The grass at Nationals Park has brought John Turnour to his knees.
Eight hours before the first pitch on a brilliant morning last week, halfway through the Washington Nationals’ first homestand, he’s just mowed his first pass along the checked pattern in the outfield.
Now he’s on all fours, nose to the turf, squinting at individual blades of Kentucky bluegrass, looking for flaws.
When you cut the most prominent lawn in Washington (now that football is over and the White House Easter Egg Roll is behind us), you don’t just mow and go. You get down on the ground and seek perfection.
“This is what you want,” says Turnour, 32, the sun casting his hunched shadow across center field as he squints at a green shard cleanly beveled at the tip.
“But not this.” He holds up a second, slightly more jagged tip, the sign of a steel blade beginning to lose its ideal razor’s edge. Too many cuts like that, Turnour knows, and the high-definition green luster of the field will dim by some tiny degree on widescreens all over town.
“We will change those blades this weekend,” he declares, wiping his hands on his khaki shorts as he climbs back on the John Deere, inserting ear buds so that he and Kelly Clarkson can get back to mowing. Behind him, a crew walks by with the detached head of Teddy Roosevelt, one of the park’s Racing Presidents.
There may be no more carefully coiffed patch of grass in the city than the 2.2 acres of lawn within these outfield walls. In a country that spends $40 billion a year on lawn care, this is sodding extreme. It’s a bonsai pasture, 100,000 square feet of landscaping Zen.
And Turnour is the deeply tanned Zen master. The stadium’s head groundskeeper for the past two years, Turnour thinks constantly of the thousands of eyes on his grass each night, not to mention a few highly paid feet.
