Q. How many bunkers are there, you said 35?
CHRIS HAGUE: That's how many had water in them. I think we probably have 95 to 100 bunkers. Some of them are huge.
Q. (Inaudible).
CHRIS HAGUE: That's true, but on the other hand, I think I've been through five championships, and every one of them out of seven days something happens. It's part of being in the Midwest for one thing. Coming off of a 54-day drought essentially, it is kind of ironic that all of a sudden the floodgates opened at the worst time it could be, but what can I say. If it wasn't for the tournament, we'd have been thrilled that we got the kind of rain that we did. Irony, I don't know.
Q. (Inaudible).
CHRIS HAGUE: Well, as I said, most of our labor hours went to the bunkers. The bunker process is not real exciting, but if you really want to know --
Q. I'm interested in what you do.
CHRIS HAGUE: It's about seven or eight steps. First off, you have to pump the water. You have to dig a pit in the bunker, put a gas pump in it and pump the water out. You just have two guys moving on it all the time. Then the water dissipates like it would in any kind of a well and it fills back in, so you make another loop and you come back in with the pump again. You try to pump the surface water out first, and once it looks like it's dissipated enough, then we bring in machines that have -- they're John Deere 1200 rakers that have little four-foot push blades on the front of them, and you bring in several of those and you start moving around all the sand because the sand that was two to three inches on the sides now is ten inches deep at the bottom because it's all washed down to the bottom. So you've got to push all that. That's done with a push blade or a good old shovel method.
This morning we were through two holes and it started raining so hard, everything we were putting up on the sides was flowing right back down again. It kind of reminds you of liquid peanut butter. No matter what you do, it's liquid cake icing is what it is.
Q. (Inaudible).
CHRIS HAGUE: Yeah, exactly, the first hour and a half probably, and then we even had -- since it was so bad, we sent people back to the shop to kind of regroup and then it went back up. But we go through that process and just try to get the depths right because we're still up -- if you don't have the proper depths and somebody goes out there and breaks his wrist, they're not going to be too happy about that, so that's always a consideration.
Then there's drying time. You do the push blading, the shoveling, you check the depths and then you let it dry down for maybe a half hour or so and you've got another crew coming in to do the hand rake. So they've had five or six things done to them by the time you see them. We averaged about 45 minutes per hole today. That's what we're dealing with.
We pushed about seven hours times 14 people to do nine holes, and all that was out of the way by 11:00 o'clock, 11:15 this morning, and that was on both nines. This was going on simultaneously on both. Plus there's another four people that are doing three cuts per green. That takes about an hour and a half per green to clean them up after this kind of rain because we're not wanting the speeds to slide too far backwards. We want to keep the speeds up as best we can, and some greens I had a guy who was squeegeeing water off of one side as the other side was being cut and taken care of.
There's all these things to go over, go over, go over. Finally by, I'd say, about 8:30 things were perking up. The wind actually started to blow and we didn't feel like it was one step forward and three steps back, but it took several hours before it felt like we were moving forward this morning.
Q. (Inaudible).
CHRIS HAGUE: It started raining within a half hour after we got out there, and finally -- I think we finally maybe stopped fighting the rain by 7:30 or 8:00 o'clock. Up until then, everything we were doing, it may have wiped out again, but you roll the dice and keep on going.
Q. Was anybody wondering what the heck are we doing, it's still raining out?
CHRIS HAGUE: Probably several dozen times.
Q. Can I get you to say your name and position?
CHRIS HAGUE: Yeah, my name is Chris Hague and I'm the Certified Golf Course Superintendent here at Deere Run.
Q. If there's a lot of standing water on the fairway, what does one do?
CHRIS HAGUE: If they had decided to play it down, we probably wouldn't have played today. The rules officials have to decide on how they're going to play it. They decided lift, clean and place. In a lift, clean and place scenario, we don't need to try to go out and squeegee them between groups, and physically you couldn't do it anyway.
What we did was make sure today that all the drainage grates that are located -- there's really dozens on every hole, make sure nothing was plugged up, pushed a lot of free water down into them early, and then over a period -- I imagine by the time of 4:00 o'clock this afternoon that you'll be able to at least look out at the fairways and not see standing water. They'll still be really mushy and still considered casual water for the players.
If it would have been less of a rain and only a few holes here and there, we'd have just had squeegees out if we felt we could do some good, and they would have played it down.
Q. What do you mean by play it down?
CHRIS HAGUE: Play it down meaning you can't lift it, can't move it from place to place. Now they can lift the ball, clean the ball and they can place it. They can touch it. When you play it down, which is the way the rules are, you play it as it lies, and the rules officials didn't think it would be fair under the conditions to have to make the competitors do that, and that was a good decision. I'm glad they're playing lift, clean and place. It wouldn't have been fair otherwise.
Tomorrow I think probably it's up in the air whether that will happen or not happen.
Q. How are the playing conditions compared to what you've seen here in the past? Is it as soft as you've seen?
CHRIS HAGUE: You mean today? I've seen it like this dozens of times. I've been here a year and a half, and many, many storms. This is absolutely nothing new. I've seen it much worse really, but the timing hasn't been worse.
Q. You and your crew, were you working right up until 11:00 o'clock?
CHRIS HAGUE: The guys didn't finish up until pushing 11:30 or quarter to 12:00. With everybody going off of 1 and 10, we were finishing up on 17 and 18 and 8 and 9 when the players started, so we were way out ahead.
Q. How does this storm compare to last year? Remember we had the delay on Monday?
CHRIS HAGUE: Yeah, it was on a Saturday morning. This wasn't much different, it really wasn't. I think at 4:30 we got hammered and we ended up delaying until 11:00 o'clock, almost identical. It wasn't all that much -- I can't remember if they played lift, clean and place. The rain was fast and hard and rolled off. The last 48 hours were a nice soft drizzle, but it doesn't go anywhere. These soils are very tight, silky, clay soils and they don't take water all that well after you get past maybe a quarter of an inch an hour. We have a fair amount of carts on paths only days during the regular season, too.
Q. (Inaudible).
CHRIS HAGUE: It really did yesterday. Yesterday morning, even though all the golf was decided, I think the rules officials directed us to change -- it seemed like it was two holes on the front and maybe two on the back because they got into some of those runoff swales a little too close, so they just moved up higher up the hills. Then, of course, they learned their lesson after they lost things, and for today's round it wasn't any problem.
Q. (Inaudible).
CHRIS HAGUE: At 3:15 our people will go off 1 and 10 with the rules officials and they'll set up the pin placements for the fourth round and they're probably only going to be 30 minutes or so ahead of the first group. He's already got them dotted and we know where they're at, so it'll be quick.
Q. Did you have 30 people working the course this morning?
CHRIS HAGUE: This morning we did, yes.
Q. What time did you get home yesterday?
CHRIS HAGUE: I think I got out of here at maybe 2:30 yesterday afternoon. Once they totally cancelled the day, we let staff out by noon or so. There was just absolutely nothing that we could do constructively yesterday at all.
Q. How much sleep have you gotten?
CHRIS HAGUE: I've averaged three hours a night maybe for the last two weeks almost. I'm looking forward to tomorrow night, really looking forward to tomorrow night.
Q. You've got to be happy about the way things worked out.
CHRIS HAGUE: Real happy. It doesn't matter whether it's competitors, private members, there's always going to be a few people that aren't real happy with the product that you have, and I've heard a few gentlemen comment negatively, and that's going to happen.
Q. What have you heard?
CHRIS HAGUE: I bet many of the top five players won't complain. It tends to happen that way.
Q. What have you heard? What have the players said?
CHRIS HAGUE: I've heard what you've heard. I don't hear what I read, and I don't read much. I keep picking up -- I'll tell you, my wife has been picking up the Dispatch and the Times for the last five days, and they're in a stack. I'll read them next week.
End of FastScripts.
