THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 14, 1996 TAG: 9604100042
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K7 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: MY JOB
SOURCE: BY KRYS STEFANSKY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
GRASS IS BLISS. So more grass is more bliss. Mowed to just the right height and green enough to eat. No dandelions. No weeds.
To Tracy K. Perez, a back yard is small potatoes. A golf course in spring, now there's a challenge.
Six years ago she found 90 acres of turf to cut, coddle and tease into verdant perfection at Hell's Point Golf Course in Virginia Beach.
Perez is its foreman and greenskeeper. The woman who makes the divots disappear.
``Right now everything's starting to kick in,'' she says, blue eyes critically scanning the fairways edged with pine forest. ``The bermuda's coming out of dormancy, and we just finished spraying weed killer and pre-emergents for crabgrass.''
She's busy now, long brown ponytail blowing in the wind, riding a small John Deere tractor back and forth over the green, spraying the grass with a wetting agent.
``This is bentgrass,'' she says, poking a boot toe at the velvety carpet underfoot. ``It's cut low so we have to baby it a little.''
Five days a week and every other weekend starting at sunup, Perez is on the job babying 18 holes, the fairways and the roughs. The work has its hazards. She has to keep an eye on golfers intent on their game, like the one this morning in the Green Bay Packers sweatshirt who's coaxing his ball onto the green with a ``Get up there, you sissy.'' Perez was hit once with a ball that put an egg-sized bruise on her chest.
But there are payoffs.
The course is within spitting distance of Back Bay. It's a registered bird sanctuary and boasts its share of wildlife. Between putts, golfers can enjoy jumping fish, grazing deer, circling hawks and a sense of peace and quiet.
Perez favors hole number five. It has a view of the water across the rolling landscape.
``I like to sit out here in the afternoon when everybody leaves,'' she says later. ``I like being outdoors. I'm a do-it-all kind of gal.''
She's got to be versatile. The course, with its sandy soil, lakes and canals of brackish water, can be a challenge to maintain. All year long, she sweats over rainfall totals, droughts, sodium levels in the irrigation ponds, and southwest winds that can flood the course and spoil the greens. She's learning to tinker with the irrigation system and fix leaks. She has a certificate that proves her knowledge of lawn chemicals.
But more than anything, she likes to cut grass. Even after 15 years.
``You can put me out on the fairway with a mower and I'm happy all day,'' she says, laughing. ``You can get those straight lines going and it looks cool. I used to be the fairway queen before I became foreman.''
In summer, she and her crew mow the fairways two or three times a week and push walk mowers over the greens daily.
She loves pinstriping the green.
``It's pretty,'' she said, ``You mow a different pattern every day so when it grows, you get a checkerboard effect. I like that job. It's exercise.''
She jokes that she has ``guy muscles'' in her arms and legs. And she doesn't mind working in the heat. Summer days when the thermometer reaches 95 degrees, Perez is in her element.
Working with nothing but men all day has been ``interesting,'' she says. She gets along with them just fine. At home it's no different. Perez, 33, is a single mom with three boys.
That's part of the reason she says she doesn't play golf. ``With three kids, I don't have time.'' The fellows at work tried to teach her once and she gave it a shot on the driving range, but it's not her game.
``Golf just never appealed to me as a sport. I just like the work,'' she said. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
CHARLIE MEADS/The Virginian-Pilot
As foreman and greenskeeper at Hell's Point Golf Course in Virginia
Beach, Tracy Perez has acres of grass to fertilize and keep mowed.
by CNB