Augusta National’s Secret Ingredient Has New Jersey Roots

This year, when you hear those first tinkling strains of piano music, Jim Nantz reaffirms your ongoing friendship, and the camera pans across roughly 365 acres of intoxicatingly green golf nirvana, know that what you’re looking at is … New Jersey.

The home of Bruce Springsteen and Tony Soprano isn’t often associated with the Masters, but Augusta National Golf Club wears a green jacket made in the Garden State. “Everything on the fairways, the second cut, and the tees is over-seeded with what's called turf type ryegrasses, and the varieties have been developed at Rutgers University,” says Richard Hurley, an NJ native who has a Ph.D. in grass breeding from RU and taught at its School of Biological and Environmental Sciences and Professional Turfgrass Program for 25 years, before retiring in 2008.

Richard Hurley with a bucket of turfgrass seed he developed. Image via Rutgers Foundation

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As part of his work, he served on Augusta’s agronomic consulting team for 15 years, then spent another 15 as a volunteer on the greenskeeping squad, dew-sweeping and leaf-blowing greens during the tournament. When he stepped down from those duties, the club thanked him with a lifetime pass, which is why he’s attended every Masters since 1978 and has the stories to prove it.

Richard Hurley with Arnold Palmer in the 1980s. Photo via Rutgers University

“Clifford Roberts wrote a book called The Story of Augusta National in 1976, and in it he says that the club is using grasses developed at Rutgers,” Hurley adds. “It’s on page 97.” He offers this as verification but also as a reassurance, perhaps to himself, that’s he’s not violating Augusta’s notorious omerta by revealing anything that wasn’t already publicly acknowledged by the man who ruled the club with a persimmon fist for more than four decades.

Sam Snead walking to the 15th green of the Augusta National Golf Course in 1953. Credit: Getty Imagaes, Bettmann / Contributor

That amounts to more than 50 years of Rutgers fuzz on Georgia’s peach, although the development story stretches back even further. “If you look at a lot of old baseball clips going back to the 40s and 50s, those fields were terrible,” Hurley explains. The diamonds of old, like most grass playing fields of the time, featured pasture grasses. “They were used to feed horses and cows and sheep, so they were coarse textured. They didn't cut well. They really weren't a good turf.”

Rutgers turf-breeding program turned its attention to cold-season ryegrass in 1960, with the aim of developing more refined strains. The first product of that effort appeared in 1967. “Through the breeding process, we've really totally transformed it from that ugly old pasture grass into what we call turfgrass, which is attractive and dense and can be cut low,” he says. “The first generation of the varieties that came out in the late '60s, they were good at the time, but we've gotten better and better and better since.”

Photo by Robert Beck /Sports Illustrated via Getty Images

Each variety requires eight to 10 years in development through a process called recurrent selection, which likely stirs memories of Gregor Mendel and 6th-grade science class. “With these grasses, the traits that are inherited are all what's called additive traits,” Hurley says. “That means many small genes affect a trait. For instance, let's just say you wanted a very dark-green grass. If you kept selecting parents that had dark color and you went through multiple generations of selecting, cross-mating, selecting, and cross-mating, you would have a darker turf. And so, we do that with all the traits that are important. We wanted fine leaves. We wanted denser turf. We wanted to grow more upright. We wanted disease-resistance.”

Augusta made the switch to Rutgers turf when the second variety appeared in the mid-70s. Shortly after, the club revamped its approach to its playing surfaces. “When I first got involved in 1978, they were old school,” Hurley says. “But from like 1980 to the early 1990s, they went from zero to 100 as far as technology,” Hurley says.

Photo by Austin Kaseman

The improvements include mowers that can cut to hundredths of an inch and a sub-air system that can suck moisture out of the ground on wet days and cool roots with circulated air on hot ones. Rumors suggest the club even uses portable grow lights on certain parts of the course at times, although Hurley has nothing to say on that topic.

Photo by DON EMMERT / AFP via Getty Images

Augusta seeds the ryegrass every fall so it’s ready for spring and allows the native, warm-weather Bermuda grass to take over in the summer. As with most high-grade turfgrasses, growers test to make sure that no weed stock has infiltrated the mix by sending samples from each batch to a seed lab, where trained analysts examine them under a microscope so they can identify a stray dandelion, crab grass or chickweed seed. The seed that goes to Augusta gets retested with a larger sample to make doubly sure that no stowaways infiltrate the grounds at 2604 Washington Road.

“I was there six weeks ago, and it was so green and so perfect, it almost looked fake,” he says. “It looks a little different without the spectators and without the traffic, because the traffic beats up the rough pretty well, but it was just perfect.”

Photo by Matty Aylward/Augusta National

Hurley and his colleagues have done their best to lighten the load of patrons, breeding wear resistance into the grass. The series of ever-more creative testing methods at its two turf farms, one of which stretches 35 acres and features 10 acres of greens, has included students hired to walk on the grass, a roller outfitted with the soles of spiked golf shoes, and a 2,000-pound steam roller rented from a construction equipment supplier. The latest implement is a horizontally mounted spinning drum covered with two-foot-long rubber straps that thud the turf as the drum rotates. “We try to select parents to use in our breeding program that do well tolerating that wear,” Hurley says.

Seven or eight varieties have emerged since that first one appeared in 1967, and the grasses are “better, finer, denser, more upright-growing, and better able to tolerate low mowing,” Hurley says. “We're at the point where we're really focusing on disease resistance, because disease resistance means less inputs, less fungicides, which cost money and are bad for the environment. Genetic resistance is better.”

Groundscrew member replacing divot on No 16 hole at Augusta National in 2016. (Photo by Darren Carroll /Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)

Hurley’s connection to Augusta has made his career far more interesting than simply watching grass grow. The standouts among his memories include friendships with Arnold Palmer and Ben Crenshaw, both of whom he named strains of grass after, Jack Nicklaus’ 1986 run to the title, Larry Mize’s chip-in in ’87, Tiger’s ground-breaking win in ’97, and a casual lunch at one of the tables beneath the big oak tree with Palmer and Byron Nelson. “When Rory won a last year, I attended the Green Jacket ceremony on the putting green, and he was just so emotional,” Hurley recalls. “You could see the monkey was off his back; he was just a different person it seemed.”

Hurley surmises that the tournament’s impact derives from Augusta's endless striving. “They have tremendous management there. They want it to be the best in every way, and they've really done the right things,” he says. “It’s one thing to see it from the outside, but when you see it from the inside, you really get to appreciate how good they are.”

Augusta doesn’t use a proprietary variety of ryegrass, but, still, Hurley isn’t about to name names. He will say that the same grass, or closely related iterations of it, shows up on golf courses around the world, many Premier League pitches, Yankee Stadium, the Rose Bowl, and the White House putting green. “Maybe Rutgers University hasn't been the strongest in sports, but it's the world's leader in developing cool-season sports turfgrasses. And at this stage, there really is no second place. Rutgers is by far the best.”

Amen to that.