Rough justice: Inside the Ryder Cup golf course where grass is grown to trip up Team USA

The gates in the walled perimeter of Marco Simone Golf Club were shut for three weeks, other than to allow a couple of secretive scouting trips by each team. No one else was allowed in, not to snoop around and certainly not to swing a golf club on the perfectly manicured turf. Inside, a team of 20 greenskeepers and more than 100 volunteers have been working around the clock to welcome Europe, America and more than 100,000 spectators to the 2023 Ryder Cup.

It is a beautiful setting in the Lazio countryside surrounded by terracotta hill-towns and undulating farmland. The highest point of the course, the 12th tee, holds panoramic views all the way to Rome. Now the head greenskeeper, Lara Arias, is putting the finishing touches on the 350-acre plot, having spent three years preparing for this moment.

“I explain to the team that we don’t have time to make mistakes,” Arias says. “If someone chooses the wrong setting on the machine – for example, I’m going to make this higher cut of 9mm, but I choose 4mm – then we are going to make a ‘scalp’... this is something that doesn’t recover in a few days.”

Part of Arias’s job is usually to indulge in some aesthetic idealism, to present Marco Simone at its most pristine. But the Ryder Cup is not about looks.

“When I host the Italian Open the most important thing for me is to make sure the golf course is in perfect condition, so people see it on TV and think ‘it looks great’ or the players say ‘oh Lara, the course is in really good shape’. But in the Ryder Cup, it’s true that we feel like we are involved on the European team, and we want to help them become a winner.”

The Ryder Cup has a storied history of collusion between captains and course superintendents. Paul Azinger knew his American team could drive the ball further than the Europeans in 2008, and he made sure Valhalla was set up with tee positions that would force their rivals to contend with far more hazards.

In 2016 at Hazeltine, Minnesota, the US tripled the size of the first cut of rough from 5ft to 15ft, then slashed the thickest grass down to two inches. It meant their big bombers – JB Holmes and Dustin Johnson were the PGA’s top two in driving distance that year – could let rip, free of punishment for missing the fairway, and it helped them to a commanding 17-11 win. The US set up a drivers’ course again at Whistling Straits two years ago, although they could have planted forests of bamboo and still come out on top against a beleaguered European team.

In between those two American Ryder Cups, Arias was on the groundskeeping team that produced a driver-killing course at Le Golf National in Paris in 2018, where Europe won convincingly. And although this time there have only been fleeting conversations with European captain Luke Donald, she plans to make something equally brutal in Rome.

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The bentgrass on Marco Simone’s greens is common in the cooler climates of the British Isles and Scandinavia, home to the majority of the team; the fairway grass is paspalum, increasingly found in warmer climates including Rory McIlroy’s home course in Florida; but it is the rough where Arias hopes to make the difference, having spent months growing thick, hungry fescue, the sort that swallows balls and twists clubheads that dare swing through it.

“The objective when the Ryder Cup is in Europe is for thick rough to be a penalty,” she says. “We are going to set up the golf course to help the European team. This is part of the tournament. When they see the golf course, even the American team will know that it is better for Europe.”

The lines of division between the US and European golf are not as clear as they once were. It is becoming harder and harder to be a short-hitting ‘accuracy player’ and succeed at the top of golf – these days you need to have precision and distance – and the data suggests this year’s teams share comparable driving statistics heading to Rome.

Even so, Arias is confident she can impact the outcome on a course familiar to most of the home players. Scotland’s Bob MacIntyre won the Italian Open at Marco Simone last year, beating Ryder Cup teammate Matt Fitzpatrick in a playoff. In 2021, fellow Team Europe rookie Nicolai Hojgaard edged out another teammate this week, Tommy Fleetwood. They know the pitfalls better the Americans, so the theory goes that the greater the punishment, the greater Europe’s advantage.

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Arias is closely supported by her partner, fellow turf specialist Alejandro Reyes, and their dog – an Australian shepherd named Ryder. “It was very easy to choose her name,” she laughs. Dogs are not allowed on the golf course at Marco Simone but Arias had it written into her contract that Ryder would get special dispensation, and she has become part of the team. “She is a princess,” says Arias.

Soon Ryder’s peaceful home will welcome thousands of rowdy spectators through its gates. After three years of build-up and a month shut off from the outside world, Marco Simone is finally ready to host the Ryder Cup – and to shape the story.