Universal damage
BY BILL HAISTEN World Sports Writer
Thursday, December 13, 2007
12/07/12 at 2:58 PM
During ice storm, the sound of snapping tree limbs 'almost sounded like gunfire'
For one week in August, as
the PGA Championship was
conducted and Tiger Woods
was victorious, the Southern
Hills Country Club course
was the most relevant venue
in the golf world.
The 320-acre property
buzzed with activity. With an
average high temperature of
100.3 degrees over the four
days of play, it was the hottest major championship ever played.
But on Monday, during
the development of the worst
ice storm in Tulsa history,
Southern Hills was frozen
solid.
"It was eerily quiet," director of golf Dave Bryan said.
''You just couldn't believe
how quiet it was, except that
every 10 or 15 seconds you
would hear tree limbs cracking and snapping. There was
nothing you could do. You
had to just sit there and take
it.''
Said Southern Hills general manager Nick Sidorakis:
''Hearing the limbs break --
it almost sounded like gunfire.''
The ice storm's exact toll
on Southern Hills and other
area golf courses will not be
determined for several more
days, but proprietors
throughout the Tulsa metropolitan area indicated that
tree damage is extensive.
''Imagine your front yard
covered in debris, and then
multiply that by 250 acres,''
Cedar Ridge Country Club
general manager Cleve
Stubblefield said. "That's
what we're dealing with."
The Cedar Ridge cleanup
process may be driven by a
sense of urgency. On May
1-4, the club is scheduled to
host LPGA's 72-hole Semgroup Championship.
LaFortune Park director
of golf Pat McCrate predicts that both his championship course and par-3
course "will lose some key
trees."
An extensive renovation
of LaFortune's championship course was completed
in 2004. After surveying the
damage on Wednesday,
McCrate said, "It's terrible,
but when you drive
through some of the neighborhoods around town, you
realize it could be a lot
worse."
As of Wednesday, there
still was no electricity at
100-year-old Tulsa Country
Club, the city's oldest club.
General manager Jason Fiscus said the 6,800-yard
course is littered with"a tremendous amount of debris.
We sustained a lot of tree
damage, but I don't think a
lot of tree removal will be
required."
Looking to the south, the
view from the Oaks Country Club's No. 7 green is
considered among the
more scenic in Oklahoma
golf. The west Tulsa course
was hit particularly hard by
the ice storm, club president Joe Mike Lay reported. Nearly half of the club's
1,000 trees were damaged
or destroyed, he said.
"The Bradford pear trees
are all completely gone. We
probably had 100 of those,"
Lay said. "Some of the oaks
will have to come down, but
the native oaks survived.
They're tough."
There are more than
4,000 trees on the Southern
Hills grounds. Some of the
trees date to the 1930s.
Most of the trees that line
the famed course's fairways
have been in place for at
least 40 years.
"It's not good," Bryan
said. "It's like everybody in
town -- we're all in the
same boat. We have suffered quite a bit of damage,
but it's not like every tree is
gone."
Southern Hills has been
the site of seven major
championships. Sidorakis
said the ice damage will not
affect the club's ability to
host the U.S. Amateur in
2009.
"The storm hasn't
changed the definition of
the golf course," Sidorakis
said. "We've got quite a
mess, but we're not devastated here."
Bill Haisten 581-8397
bill.haisten@tulsaworld.com
