Brian and Birnam: The Green Green Grass of Home

Brian O’Laughlin was born to it – his awkward orientation at Washington State University notwithstanding. “Everybody shows up and all the other students are holding their major signs. You know, ‘What’s your major?’ And I was just walking around aimlessly looking for my group. I asked someone from admin, ‘Excuse me. Where’s Turf Management?’” The woman gave him a firmly puzzled look. “‘There’s no such thing as Turf Management,’” she told him. O’Laughlin looks at me wide-eyed. “I go, ‘Yeah there is. I’m enrolled in it!’” 

O’Laughlin is today Director of Agronomy at Birnam Wood, the impeccably gorgeous, nationally celebrated golf club and community nexus. Yeah – agronomy. A golf course, you see, is a living thing. As you follow your disobedient Titleist through the paradisaical labyrinth of greenery, you may give little thought to the soil scientist whose knowledge base – and dedicated team – keeps this pristine parkland breathing and thriving. At Birnam Wood, that wizard is a detail-haunted guy named Brian. 

“Coming up early on, I used to see how straight a line I could mow. You turn around and look at a fairway and all your lines are just perfectly straight, and it’s beautiful.” An eyebrow arches and O’Laughlin offers a sheepish grin. “I might be undiagnosed OCD.”

Lemonade from Lemons

Designed by storied course architect Robert Trent Jones Sr., Birnam Wood’s links so thoroughly interweave the greater Birnam Wood community, the knockout homes can seem to exist at the pleasure of the fairways. “This is a truly beautiful place as you drive through it,” O’Laughlin says. “The intention is to keep it that way.” The guy isn’t making small talk; he is completely immersed in the mission.

The gated Birnam Wood community flirts with both the pleasantly folded foothills of the Santa Ynez range and the cornflower blue Pacific. Formerly a 220-acre lemon orchard dating to 1892, the orchard’s onetime lemon-packing hangar is today’s palatial Birnam Wood clubhouse, if you can imagine. 

Birnam Wood was recently conferred the Distinguished Club Award of Excellence by Forbes and BoardRoom magazine – an honor bestowed on only 250 golf clubs nationwide. “It encompasses everything,” O’Laughlin says with a warm and settled expression – a guy describing home. “The food, the service, the golf course, the tennis – all of it put together.” Brian O’Laughlin is exactly where he wants to be. How did this happen? Thanks for asking. 

High, Heavenly Ground

O’ Laughlin caught the bug early. “I grew up in Mount Vernon, Washington. My father was a golf pro and I used to hang out at the golf course when I was a kid. I started cleaning golf carts before I was even old enough to have a job – helping out, working for tips. Somebody leaves a dollar on the steering wheel. Wahoo!”

Soon enough the youngster took to swinging those irons and woods, trying like hell to slap a little ball of 1.6” diameter into a hole not much bigger and several hundred non-linear yards away. At this juncture, we can safely assume soil agronomy was not keeping the teen up at night. 

“I played a lot of golf when I was a kid, was pretty successful in high school. I played a little college golf and realized I didn’t have the skills to go pro.” It happens. In his youth O’Laughlin had worked course maintenance for a couple of years before he was old enough to work in the shop. “Once I turned 18, I worked a couple summers in the pro shop,” he says. Tellingly, he does not embellish. By the time he needed to think about a career, he’d made up his mind. “I felt pretty sure I didn’t want to work in a pro shop,” he says measuredly. That left the other thing. 

The Sahalee Country Club is a private golf course and country club located in Sammamish, Washington. In the language of the indigenous Chinook tribe, Sahalee means High Heavenly Ground. “I ended up getting offered a full-time job after school at Sahalee. Over four and a half years I worked my way up the ladder there to becoming the Assistant Superintendent.” From the Sahalee era O’Laughlin moved from strength to strength, as is said of those whose progress has a caste of inevitability. 

Too Slow for Me

Seeking a faster track to more responsibility in the work he loved – “…my fellow assistants at Sahalee were already in their early mid-thirties and had been in their roles for 10 plus years; too slow for me…” – O’Laughlin saw a job board opening at Sherwood Country Club, in a California town with the boldly deciduous name Thousand Oaks. Sherwood flew O’Laughlin down for a chat.

“So I’m telling my fiancée Darcie about all this, and she’s panicking. I’m like, babe, don’t worry. It’s interview practice.” In the event, O’Laughlin showed up at Sherwood hatless and in pressed shirt and necktie – braced for a day of conversation under cool office fluorescence. His Sherwood host, agronomist Neil Edwards, had another idea.

“We spent eight hours driving the golf course and looking at things,” O’Laughlin says. “My face and forehead got burnt to a crisp.” The job offer stunned he and his sweetheart, a golf pro. They’d considered the Sherwood role an outlandish longshot whose particulars would provide an opportunity to sharpen O’Laughlin’s employability.

“All of our friends, all of our family are in Seattle,” he says. “It was time for Darcie and I to make a decision.” O’Laughlin is unequivocal about the outcome. “The support of my wife and the doors that God has opened for me – that’s what got me here,” he says with something like reverence. “Darcie just jumped on board and we moved out here a few months later.” The two had been planning to marry when Sherwood happily barged in, and they followed through before moving to California. “A quick little civil ceremony,” O’Laughlin says. “Both of our families were there.” Two beats. “My grandma was still alive,” he quietly adds, “and she got to see that.” Ten months later Brian and Darcie flew back up to Washington and did it proper. “We had had our big wedding with all of our friends and family. It was a lot of fun.” 

Sherwood to Annandale to Birnam to Happy

A year and a half or so into his Sherwood job, Neil Edwards blithely suggested O’Laughlin apply for an opening at Pasadena’s Annandale “for the experience.” You’ll never guess what happened. Can we suppose Sherwood’s Neil Edwards regretted the recommendation? Negative. In this realm, mentorship is the summit. 

“All superintendents would say it’s a feather in your cap to mentor someone, have them move on and become a successful superintendent. That’s really all of our goals.” Five years into O’Laughlin’s career at Annandale, Birnam Wood’s beloved and recently appointed superintendent Ryan Bentley was tragically felled by a sudden heart attack at 46. Birnam found O’Laughlin. 

“Ryan Bentley was a very close friend of mine,” O’Laughlin says softly. “Caught us all by surprise. It was devastating. And to this day I really don’t know how they knew of me or why they thought to call me.” 

Brian O’Laughlin’s path through the woods has been neither traditional nor predictable. When he set foot on the Birnham Wood soil, he knew he was home. And he brought with him a yen for 21^st century, link-healing tech. 

“The technology has exploded,” he says. Birnam Wood uses two GPS sprayers which take (charming but wasteful) human fallibility out of the course care, saving water and fertilizer. “And that little black thing hanging there, that’s actually a mount for my drone” – a whispering little bot that drifts on scented breezes (we can imagine) some 300 feet above the course, measuring both moisture and photosynthetic efficiency. O’Laughlin next indicates what looks like the eye of a bionic cow nestled in a charging cradle. The Deacon GS3™ Ball collects thousands of data points – surface performance metrics like firmness, green speed, smoothness and trueness – and transmits them to the user’s phone. All you have to do is roll it. Brian of Birnam is on his game. But he is not alone. 

“It’s hard to say that anyone is more important than anyone else because we’re such a team in an operation like this. Rodrigo and Alfredo – absolutely. I couldn’t do my job without their support. But also Ken, my mechanic – incredibly important. Juan, another manager; honestly, the entire crew. The management team at the club give us so much support. Even the support from the members and committees – it all matters!” Does he ever miss the simplicity of his earliest days caring for a course?

“Yeah, for sure. Because walk mowing a green, that’s the stuff we fall in love with. Mowing out fairways… when you’re out there doing that stuff, an eight-hour day goes by like that. So yeah, I do miss that, but I also really enjoy where I’m at. Having reached a goal of getting here and supporting my family and being around a great club, how can you not feel blessed?”

“You’re happy as a clam,” the interviewer affirms, using an arguably antiquated expression. O’Laughlin positively beams. 

“I’m happy as a clam, man.”