It was like a flume ride, only slower. Golf carts aren't that fast, after all.

But golfers leaving the No. 2 tee at Highland Meadows Golf Club during last summer's Jamie Farr Owens Corning Classic, normally a walk of 162 yards down a hill to the par-3 green, instead rode in carts, their shoes up on the dash, their hands in the air, whooping it up as they drove through water that rose halfway to the hood.

"Thank God golf carts can float," joked Farr Classic director Judd Silverman, looking back on the unusual scenario.

The truly amazing thing was that the golfers and the carts were even on the course.

The 2006 Farr Classic was a freak of Mother Nature. And while it's not nice to fool the old girl, course superintendent Mark Mixdorf and his staff managed to have the last laugh.

"I was looking at my notes from last year; I always review them when we're getting ready to prep for the tournament," Mixdorf said the other day. "I'll tell you, it was agonizing to read them."

If you recall, late June of 2006 was, well, monsoon-like. The first of several major storms swept through the Toledo area on June 21 and by the Fourth of July about seven inches of rain had been registered at Highland Meadows. One week before the LPGA golfers were scheduled to arrive for the Farr, on a Monday night, a storm dumped 1.5 inches of rain, damaging bunkers and lifting Ten Mile Creek to the brim of its banks.

So, the Meadows was soft, to say the least, when the pros hit town. And it hadn't seen anything yet.

On Wednesday of tournament week a pro-am event was washed out for the first time in the 22-year history of the Farr when two inches of rain fell in sheets over a span of just 45 minutes. By late that afternoon, three inches of rain had deluged the course over a 24-hour period and Ten Mile Creek, a tributary of the Ottawa River that meanders through the Sylvania course, came roaring over its banks and turned the Meadows into swamp land.

Amazingly, despite the creek raging to white-water rafting proportions, first-round play began on Thursday morning after a mere 30-minute delay. There were a few flooded areas leading to bridges, and players and caddies were shuttled by carts, but Mixdorf's crew had pumped out 60 bunkers and former Farr champion Meg

Mallon said "the course was great, especially when you

consider there's a rushing river ripping through the middle of it."

If only that had been the end of the story.

On Friday, after a sunny start and a bright morning, the sky to the west turned ashen, then dark gray, then purplish-black. The wind whipped, lightning flashed, thunder rumbled, and, yes, it rained again. A lot. This time, 1.5 inches fell in about 90 minutes. Water poured unchecked out of the creek and there was serious flooding.

And there was a serious problem. The '06 Farr Classic was in jeopardy.

"We have issues out there, big issues," a somber Silverman said at the time.

One of the issues was an LPGA rule that says a round cannot be washed out and must be completed if half of the field has posted a score. When the storm hit and play was suspended at just after 3 p.m., 72 of the 143 players in the field had completed their rounds. Furthermore, the rules of golf stipulate that conditions of play cannot be altered between the start and finish of a round. The 71 golfers still playing had to use the same tees and hit to the same pin positions as those who had already finished.

Greens on the second and 10th holes were completely surrounded by water, but the big problem was the tee on No. 3. It had become an island and the water around it was rising by the minute and the creek had not yet crested.

"Worst-case scenario, when the creek crests that part of the course could be under water for days," Silverman said that Friday evening. "If we lose the third tee before we can finish the second round we've got serious problems."

At that point, no one was even thinking about completing a 72-hole tournament. Even a Sunday finish was in serious doubt.

Enter Mark Mixdorf, who pulled off the Miracle at theMeadows.

The course superintendent at Highland since May of 2001, when he was hired away from Oakland Hills near Detroit,

Mixdorf faced a monstrous task. But he's the type of guy who ignores the scope of a problem and focuses instead on the solutions.

"You don't ever really plan for something like that, but there are always the seeds of a plan in the back of your mind," he said. "We'd had a little taste of it in mid-May [of 2006] when the creek came out of its banks and the course was closed to members for two days. But we hadn't faced the pressure of having the course prepped on a deadline after that type of event."

And Mixdorf faced a self-inflicted deadline. After touring the course with Farr Classic and LPGA officials following the suspension in play on Friday afternoon, Mixdorf was asked when he felt second-round play could be resumed on Saturday.

"I sort of arbitrarily said 11 o'clock in the morning," Mixdorf recalled. "Did I think that was realistic? Probably not. But I knew we could try."

So Mixdorf started calling in his crew. Tournament officials started phoning rental companies to get as many pumps

delivered as soon as possible. Inverness Club came through with squeegees to push the standing water towards the pumps. Tim Glorioso, the director of course operations at Toledo Country Club, offered to call other area superintendents for help, and a good number responded. Steve Brown, the

super at nearby Sylvania Country Club, showed up with a handful of his staffers.

"People got up off their couches in the early evening and came and worked until 1 or 2 in the morning," Mixdorf said. "And they all had their own courses to worry about, too. It says a lot about the folks in this business."

Mixdorf had a plan. He had a dozen big, powerful pumps. He had some portable lighting. He had bodies. He also had massive amounts of standing water, full drains, and a professional golf tournament hanging in the balance.

"The biggest question was where we would put the water," he said. "We couldn't have lakes in play on the course. We basically had to clear the water out of the in-play areas and pump it all into one spot. We decided to make one big, big pond in the out-of-play areas between the fifth and 18th holes. So we positioned all the pumps and started pushing the water towards them with the squeegees."

Ten hours later, at 3 a.m., Mixdorf sent his exhausted crew home to get a little sleep. In the meantime, workers from the Lathrop Company, a local construction firm, began building a temporary, scaffold-like bridge over standing water at the edge of the first fairway to the existing bridge over Ten Mile Creek.

Mixdorf and his staff were back at dawn, using squeegees and pumps to handle some final problem areas, such as the 18th fairway, and pumping out and repairing numerous bunkers. Remarkably, play was resumed at 11 a.m., on the dot, as

predicted by Mixdorf.

"Mark's attitude on Friday evening and his willingness to do whatever it took to get water off the playing surfaces allowed us to have a 72-hole tournament that finished on Sunday," Silverman said. "Otherwise, we might not have played at all on Saturday and we might have ended up with a 54-hole tournament and we might not have been able to finish that until Monday. He did an incredible job."

Mixdorf, of course, had another motivation. After all, the Farr Classic lasts for one week. The rest of the golf season is for the Highland Meadows members. And Mixdorf couldn't allow the course to be devastated.

Grass is like you and me - it needs oxygen to live. And, like us, it can't exist for long under water and deprived of oxygen. Sun and hot temperatures, both of which were in large supply that July weekend after the rains stopped, exacerbate the situation when there is standing water because the turf roots can literally be boiled.

So, Mixdorf had two incentives - save the tournament and save the grass for future member play.

Both missions were accomplished and the Farr, even with a three-hole playoff Sunday evening between champion

Mi Hyun Kim and Natalie Gulbis, was concluded within 2 1/2 hours of its originally-scheduled finish.

"Today, there's not a spot on any of our playing areas that would suggest we had any type of issue a year ago," Mixdorf said last week. "Am I proud of what we did? Absolutely. We faced a pretty big challenge, a great test, and I think we passed."

Mixdorf and his staff passed with flying colors, in fact, according to Robert O. Smith, the LPGA's on-site tournament director at the Farr Classic.

"It's amazing what some [course maintenance] crews can do," Smith said a year ago. "And this one is about as good as I've ever seen."

First Published July 8, 2007, 11:35 a.m.