Frankenstein Mutant Grass exists and might show up at your favorite golf course. BE ON ALERT!

My favorite Far Side cartoon shows a buffoonish-looking man walking mindlessly through a park above the caption: “Good and Evil Shoes.” One shoe has a voice bubble that reads: “I must protect Bob from the evils of the grass.” The other shoe says: “He, he, he. What can I step in next?” Like most of Gary Larsen’s genius work in that single-caption cartoon series, the joke proved funny on several levels. First, that shoes could be virtuous or vile. Second, what possible evils could exist with grass?

Well, today I’m no longer laughing. Grass, I find, creates a huge, hidden world fraught with controversy and crime. For most golfers (including myself a short time ago), their knowledge of grass consists of: a. it’s green, b. you mow it, and c. it’s fun to golf on. The most controversial and comedic thing most know about grass could be highlighted from the scene in Caddyshack where Bill Murray, as the dimwitted groundskeeper Carl Spackler, talks about creating his own hybrid made of Kentucky blue grass and marijuana. “The amazing stuff about this,” Spackler explains, “is that you can play 36 holes on it in the afternoon, take it home and just get stoned to the bejeezes belt that night.”

Frankenstein-like Mutant Grass
Surprisingly, strangely and sadly, there is much more to grass than that. There’s big corporations employing scientists to create Frankenstein-like mutant grass so they can sell it and make money. Opposition forces stand against them, destroying property and perpetrating crimes for what they believe in. Meanwhile, golfers continue to three-putt on the stuff, blissfully unaware of the controversy brewing beneath their feet.

So, to my fellow golfers, I say: beware the evils of the grass.
I first became aware of a hidden world of grass back in 2001 when I clipped a short newspaper article about some vandalism at a testing facility operated by Pure Seed Company in Oregon. Several people belonging to an extremist environmental group calling itself the Anarchist Golf Association broke into Pure Seed’s lab, destroyed two greenhouses full of experimental grass plots, and spray-painted “Nature Bites Back” on every wall they didn’t wreck. They even left “logo” balls marked with circle-A anarchist symbols.

The next morning, someone from the AGA emailed area newspapers taking credit, and explaining their justification. He wrote that, “Grass, like industrial culture, is invasive and permeates every aspect of our lives.” Due to statements like that, I dismissed the sabotage as being the work of slightly deranged college students who were wildly idealistic in a way that one can be only when one is in college with nothing expected of him and where beer flows freely.

Vandalism On Golf Courses
Another reason I didn’t get worked up is because vandalism to the golf industry is pretty common. A few years ago hoodlums broke into the Riverwoods Golf Course in Akron, Ohio. They tore into sod and went joy riding in the club’s golf carts, submerging many in water hazards. In Philadelphia, so many stolen cars were being abandoned and set aflame on the city-owned courses that groundskeepers issued a local rule allowing for a free drop from standing water that resulted from putting out the fire. At Louisville’s city courses, besides the typical empty beer cans and stolen flagsticks, some pranksters cut down a large tree and planted it in a 4’ by 3’ hole in the middle of one green. Speaking on behalf of courses everywhere, Marty Storch, golf manager for Louisville County’s Metro Parks, says that, “Vandalism is a constant problem.”

To some extent I can understand the criminals’ motivation, though I could never condone the destruction. For starters, alcohol’s often involved, and we’ve all done stupid things while under the influence. That explains much of the petty vandalism, but the more sinister destruction often results from people hating golf specifically. Many people consider golf (unjustly, I think) a rich, white man’s pastime, imbued with class-condescension and monetary privilege.

In World War II, after the Japanese conquered Singapore, they interred their captives at a POW camp across the street from Royal Singapore Golf Club. A short time later, the Japanese marched thousands of British over to the first fairway. The camp commander asked for all the golfers to step forward. In that crowd happened to be William Herbert Day, former president of the Malayan Golf Association, and a club regular. As he stepped forward, he remembers thinking: “Well, those little fellows want to play some golf. I’ll be happy to oblige.”

But rather than organizing the inaugural POW match-play championship, the Japanese leader launched into a tirade about how golf was a western poison, a tool of evil, rapacious capitalists. The Japanese then forced the British to dig up the greens and plant sweet potatoes.
Day, and others, tried foiling their overseers by carefully laying aside the sod and digging shallow holes, but the Japanese knew better and forced the Brits to completely tear up the course. (Lost to history was whether or not these British POW’s passed the time by whistling the theme song to The Bridge on the River Kwai.)

The Japanese attitude mirrored the rage felt by the Anarchist Golf Association. In their news release, the AGA wrote: “The biotech industry usually hides behind the racist aura of ‘feeding the Third World,’ but as you can see, it is quite obvious that these crops are grown for profit and the pleasure of the rich and have no social value.”

To lump grass seed in with biotech agriculture, I thought, revealed the AGA as stupid simpletons. Pretty much every human being alive eats biotech food. You can’t escape it. In 2006, American farmers planted over 100 million acres of genetically modified crops. Biotech seeds now account for, among other things, 85% of the nation’s soybean production, half the corn, and 76% of cotton. I laughed picturing these vandals working up an appetite destroying Pure Seed’s labs, then filling their bellies with a late night run to Taco Bell where they ate biotech corn tortillas, or to McDonalds where the fries get made from biotech potatoes immersed in biotech soybean oil. Both places also feature beef from cows that grew big from biotech hormones and by eating biotech corn.

Perhaps the AGA would say that at least the cows ate corn instead of—heaven forbid!—grass. After all, you find grass on a golf course, and the AGA claimed that: “While the golf trade journals claim that ‘golf courses provide suitable habitat for wildlife,’ we see them as a destroyer of all things.”

“Destroyer of all things”??? What about nuclear warheads, stupid politicians, ruthless dictators or the Ebola virus? Sure, golf may have drastically increased the number of swear words uttered in the world, but to claim it destroys all things seems to be stretching it, to say the least.
I stashed away the grass-vandalism accounts in my writing files where, for years, the idea germinated (pun fully intended). Then, recently, two separate instances brought the idea out of hibernation. The first was when I interviewed a course superintendent who bored me with a long talk on the various qualities of different grasses. “There’s a lot people don’t know about grass,” he said. While a lot of what he said I could have lived without ever learning, I agreed. How much do golfers really know about the grass they play on?

The second instance was when my home course started charging more for cart rentals. Some vandals had broken in and played demolition derby with their carts, and the club needed to recoup that expense. I never learned what that bill was, but the Riverwoods course in Ohio spent $100,000 repairing their carts. Other courses drop cash trying to prevent such incidents. After repeated visits by vandals, the Arizona Biltmore Resort & Spa spent thousands on a fence to protect their carts at night from repeated visits by vandals. Hundreds of other courses bought security measures like high-tech GPS devices that prevents carts from going where they aren’t supposed to (like taking a golfer back to his hotel room, or a vandal down to the Taco Bell for munchies) and when they aren’t supposed to (like after closing time).

The cost to repair damaged grass far outweighs the price of dented carts. Pure Seed swallowed $500,000 in costs thanks to the AGA. Another group, a loosely organized band of environmentalists calling themselves “Elves of the Night” (ELF being an acronym for Earth Liberation Front), has caused more than $37 million in damages since the 1990s. They’ve attacked businesses and burned several buildings on college campuses where, they claim, genetic research takes place on a variety of plants, including—you guessed it—grass.

Such attacks on golf and grass prove not only costly but counterproductive as well. For instance, while some companies do perform genetic experimentation on grass, Pure Seed is not one of them. Pure Seed uses only natural plant breeding with no biotech manipulation. They’re trying to create grass that would decrease the need for pesticides on golf courses. This, of course, would help the environment. “They [the AGA] actually destroyed what they purport to be supporting,” said Pure Seed’s president Bill Rose.

Many in the golf industry follow Pure Seed’s environmentally conscious example. Many courses water their grounds using wastewater, thereby filtering out pollutants before it reaches groundwater. Some courses get built over garbage dumps. Golf courses, as a rule, view themselves as being part of the environment, not apart from it.

Nude Golf As Protest
Given these facts, many reputable environmental groups express outrage when radicals take part in criminally destructive behavior. After the ELF burned one agricultural research laboratory on the University of Michigan campus, they issued the statement that: “Gas guzzling SUVs are at the forefront of this vile, imperialistic culture’s caravan towards self-destruction. We can no longer allow the rich to parade around in their armored existence, leaving a wasteland behind in their tire tracks.”
(In a quick aside: you got to wonder what sort of damage ELF would have done had they actually targeted something that had anything whatsoever to do with SUVs. They might have ripped up concrete parking lots to plant sweet potatoes or something.)
The vandalism at U of M prompted Chip Geller, editor of Grist Magazine, the online voice of the Earth Day Network to write: “I loathe SUVs” and “I have deep concerns about genetic engineering” but “these attacks aren’t constructive.”
Geller understands what these radicals apparently do not, that destruction of property has never been a persuasive argument to convince people your side is right. It even gives logical environmentalists a bad name. Such criminals make it easy for critics to dismiss all environmentalists as extremists. This, in turn, makes it more difficult to get anything done when some real problem actually occurs.
Skeptics liken such actions to the boy who cried wolf. There’s only so many times you can burn buildings for researching golf grass and still get people to support your calls for a reduction in greenhouse gases.
To make their side even less sympathetic, this particular boy cries wolf while burning your home and playing sports while naked. Nude golf in this case. When leaders of the industrialized nations met at Gleneagles Golf Club in Scotland for the 2005 G8 Summit, British campus environmental groups boycotted by staging their own golf tournament. Calling themselves the People’s Golf Association, they encouraged golfers to show up wearing gas masks, Tony Blair or George Bush masks, or completely naked. This PGA encouraged bad swings (how well can you play golf with masks on and body parts fluttering?) in an effort “to take divots in the well-manicured and pesticide-fed lawns.”
Such spectacles make the Chip Gellers of the world cringe.

Grass That’s Immune to Poison
While genetically modified (GM) grass has never been proven to negatively impact the environment, one case remains under study. In 2006, agents from the USDA and EPA discovered that some GM grass escaped its testing facility in Oregon. The grass was a strain of creeping bentgrass (Agrostis stolonifera) produced by the Scotts Company, which had been infused with a bacterial gene that made it immune to the herbicide glyphosate. Glyphosate is better known by its commercial name of Roundup. This grass could be a tremendous boon to the 11,000 golf courses in America that have bentgrass greens or fairways.

Weeds easily infest bentgrass but since the grass itself is susceptible to glyphosate it cannot be widely applied. This forces groundskeepers to toil ceaselessly keeping bentgrass healthy, including by hand-pulling weeds. If this A. stolonifera strain could be used, however, groundskeepers could simply spray Roundup and be done.

Agriculture already relies heavily on Roundup resistant plants, and that creates a problem. Crops like corn and soybeans are annuals and do not reproduce. Bentgrass, however, grows year after year and will crossbreed with other varieties of bentgrass. If it were to grow unchecked, it could potentially create weeds resistant to Roundup. That could put many crops—and some environmentally sensitive areas that also use glyphosate—at risk. If such a scenario occurred, it would necessitate the use of a more powerful herbicide.

While authorities are taking this outbreak very seriously, they caution that the unplanned release has not yet created any environmental problem. They remain unsure if one will ever result.

New companies spend millions developing new strains of grass because most golfers demand luscious green grass just like the kind they see televised on the Masters tournament every spring. Groundskeepers derisively call this “Augusta Envy” and blame it for most of their expenses and headaches.
However, few golfers understand that Augusta National is to golf courses what Pamela Anderson is to women: an impossible-to-duplicate fantasy. Technically, Anderson may biologically still be a woman, but surgeries and silicone and collagen have long ago turned her into something unnatural. Likewise with Augusta National. That course spends more money just on grass than about 100 regular courses spend in their entire annual budget. They hire a personal maintenance worker for each individual blade of grass. These hirelings do nothing but care for their blade. They apply fertilizer with a Q-tip. They stand ever ready with nose-hair scissors to cut the blade down to size should it grow in excess of Augusta’s guidelines.
Since regular courses lack the funds and staff to make their grass Augusta-green they must turn to other means—like GM grass—to satisfy expectations.

Augusta Envy also influences golfers to demand their home courses play with lightning-fast greens like those found at major championships. Fast greens come from short grass. From 1980 to 2000, the average cutting height on greens dropped from five thirty-seconds of an inch to one-eighth of an inch. Now, one-tenth of an inch marks the common height.
Short grass does not come easy. Short grass lacks sufficient blade size to photosynthesize enough energy to sustain itself. This forces groundskeepers to supplement the grass through heavy applications of nutrients. The smaller blades also make grass more susceptible to disease, which must be countered with other chemicals. Overall, it greatly increases the cost and time of course maintenance. This, in turn, gets passed down to golfers.

Some studies also indicate that fast greens slow down the pace of play and increases the frustration. Few recreational golfers putt well enough to handle fast greens. Therefore, they need more putts to hole out and take longer to read each one.

It could therefore be surmised that simply by letting grass grow, more people would golf more often while simultaneously deriving more enjoyment. While every golfer considers grass essential to the game, who would have thought it could be so important?