On dry summer afternoons in Alabama, the greens at Bent Brook Golf Course are doing something that may seem unlikely in the Deep South: thriving.

Bentgrass — the cool-season turf used on many championship golf greens — is infamously temperamental in Southern heat. When temperatures climb and humidity is heavy, superintendents across the region brace for stress, disease and sometimes outright loss. But here, on a winding country road outside Birmingham, they’ve proven tougher than anyone expected.

Part of that success comes down to design. Part of it is patience. And part of it is due to a grass variety born at Auburn University.

Together, those elements have helped Bent Brook become something rare in modern golf: a public course built to last.

ent Brook owner, Auburn alumnus James “Jimmy” Coleman Lee III, was already an avid golfer when he first imagined opening a course in the 1980s.

Lee is the fourth-generation CEO and former president of Buffalo Rock Company — the largest privately-held, family-owned Pepsi Co. bottler in the United States — which was founded by his great-grandfather Sid Lee in 1901.

With a deep knowledge of golf and a head for business developed in Auburn’s Harbert College of Business, Lee knew the math of public golf depends on play volume. But more golfers also mean more wear on turf.

Lee’s solution was unusual: build 27 holes instead of 18.

The extra nine would allow the staff to rotate play, resting one course at a time while the others handled the traffic.

“It had to be 27 because you could rest the nine,” Lee said. “Otherwise, 18, you were going to wear the greens out.”

That decision proved crucial almost immediately. When Bent Brook opened in 1988, demand was strong.

“I think the first 12 years we did minimum 50,000 rounds a year,” Lee said. “That’s a lot of rounds.”

Another way to think about it? That’s roughly 140 golfers a day, every day of the year.

The three-course rotation — known as Brook, Graveyard and Windmill — allowed the maintenance team to move golfers while giving turf time to recover from foot traffic, among the greatest stressors for turfgrass.

Director of golf Jeff Alcorn said that commitment to quality has defined the course from the beginning.

“It’s an upscale daily golf course open to the public,” Alcorn said. “It has a country club feel and condition, just to give public golfers a quality golf course. That’s been Mr. Lee’s gift to Birmingham.”

Lee almost stumbled upon the land that now is home to Bent Brook. He was driving along Interstate 459 one day in the 1980s when he spotted a stretch of open pasture and began imagining fairways instead of fields.

“I looked over here and saw this — looked like pastureland,” Lee said. “And I went, boy, it looks like that’d make a good golf course.”

But finding the land was only the beginning. Buying it was another matter.

“I had a hard time getting a loan,” Lee recalled. “A very hard time.”

At the time, the area around the interstate exit was mostly undeveloped. Convincing lenders the location would eventually grow took persistence. Now, the landscape has changed dramatically — hospitals, businesses and neighborhoods filling what was once a deserted exit off the interstate.

“I tell people we beat McDonald’s to this exit,” Lee said.

aintaining bentgrass greens in Alabama has never been easy. Heat, humidity and disease pressure make the turf notoriously difficult to manage.

Around 2010, Bent Brook faced a major outbreak of Pythium volutum — a destructive turf disease that swept across the region.

“We had a bad outbreak,” Superintendent Johnny Perry recalled. “It was all throughout the greens. It came out of nowhere. We didn’t really know how to fight it.”

Looking for alternatives, the Bent Brook team decided to experiment with several bentgrass varieties, one of which was AU-Victory, a new line developed through Auburn’s turfgrass breeding program.

Perry’s team stripped an existing putting green and planted three test plots. Then they did something most superintendents would never do.

“We’re not going to water it. We’re going to see how tough it is,” Perry recalled saying. “And that was the whole test.”

For three years, the plots were left largely alone — just minimal irrigation at the end of the day. They reevaluated the approach annually. By the end of the experiment, the results were obvious.

“The AU-Victory was looking great,” Perry said. “And the other part of the green was stressed and thin.”

That performance convinced the Bent Brook team to move forward with a full renovation using AU-Victory, making them the first course to fully implement the bentgrass variety developed at Auburn.

The biggest surprise wasn’t that the grass survived Alabama’s summers, but how well it handled stress. When Professor Emeritus Dr. Edzard van Santen — the breeder who developed AU-Victory — came up to examine the turf’s roots within the first year after installation, he found roots 10-12 inches deep.

Deep roots allow the grass to access moisture far below the surface — a critical advantage during periods of extreme heat. Soon, other courses in the area took note of Bent Brook’s success, and the course’s leadership offered guidance to their peers in the care and maintenance of AU-Victory.

“The more I try to kick this grass’s — excuse my language, but — ass, the better it responds,” Perry said, laughing.

The real danger, he discovered, wasn’t drought, but water. Overwatering — especially during intense heat — can damage bentgrass by trapping moisture and reducing oxygen around the roots.

“So, I literally have a rule: If I catch anybody dragging a hose after 11, I say, ‘Stop. It’s fine,’” Perry said. “It likes to be drier. It really does well in the stress and heat.”

The AU-Victory variety was first developed by van Santen and produced by Mountain View Seeds.

“Dr. Edzard van Santen specifically focused on selecting a bentgrass variety for heat and drought tolerance that would be adapted to the U.S. transition zone and further south,” said Auburn Professor of Turfgrass Management Professor Scott McElroy. “Northern breeding programs also select for these qualities, but selecting for these specific characteristics in Alabama really challenges the various selections to survive.”

early four decades after opening, Bent Brook remains a fixture in Birmingham’s public golf community.

The solid-wood clubhouse furniture still shows the gentle wear of decades of golfers passing through. The staff includes longtime employees who have helped maintain continuity through years of change.

Lee said that stability — along with a shared commitment to the course — has been central to its success.

“You’ve got to have a great superintendent,” he said. “Johnny has just done a great job consistently.”

But Perry and Alcorn say the true testament is in the course’s leader.

“You can’t do justice to what he’s done for golf in Alabama,” said Alcorn, who has worked at Bent Brook for 18 years. “He never turns down an opportunity to support a junior event. It costs us a lot of money to do so, but for him it’s never about the cost.”

That investment in the future of golf pays dividends. Bent Brook was the first purely public course to hold an amateur, the Alabama Golf Association’s State Amateur Championship, in 2004. And when the world came to a halt in 2020, Bent Brook was able to weather the storm.

“We were ready to close,” Alcorn said honestly. “But we held out. And when everyone could get outside again? Boom.”

Golf has changed in the last decade, according to Alcorn. It’s more accessible than ever and has wider interest thanks to attractions like Top Golf. Golf play nationally is up 40% since pre-pandemic numbers, he said.

“It’s always been true, but I think it’s more understood than ever that it is really about having fun,” Alcorn said. “It’s about getting out, getting some exercise. That’s always been true here.”

McElroy described Bent Brook as “what golf needs to be.”

“If we want golf to grow in Alabama, we need to be looking to Bent Brook as an example of how to grow the game of golf through publicly available courses,” he said.

“They also took a risk and trusted Auburn researchers to provide a cultivar that would benefit our southern climate,” he continued. “They looked at our data and trusted us in what we were providing. This was immense in helping AU-Victory to get off the ground — or in the ground, so to speak.”

McElroy said Bent Brook remains a quality partner to the Auburn turfgrass program, creating potential for training and internship opportunities for students.

“They want to see golf grow in the state, and they know it starts with training the next generation of golf course managers,” he said. “We have also been in discussion with them about the development of a turfgrass research area at Bent Brook to expand our research areas to the Birmingham area. This would put our research trials on a golf course and expand our ability to conduct research right in the area where most of our golf courses are located.”

Perry — who has worked for Bent Brook for more than 30 years — and Alcorn agreed there is one other crucial ingredient to Bent Brook’s continued success.

“I couldn’t work for a better guy,” Perry said of Lee. “We get to come to work, do our jobs and do them well, working for someone who always listens to our ideas. Because of him, we can do our jobs and make this place the best we can.

“That’s really special.”