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As a golfer, I find spring to be the best time of year. March is now when the Players Championship is contested, and when I really begin paying attention to the PGA Tour each season. It is also when I start thinking of warmer weather in my part of the world and teeing it myself. It doesn’t matter that the courses might be soggy and the fairways and greens in sorry shape. It is just nice to be swinging a club again.
My spirits positively soar when April arrives, and when the golf world gathers in Augusta for the Masters. There is no athletic event I have enjoyed covering so much, for the beauty of the setting, the drama that singular course produces with each playing and the chance it affords me to connect with good friends in the game. And there is nothing I want to do more when I return home at tournament’s end than to tee it up some more. Being able to play regularly brightens a mood that has been dampened by months of cold rain and snow. Just as intoxicating are the prospects of playing better in the coming season. Of making more birdies and pars, lowering my handicap and maybe even visiting a bucket-list course or two.
When I think of this time of year, Alexander Pope’s poem, An Essay on Man, comes to mind. “Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” the Englishman wrote, and for me as a golfer, it does that in spades, and especially in the spring. Which is why I found the news about the PGA Tour shutting down the Players and cancelling the next three tour events as a result of the coronavirus pandemic so disconcerting. Then came the postponement of the Masters, and the hope that usually comes with each new golf season was suddenly dashed.
“Hope springs eternal in the human breast;Man never Is, but always To be blest.The soul, uneasy, and confin'd from home,Rests and expatiates in a life to come.”
― Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man
But I am not a man easily discouraged, and I soon realized that while tournaments may be closed down, the courses I normally play are open for business. I can head out with my sticks any time, by myself or with my mates, and I intend to start doing so. I cannot imagine a better way to spend a spring morning or afternoon – or to find relief from the chaos the coronavirus has caused.
In time, the PGA Tour will start up again, and I will be back in Augusta to write about yet another Masters.
One can only hope.
John Steinbreder