DETROIT — Jake Mendoza has seen this movie before.
And he could’ve told you that long before the scene played out again at Detroit Golf Club on Thursday afternoon, when the dark clouds rolled in and the skies opened up and the rain started coming down in sheets.
Mendoza, in his third year as superintendent for the venerable old Donald Ross-designed courses that host the Rocket Mortgage Classic, knows the forecast by heart at this point. So when the golf umbrellas came out shortly after noon during the first round of the tournament and the horn ultimately sounded, bringing PGA Tour golfers back to the clubhouse for what proved to be a 3-hour weather delay, about all Mendoza could do was sigh and get back to work.
“It’s been a very long week, and my team has been through a lot,” he said early Thursday evening, finally able to take a break as the tournament resumed under sunny skies and a welcome breeze. “But watching it rain again, and then getting back out there and getting things dried down, and then watching it rain again … it felt a lot like Groundhog Day. Rinse, and repeat.”
But it bears repeating now, after seven extremely soggy days here in southeast Michigan, that this century-old parkland course, with all its treasured golf history, is a marvel of modern engineering.
And it almost goes without saying that Mendoza and his staff will be the real medalists again when this tournament is over Sunday evening. Because it’s a minor miracle what we’re seeing now, given what this place looked like last weekend — a fact that’s certainly not lost on the golfers here.
“I thought the grounds crew did an amazing job,” Phil Mickelson said. “With all the rain that they've had leading up to the tournament and then today, to have the course in such great shape was really impressive.”
How did they get it done? Well, start with this: They’ve had to do it before.
As Mendoza puts it, “We’re very good at disaster remediation here.” And it has been sort of an annual challenge for the DGC staff, with major rainfall causing headaches on the weekend prior to the tournament both in 2019 and 2020. Two years ago, after an extremely soggy May hampered preparations for the inaugural RMC, it was an inch of rain that fell on the Saturday before tournament week. Last year, it was a couple of inches, though at least there weren’t galleries to worry about trampling around the course with no fans in attendance.
But this was the “big one,” as Mendoza describes it. The rain began midday Friday and by 10 p.m. that night, more than 2 inches had fallen at the course. By the time Mendoza returned to the course at 3:30 a.m., it was more than twice that amount, “and it was still raining,” he said. “Everything was completely under water.”
“The pictures were brutal,” golfer Patrick Reed said. “When they showed me a picture off of 10 tee, it just looked like a lake.”
Fortunately, the club had a disaster plan in place, reserving water pumps from a local rental company and then smartly opting to have them delivered ahead of time just in case.
“We called them before the rain started, thank God, and requested they deliver the pumps and not just hold them for us,” Mendoza said. “So we had an army of pumps ready to go, and we were well-armed with squeegees.
“We worked all day Saturday, just moving pumps around, finding different spots, pushing water into drain lines. As fast as you could run around and top off the gas in them, they were ready to be filled up again. We kept 'em going for basically 36 hours straight, just pumping as much water as we could.”
Adding to the urgency was the fact the course needed to be playable Sunday, if at all possible. Because this year marked the first edition of the John Shippen Invitational, a two-day, 36-hole event that showcases Black golfers and serves as a qualifying tournament for PGA and LPGA events.
“With what I saw on Saturday morning, I never would’ve thought that we could get that event off on schedule on Sunday,” Mendoza said. “It wasn’t ideal conditions, but they were able to play golf, so it was a dramatic turnaround.”
And a testament to his maintenance crews, as more than half of those scheduled to work Saturday couldn’t even make it into work due to flooding issues around the city.
Some of the credit goes to the infrastructure here, with a well-maintained drainage system and that original 1916 brickwork in the catch basins. Mendoza and his staff still have the original map from the 1920s when the irrigation system was first installed, so they know where the old clay tile is, what size pipe they are, and where they exit the property, which is relatively flat, all things considered. It helps that he has a pair of superintendents that have been with the club for 20-plus years and know the place well enough they can problem solve in the dark, literally.
“My team did just a fantastic job of pushing through it,” he said. “I’ve never seen so many people walking around a golf course with their pants rolled up, tromping through puddles trying to get things prepared.”
They were prepared for more Thursday, but again nothing like what they got, as an expected passing shower turned into another measurable problem. Not that it took much at this point.
“Unfortunately, we’re so saturated right now that even a tenth of an inch is enough to flood the place,” Mendoza said.
The PGA Tour officials implemented lift, clean and place rules for Thursday’s first round, anticipating all the plugged lies in the fairways. There were still plenty of areas where standing water meant free drops for golfers as well.
The course setup was altered at various points, too, using tee locations that have players hitting into dryer landing areas. Also, some pin locations that might otherwise be inaccessible were allowed Thursday because the greens were softer and more receptive.
But the good news is the forecast looks clear from here on out, though Mendoza is smart enough not to say it out loud.
“So we’re hopeful that by Sunday we’re back to normal tournament conditions that we expect here,” he said. “And can give the golfers a good test and an enjoyable course to play.”
That they can play it all, though, is a pretty impressive feat in itself.
