Tee Pads

[Jason Southwick]

A great tee pad is big, flat, level, hard, grippy and safe, with a nice, flat follow-through area.

There should be no holes to step into, cliffs to fall off of, no stumps to trip on. If there’s something to step up onto it should be a half-inch-thick Fly18 10’ x 5’ rubber mat.

And if you can figure out a way to do all that, you will have great tees. Just be sure you have the energy and the resources and the time and determination to do it and do it the right way 18 times.

Forget about 36, or even 27. There is no course in the world – no single course – with more than 18 stellar tee pads. Disclaimer: several of the 18 tees on my own course, Pyramids, fail to fully meet the standards set forth.

The list below is what you’ll need to install a rubber pad over stone dust with a timber frame. It’s only one variation of one method for building a great tee pad. The principles, however, remain universal.

Tools you’ll need:

Exacto knives with titanium blades
Hinged two-pieces-of-wood tool as your cutting guide
Plate compactor
2nd plate compactor for when the 1st one breaks, those pieces of crap…something about the shaking makes them fall apart or something. I dunno.
Metal rakes
Pointed shovels
Square shovel (just one; people will fight over it)
Skreeting board (long 2 x 4)
Watering can
12” galvanized spikes with matching washers
Powerful battery drills with extra charged batteries
Gallons and gallons of water
4-wheel drive vehicles for transport
Ramp for the plate compactor
Front-end loader skid steer Bobcat with forked bucket for precision digging
Bicycles
A designated runner (instead of always having the boss run to the store, or to the other site)
Internet connection
Snacks and potable water
Beer (because some of the best workers are drunks)
Extra work gloves
Hand tamper (as a last resort when the 2nd piece o crap plate compactor breaks)
Timbers (or, in the absence of timbers, New England stone wall stone) for the frame
Two 90-foot half-inch-thick Fly18 Rubber rolls. (Try moving one of these yourself.)
Six-foot levels
Chainsaws with extra sharp chains, chainsaw tools and chainsaw gas and bar oil
Phone number of The Wolf, the guy in Pulp Fiction that comes in and fixes everything

And the most important thing to bring to a workday? Drum roll please.

Your friends.

How do you do it? Generally, the workday leader is scattered the way tournament directors get. They babble. They run to the store for the thing needed to proceed, and come back much later to discover the thing fetched is no longer needed.

Workday leaders make vague tentative decisions, speaking only every other word they’re thinking, and wander off to tend to something completely different than the task at hand.

The most important task is keeping the workday leader focused. That’s why you have a designated runner, who gets the thing everyone needs. It might be whisky and condoms. The runner doesn’t get to ask questions. He runs because we’ve got the boss tied to a tree. We pretend not to notice that he’s slowly, and with great effort and secrecy, trying to move the small chainsaw with his foot, an inch at a time, toward his tied hands. It gives him something to do.

The most important thing is keeping the boss on site. He doesn’t get to fetch anything. And it’s fun to watch him try to start the chainsaw, which he’s somehow managed to inch much closer.

Why keep the boss close? Because the boss is the only person who can definitively decide at every crossroad which path to take. It doesn’t matter that he’s seldom a construction or landscape expert. Some of the best workday bosses pretend to know absolutely nothing about anything, the better to initiate action among those more experienced with tools and their tackling of the physical world.

But the boss defines the goals, and the boss is almost always the boss for working harder and being the one person who decided to make the course, and is making the course. The “Wouldn’t have a course without this person” person.

That person.

Essentially, successful workdays come down to preparation and organization. Charge batteries the night before. Bring them. Get everything you need together. Make a list. Check it twice. Call your friends.

Be Red Auerbach. Win the Championship before the season begins. Make sure Bill Russell and Bob Cousy are on board. Every workday crew has a couple reliable superstars as far as working goes. Keep it relaxed. Set the start time anywhere between 9 and 11, but mention you’ll be there at 8 setting up.

Lunch provided at the right time is always good, and appropriate for hungry volunteers.

So what’s big? 15’ by 8’ is plenty big, and better than smaller. The last installation we used three 6” x 6” timbers on each tee: two 12-footers for the sides, and an 8-footer for the front. We press the ends of the 12-footers against the 8-footer, so that the width of the pad and the length of the front timber are the same. Connect the timbers at the front corners with timberlocks. The 12-footers can also be simiularly secured at the back of the tee by means of an 8-foot-long 2 x 4. Make sure this back of the tee brace winds up below ground level.

Dig an 8’ x 15’ foot hole six inches deep. Fill half of that with sand and the rest with stone dust. Water and tamp the stonedust with the plate compactor, using a metal rake to carefully smooth and redistribute the stonedust during compacting. Be sure to use a lot of water, so that the stonedust is saturated. PUT WAY MORE WATER ON THE STONEDUST THAN EVERYONE THERE SAYS YOU SHOULD PUT ON IT. Lay and stake the 10’x5’ half-inch thick Fly18 pad, drilling six holes in the pad, one at each corner and an extra one in the middle of each side. Six 12-inch galvanized spikes and six similarly galvanized washers.

Then plate-compact the pad. It’ll sink down a little into the stonedust around it, making it maybe a quarter-inch step-up for those who need more than 10’x5’, like Timmy Walsh.

[Jeff Wiechowski]

Jason is without a doubt........ one of THEY