Bert McCarty, Ph.D., is the 2026 winner of GCSAA’s Outstanding Contribution Award. He’s pictured here at a greenhouse on the Clemson University campus. Photo by Justin Wojtczak
It started with a tackle.
As unbelievable as it might sound, that’s how the story began of the evolution of Bert McCarty, Ph.D., from an athletic small-town South Carolina boy to world-renowned turfgrass authority — with a tackle.
Or, more accurately, a series of needlessly painful tackles.
“Growing up in rural South Carolina, I played sports,” McCarty says. “To be honest, when you got tackled, you’d get a mouthful of sand, an eyeful of sand or a butt-ful of prickly pear or sandspurs. I’d see college teams, professional teams, and think, ‘There’s got to be a better way of doing that.’ That’s what got me into it.”
It wasn’t necessarily a lightbulb moment, but it planted the seed. And, oh, has it grown. After nearly four decades in turfgrass academia, McCarty has quite the résumé. His Clemson University profile page lists some eye-popping numbers: McCarty is author or co-author of 15 books, 110 book chapters, 120 refereed journal articles, 175 Public Service Activities/Extension publications, 230 trade journals (since 2000), 36 annual research reports and 630 scientific presentations/abstracts. And though it’s clear those numbers are a bit out of date, perhaps that’s to be expected given his prolific pen.
He also boasts a laundry list of awards, to which McCarty, a 28-year GCSAA Educator member, can add one more: GCSAA’s 2026 Outstanding Contribution Award, which goes to an individual or group who has made a significant contribution to the membership through outstanding contributions to the golf industry.
“To be honest, that was a bit unexpected,” McCarty says. “I didn’t know anything about it.”
Tackling turf
Those hard knocks in sandy South Carolina sent McCarty off to Clemson, where he earned his bachelor’s in agronomy and soils in 1981. Crucially, he also worked at a golf course in college.
“At that point, I knew I wanted to go into turf, and at that time golf was the most lucrative portion of turf,” McCarty recalls. “A professor advised me to do an internship at a golf course, and that was what I was doing — intern, summer help, gofer. Whatever. What I did, I really enjoyed, and I knew that was the life I wanted to live. I wanted to be a professional turf person.”
Trouble was, the country was in a recession, and jobs were scarce. McCarty received a couple of unattractive offers — back on a grounds crew, Extension jobs — but “none of them really grabbed me,” he says.
At the time, McCarty’s brother, Mike, was studying agronomy at North Carolina State, and he suggested his little brother join him there in grad school.
“Once I got to grad school,” McCarty says, “I thoroughly enjoyed it and wanted to stay in school.”
McCarty collected a master’s in turfgrass management from N.C. State in 1983, then returned to Clemson for his doctorate in plant physiology and pathology in 1986.
His older brother just retired after a career in ag — “He works more with row crops, like cotton and soybeans,” McCarty says — and the younger brother saw turf as a logical extension of their shared interest in agriculture.
“I grew up in ag,” McCarty says. “The Ridge area of South Carolina is a big peach-production area. But peaches require a large capital investment. I knew I wasn’t going to marry into it, and I wasn’t going to inherit it, so the future for me outside of being a regular worker looked slim. I guess turf bridged both gaps — you get to dip your toes in ag to a certain degree, and the ag-related sciences, but it’s not dependent on markets and stuff like that.”
Three turfgrass power hitters, from left: McCarty, Fred Yelverton and Bruce Martin. Photos courtesy of Bert McCarty
Gone to the Gators
Doctorate in hand, McCarty seriously considered two job offers: Go teach at a local two-year community college or pack his bags for the University of Florida.
The Gators won.
“That was a fortuitous event in my life,” McCarty says. “My adviser at the time said, ‘Go to Florida. You can always drop back and teach at a community college, but you can’t always go from a community college to a major university.’ He was correct.”
UF presented a new set of challenges for the native Carolinian.
“The job intrigued me,” McCarty says. “I didn’t know anybody down there, but I really enjoyed it. If you want to learn turf in this country, go to Florida. Things are tougher there, more demanding, year-round. Turf is big business, but there are big expectations, too. You’re fighting drought, then a few months later you fight hurricanes. You’re fighting pests out the yin-yang. Winter’s their busy season, so you’re trying to keep optimal playing conditions when the grass doesn’t necessarily want to grow.”
At UF, he published the first Best Management Practices book for golf courses in the early 1990s, and that became the blueprint for many future BMP publications, including the Carolinas GCSA’s BMPs for Golf Courses, which McCarty served as coordinating author of in 2015.
He returned to Clemson in 1996, lured there in part by another turfgrass titan, Bruce Martin, Ph.D. Together, they presented a GCSAA Conference and Trade Show seminar on advanced management of ultradwarf bermudagrass putting greens for more than a dozen years.
“When you get to Florida, you get pigeonholed to warm-season grasses,” McCarty says. “I wanted to get back to warm- and cool-season grasses, and South Carolina is one of the few states that provides that, even if South Carolina doesn’t provide ideal growing conditions for warm- or cool-season grasses. But it’s been a good move. I’m glad I went to Florida, and I’m glad I stayed, but I’m glad I came back to Clemson.”
Through the years, McCarty considered changing jobs — or at least employers — but found his heart (and head) belonged to academia.
“I decided I like university life,” he says. “I like being around smart people. I like interacting with students, and I get to interact with industry very closely in my position. I like the university lifestyle, and it’s been good to me. The downside is, don’t expect to be walking around with a lot of 50-dollar bills in your pocket.
“Many people have been critically influential during my career, including numerous professors I’ve had and interacted with, graduate students, undergraduate students, research associates, friends, and family.”
That’s McCarty (the tall one in the back row) during his North Carolina State grad school days.
‘He checks all the boxes’
Fred Yelverton, Ph.D., knows a thing or two about GCSAA’s Outstanding Contribution Award. After all, he was the second recipient of the OCA, back in 2023.
He knows a thing or two about McCarty, too. After all, they were in grad school at N.C. State together, and Yelverton shared an office with McCarty’s big brother.
“I’ve known Bert for an awfully long time,” says Yelverton, a professor and Extension specialist at his alma mater. “Bert’s always been really nice, a friendly person, and he hasn’t changed one bit. He’s very selfless. He’d do anything in the world for you. He helped me tremendously in my career. Usually when something comes up and neither one of us has a good answer, he’s the first person I call. That happens frequently — as recently as today, even. He’d do anything in the world for anybody.”
While some folks tend to specialize, McCarty did not.
“What makes Bert special is, he’s very accomplished in all aspects of turfgrass management, whether it’s fertility, pest management — he checks all the boxes,” says Yelverton, who for more than 20 years has teamed with his pal McCarty to teach advanced turfgrass management and weed control at the GCSAA CTS. “Without a doubt, he’s the most versatile turfgrass faculty member I’ve been around.”
That, McCarty says, was by design — and it’s something he tries to instill in his current students.
“The system is set up so you have to focus on something. That could be a positive or a negative,” McCarty says. “But I avoided trying to do that. I have two agronomy degrees, a degree in plant physiology and plant pathology. That covers a lot of the waterfront. If you have that kind of broad training, you have the ability to understand things — if you do one thing, it might impact something out in left field. If you look at it from the bird’s-eye point of view, you might be able to figure out why. That broad-based background was a struggle, in that I had to take a lot of classes, but I wanted to learn the business from a wider angle.”
McCarty at a Clemson turfgrass field day in 2005. Photo courtesy of Trent Bouts
‘Publish or perish’
Even by academic standards, McCarty has been quite prolific.
“When you look at his career,” Yelverton says, “you’d be hard pressed to find an active faculty member now who’s done more in the turfgrass industry than Bert.”
McCarty wrote the book on the industry. Literally. Despite what his Clemson bio claims, he now has 20 books to his credit — in addition to those hundreds of articles, publications, reports and presentations.
“That old saying, ‘Publish or perish,’ is very, very true,” McCarty says. “I learned that lesson early in life. I decided I knew the rules and I’d play by them.”
Textbook writing, in particular, is a challenge McCarty eagerly embraces. By their nature, the books’ rigid structure stands in stark contrast to the colloquial “let’s-sit-down-and-just-talk” approach to most of his seminars. But they also, in their way, provide the perfect prep for his talks.
“They’re a lot of work, but they force you to know the material forwards and backwards,” McCarty says. “And I think that helps me to be a much better teacher and instructor. If you have the background, you can talk about anything. Very few seminars do I take slides to. You get a lot better interaction when you’re able to talk about things that are on everybody’s minds. And that’s how I learn lots of things. People try things, and if it makes sense to me, I might try it in a research setting. I’ve discovered a lot of things like that interacting with the audience.”
Whether in a seminar setting or just over the phone, Alex Tolbert, the GCSAA Class A superintendent at Orangeburg Country Club in Orangeburg, S.C., has been among the legion of turfgrass pros who have benefited from conversations with McCarty.
“We’re always talking to him about what we’re seeing on the golf course,” says Tolbert, president of the Carolinas GCSA and a 16-year GCSAA member. “Usually, what we’re seeing has a direct correlation to the research he has going on. It’s just a constant communication about what we’re seeing in the real world.”
Also extremely active with the Carolinas GCSA, McCarty is, in Tolbert’s words, “the superintendents’ superhero.”
“Everybody in the Carolinas is very, very grateful of his time. He’s always been there for us,” Tolbert says. “But it’s not just us. He takes phone calls and emails from all over the world.”
McCarty was awarded a Clemson national championship ring because he was chair of the University Athletic Council and had a close working relationship with University Athletic Grounds. Photo courtesy of Bert McCarty
Still going strong
Officially, McCarty has retired from Clemson. But he’s far from retired.
“Yes and no,” McCarty says. “That’s a loaded answer. They lured me back half-time.”
McCarty still teaches. He and Yelverton tag-team the Carolinas as roaming agronomists for the Carolinas Golf Association.
“I still do a lot of troubleshooting, a lot of site visits,” says McCarty, 66. “Retirement, quote-unquote, has been good. I’ve gotten away from a lot of the things I don’t like to do — like writing a bunch of grants, going to committee meetings. I’ve ditched a lot of those things to focus on what I do enjoy. So that’s good, the phased retirement path I’ve been on. I’m thankful the university provided the opportunity.”
And what, exactly, does he enjoy in his semi-retirement?
“I like teaching. I like site visits,” he says. “I like being at golf courses, trying to figure out issues, problems and solutions. I don’t do near the research I used to, but I do the things now that interest me, things that have the potential to impact the industry in a positive way.
“It’s been a great run for me. I enjoy the business. I enjoy the university lifestyle. I still teach and do research. Very few days of mine are alike. Every day is different. It’s been a great run.”
Andrew Hartsock (ahartsock@gcsaa.org) is GCM’s editor-in-chief.