He looks at the greens, seeing how firm they are when the balls land. He wants to know how true they roll on a putt and whether the daily pin placements are as good as everyone thought they be early that the morning, before play began.
He surveys the fairways, making sure there are no places where the grass looks stressed or discolored. He wants to see everything well-manicured and he searches for loose divots that have not been replaced.
At the bunkers, he even checks to see that the sand has been raked smooth and in perfectly straight lines.
Campion is the Director of Golf Courses and Grounds at NCR and this past week that’s meant making sure the South course meets all the USGA’s championship requirements and that it has given all the women in the field – “120 of the best senor women golfers in the world,” he stressed to his NCR greens crew -- a stern, but fair test.
In the process, he also wants to make sure the course looks good, both to the crowd that’s flocked to the famed Kettering tract and the national TV audiences. If that happens he said it not only reflects well on NCR Country Club and its membership, but the surrounding Dayton area.
“This is a marque event that is huge for the region,” he said.
Early Saturday morning you got to see some of the extensive preparation that goes just after dawn.
The pin placements are changed daily and, as the old saying goes, “it takes a village.”
The scene I watched on the ninth green was repeated on the other 17 massive putting surfaces as well.
As Campion observed, five people busied themselves with myriad tasks before the new hole was cut into the perfectly trimmed bent grass surface.
Two USGA officials used a tape measure to line up coordinates as if they were working a buried treasure map that took them to the exact right spot.
Campion said the pin placements for all seven days of the tournament – three days of practice preceding the four actual days of play – had likely been chosen “six to eight months ago.”
Before that, the USGA competition director had walked the course several times, played it and observed other people’s rounds of golf.
Paul Jacobs, the USGA agronomist, showed up at each green Saturday with a TruFirm golf green hardness indicator that utilizes a hemisphere-shaped impact hammer that mimics the shape of airborne golf ball making an indentation in a green.
Then he used a stimpmeter, a long, V-shaped chute from which he’d roll three golf balls onto the green and, with some quick mental math, was able to check the speed and accuracy of the putting surface.
Finally, when the exact spot was confirmed, the hole was cut by Steve Stockelman, the assistant superintendent of the North Course, who was assisted by Jim Dillard from Columbus, one of over 400 volunteers from 10 states who are helping put this tournament on.
Campion has been arriving at the course at 4:30 each morning to begin a long list of daily preparations.
He meets with his staff and then goes out to four of the greens and turns on towering portable lights that had been towed out the night before. That way the workers can begin prepping the greens and nearby bunkers in the predawn darkness.
He also gets the driving range ready for the players who will hit balls before their rounds.
He and his crew have been working 15-hour days this past week, but the payoff comes in moments like the one Saturday when LPGA legend Amy Alcott, a World Golf Hall of Fame player who also designs courses, offered an unsolicited assessment:
“The course looks great. It’s just in great shape. They’ve done a good job.”
And a bonus for the 52-year-old Campion comes in other unexpected ways, too.
The two courses cover some 340 wooded areas and if you add in nearby Moraine Country Club and the Mead Estate it’s like a 500-acre oasis right in the middle of Kettering.
Campion talked about regularly seeing deer in the early mornings on the driving range. There are coyotes and fox and his wife Marcie, who was visiting him at his office the other day, said they’d seen a bobcat once.
And then here was the scene late Thursday, as the last group of three players finished their opening round on the front side of the course.
As they came down the seventh fairway, a wild turkey strutted right behind them.
Positive sentiments from players
Campion’s greenskeeper genes first showed when he was a kid growing up in the Northridge area, south of Vandalia.
“I mowed lawns in the neighborhood for a few years and then I bought my own mower and mowed even more,” he said.
His dad helped him get a job at Kitty Hawk public golf course when he was a 16-year-old student at Chaminade Julienne. A couple of years after graduation, he enrolled at Clark State Community College to get an associate’s degree in Turf Grass Management.
After a six-month internship at Baltimore Country in Maryland, he returned home and, as he finished his studies, he worked on the crew at NCR.
That was 1991 and eventually he became an assistant greenskeper and, in 1999, was hired as the golf superintendent of NCR Country Club.
Over the years he’s overseen massive improvement projects on the courses. In 2003 a $2 million irrigation system was put under the South greens and over 30 aces of fairways were redesigned and reseeded.
In 2013 the South Course’s 18 greens and two practice putting surfaces were regrassed with over 165,000 square feet of sod and 300 tons of sand and soil
Soon after that the bunkers were redone.
Campion prepared the course for the 2005 U.S. Senior Open and it was a walk in the park compared to nightmare his predecessor faced at the 1986 U.S Women’s Open here when the tournament was hit by rain, an earthquake, swarming locusts and a Miamisburg train wreck that left a toxic cloud blowing in and out of the area for five days. The challenges this year – excessive days of heat in June and seven inches of rain in early July – were minor.
Some areas of grass couldn’t handle both the heat and wetness, but milder temperatures recently – and some hard work -- helped alleviate that.
Campion said: “The sentiments have been very positive from the players.”
Family commitment
During a late morning lull the other day, I found Campion in his office, which is at the end of the turf center barns off the first fairway.
Mounted on the wall behind him was the replica scorecard of Arnold Palmer’ final two rounds of competitive golf. They came at the 2005 Senior Open here when he shot an 81 and an 85 for a 166 total. He missed the cut,
Ironically the legendary JoAnne Carner, who is 83 and shot her age twice, finished with a 166 and missed the cut here this week. Afterward she said this would be her last U.S .Senior Women’s Open.
A plaque honoring Campion’s work hung on another wall, but he never mentioned it. He is a man who doesn’t like to toot his horn or even draw attention.
In front of him a large-screen TV was tuned to the weather channel.
Marcie -- who is recovering from hip replacement surgery 2 ½ weeks ago and just graduated to a cane – said it takes an entire family’s commitment to a job like her husband’s.
She has a PhD in nutrition from Cal-Davis. They met on a blind date that proved visionary.
She and the boys would visit Jim on Mondays when NCR was closed and they’d have picnics and go on cart rides.
In the winters, Jim and some of the other workers learned to tap the trees and make maple syrup.
She opened up the small refrigerator in her husband’s office and took out a bottle of the dark colored sweetness.
Gabe, who is 21, used to work on the greens crew and 16-year-old Sam hopes to begin work here next year, Middle son Ben, who is 19 and goes to Ohio State, has been returning each day to work the tournament.
Many people in the golf community have done the same. Campion mentioned several area golf superintendents who are volunteering this week and a few of them brought some of their workers with them.
And the other night, after a long day, several of them joined Campion for a real treat.
“We got done a little earlier, about 9, and we went over to the seventh tee on the North Course and they all were taking pictures of the sunset,” Campion said.
“All these guys from other courses over here taking photos and enjoying themselves, that was pretty special.”
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