Passionate advocates

GCSAA selects a distinguished trio for its 2009 Col. John Morley Distinguished Service Awards: Mark Esoda, CGCS; the late George Hamilton, Ph.D.; and Monroe Miller.

Bunny Smith

Because the Distinguished Service Award goes each year to individuals who have demonstrated outstanding service to superintendents and the profession, the roster of past winners reads like a “Who’s Who” of the industry. They’re all, well … distinguished.

Mark Esoda, CGCS

That’s just what Mark Esoda, CGCS, discovered when he took a look at the list after hearing he was a 2009 recipient. He describes the experience as “surreal.”

“It was just all the folks I’ve looked up to for years and years — guys like Jim Loke (2008) and Eb Steiniger (1988). I grew up in New Jersey near Pine Valley Golf Club, and Mrs. Steiniger was my second-grade teacher,” he muses. “I’m still trying to work through what it means.”

Mark Esoda, CGCS, says he’s proudest of his achievements as a Boy Scouts leader (pictured, below, with his son, Jackson, on a scouting outing) and of his service on state and national association committees. Photos courtesy of Mark Esoda

But one of Esoda’s former assistants at Atlanta Country Club in Marietta, Ga., where he has worked for the past 20 years, could explain it all to him. “He’s touched the life of every golf course superintendent in Georgia,” states Tim Busek, now Class A superintendent at The Manor Golf and Country Club in Canton, Ga.

Busek is referring to Esoda’s leadership in Georgia golf course management organizations and his involvement in the state’s legislation regarding golf course water rights. A member of the Georgia GCSA for 27 years, Esoda served on the chapter’s board for 10 years and was president in 1995-96. He is a founding member of the Georgia Turfgrass Foundation Trust and also serves his alma mater, the University of Georgia College of Agriculture and Environmental Science, on the Dean’s Advisory Council. He is currently secretary/treasurer of the UGA Alumni Association.

In 2001, as the state began drafting legislation restricting water resources for golf courses, Esoda founded the Georgia Allied Golf Council, which comprises the GGCSA, Georgia State Golf Association, Georgia PGA, Georgia Club Managers Association and Georgia Club Owners Association. The state had put the golf industry’s access to water at the bottom of a list of “agricultural” water users.

“I came out of my seat when I saw that,” Esoda recalls. “My first question was, ‘How could this happen?’ We were a political hot potato, and that just didn’t sit well with me. So I waded in and started to work. We’re still doing it.”

The council supplements ongoing lobbying efforts for the golf industry at various levels of state government and developed a set of best management practices for water conservation that were voluntarily adopted by a majority of Georgia’s GCSAA-member golf courses. The state rewarded the efforts with a revised, “golf-friendlier” version of its drought management plan, and Esoda earned a GCSAA Excellence in Government Relations Award in 2004 for his contribution. In 2005, he was the recipient of the Distinguished Service Award of the Georgia Section PGA of America.

“His efforts have been tireless in the state of Georgia as he has been the beacon in the ‘water for golf’ effort,” says Richard Staughton, CGCS at Towne Lake Hills Golf Club in Woodstock, Ga., and former GGCSA president.

Esoda says he’s proudest of his achievements as a Boy Scouts leader for eight years and of his service on state and national association committees that have “had an impact on the membership.” He also finds personal joy in serving his alma mater.

“It’s fun to have an impact, not only on the students,” he says, “but also to show the people of Georgia what golf is really all about.”

His son, Jackson, 18, is a GCSAA Legacy Award scholar at Georgia Tech. Esoda and his wife, Marty, also have two daughters, Addison, 15, and Parker, 12.

The late George Hamilton, Ph.D. (far left), was devoted to the students in his two-year certificate program in golf turf management at Penn State. Photo courtesy of Penn State

George W. Hamilton Jr., Ph.D.

In awarding a Distinguished Service Award to George Hamilton, who died in 2004 at age 43 following a year-long battle with pancreatic cancer, GCSAA demonstrates that dedication lives forever in the annals of golf course management.

“I know that presenting a career award to someone whose life was cut short by a disease is highly unusual, but … consider the significant impact he made on the golf turf industry in such a relatively short period,” poses Hamilton’s turfgrass science colleague at Penn State University, Peter Landschoot, Ph.D. “There is little question in my mind that George’s contributions to the golf course industry would have been tremendous had he lived another 20 or 30 years.”

As it was, Hamilton’s contributions included the invention of the PennPro calibrator for rotary spreaders, the development of the first pelletized mulch made from recycled paper and the use of black sand for preventing ice damage on putting greens. In 1994 and 1997, he was named Innovator of the Year by the Northeast Weed Science Society.

But Hamilton’s most renowned work was in academia. After completing his bachelor’s degree in turfgrass science at Penn State, he worked with Tom Watschke, Ph.D., to establish the nation’s first major research project on runoff and infiltration in turfgrass systems and later earned his master’s degree on the subject of water infiltration in home lawns. In 2001, he completed his Ph.D. on factors involved with ice damage to putting greens.

Following the retirement of Joe Duich, Ph.D., Hamilton assumed directorship of Penn State’s two-year certificate program in golf turf management. During the next 10 years, he trained more than 500 students in the art and science of golf turf management and helped place them in professional positions. His students revered him.

“He always wanted to bring out the best in us and for us to develop to our true potential, and he did this with a positive attitude and an understanding that will go unmatched,” commented Graeme Calder when he had just finished his first year in the Penn State program at the time of Hamilton’s death. Calder is now assistant superintendent at The Cutten Club in Guelph, Ontario, Canada.

Many of Hamilton’s students have gone on to become influential golf course superintendents, consultants and industry representatives. One is Mark D. Kuhns, CGCS and director of grounds at Baltusrol Golf Club in Springfield, N.J., who took a lab course under Hamilton in 1990 and remembers his “deep devotion to his students and to the industry as a whole.” In 1998, Penn State honored Hamilton with the creation of the endowed George W. Hamilton Jr. Graduate Fellowship in Turfgrass Science. Other honors include the 1996 Governor’s Award for Environmental Excellence and the Pennsylvania Turfgrass Council’s 2000 Distinguished Service Award.

Hamilton’s widow, Becky Zavacky, will accept his DSA at the Opening Session of the 2009 Golf Industry Show in New Orleans on his behalf, and said the posthumous honor had left the family, including their two daughters, Natalie and Julia,  “very touched.”

Monroe Miller has led fundraising efforts that have strengthened his bond with his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Photo by Scott Leiphart/EPIC Creative

Monroe Miller

Few superintendents spend their entire careers at a single course, but Monroe Miller belongs to that rare species. The superintendent at Blackhawk Country Club in Madison, Wis., for 36 years until his retirement just two months ago, Miller exemplifies one of the association’s most revered roles — that of mentor.

“During this time, Monroe has trained, by my estimation, over half of the 500-plus Wisconsin superintendents that came through the University of Wisconsin-Madison,” claims John Stier, Ph.D., chairman of the university’s horticulture department.

Miller himself puts that number at closer to 200, but that hardly diminishes the bond he’s formed with his alma mater. As a founding member of the Wisconsin Turfgrass Association, Miller led the group’s fundraising efforts from 1990 to 1992 to build the university’s O.J. Noer Turfgrass Research and Educational Facility, which is today a 26-acre research station complete with offices, classrooms and diagnostic
laboratory.

In 1999, Miller dug in again and organized the successful drive to fund four distinguished graduate fellowships at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Miller says his devotion began with his father, a southwest Wisconsin dairy farmer who was an honors graduate of the institution, and with his own experiences as a soil science major at the school in the 1960s.

“It’s always loomed fairly large in my life. When I was in high school and they asked me which schools to send my SAT and ACT scores to, I could only think of one,” Miller recalls.

While in college, Miller fell under the spell of the school’s revered professor (and 2001 GCSAA Distinguished Service Award winner) James R. Love, Ph.D., whom Miller says told him, “You can’t pay me back; you can only pass it on to those who come after you.”

“I find great reward in seeing them (student interns) go on in the profession — you can’t beat their enthusiasm, their devotion,” he continues.

Miller says he considers himself to be a “working superintendent,” because, he adds, “That’s what appealed to me. That’s also what made me a good teacher.” Yet Miller is a man of many interests and talents — one of them being writing. For 23 years, Miller was the volunteer editor of the Wisconsin GCSA’s official journal, The Grass Roots, which annually won first place for best magazine with an unpaid editor in GCSAA’s competition at conference and show. Several years ago, the Wisconsin State Golf Association honored Miller’s writing skills by asking him to be a steady contributor to its monthly journal, Wisconsin Golfer.

“It’s been a labor of love,” says Miller, who adds that he’s the kind of guy who gets a kick out of diagramming sentences. “It’s a perfect way for me to spend my time — I hate taking care of my lawn.”

On the other hand, Miller, who in 2005 became the first superintendent to be inducted into the Wisconsin State Golf Association Hall of Fame and is the recipient of the Wisconsin GCSA’s 1989 Distinguished Service Award and the USGA’s prestigious Green Section Award in 2004, is loving life in general. He and his wife of 40 years, Cheryl, have three daughters — Amy, Holly and Christie — and, by mid-April, five grandchildren. In his newly minted retirement, he plans to compile and write his family’s genealogy and organize his massive collection of model tractors. And, although he hopes to be able to travel a lot now (“when the weather is good, for a change”), he mostly plans to stay put in Madison, Wis., where neither home nor Blackhawk CC were ever more than a short walk away from the main campus of his beloved alma mater.

“If you love Wisconsin like I do, I couldn’t ever figure out where I could go that would be any better,” he says.

Bunny Smith is GCM’s managing editor.