season, for example, or something like that. So we're not just eliminating trees, we're just essentially relocating trees or making sure that we can play golf where we can play golf and then we can have the beautiful trees outside of that.
RAND JERRIS: If there are no other questions, we'll thank Tony and Tim for their time.
End of FastScripts.
