HENLEY-ON-THAMES, ENGLAND | The emails land in my queue soon after dawn. Sent by my golf club and headed “Club Status,” they make announcements such as:
“Course open. No buggies.”
“Fog delay. Course closed for now.”
“Course open. No restrictions.”
These messages remind us that the lazy days of summer have gone and that autumn has arrived in this part of the United Kingdom. This means that the dog days of winter are just around the corner.
Days of exchanged email, texts and telephone calls.
“What do you think?”
“Too wet?”
“Too windy?”
“Too cold?”
“Shall we postpone, or shall we go for it?”
Days when your breath billows out in front of you as you speak the way the wind fills out the jib of a sailing boat. Days when you blow on your cupped hands to generate some warmth. Days of such uncertain meteorological conditions that the part of you that wants to play golf is matched by the part of you that doesn’t. Days when hitting a thin iron shot and watching your ball bound and ricochet over frozen turf has less appeal than swirling a glass full of whisky in the warmth of the clubhouse.
Before experiencing the delights of next year’s spring and summer, one must endure the perils of cold and rain, frost, snow and wind.
Days when you get out thermal underwear, burrow around in a drawer for the thickest and warmest socks. Days when it’s not just the cold that bothers you but the prospect of rain or the aftereffects of it – the damp grass in the rough that grabs at your ankles and soaks your trousers when you step into it.
In “An Entirely Different World,” a glorious essay about the President’s Putter competition, held at Rye Golf Club each January among members of the Oxford and Cambridge Golfing Society, Herbert Warren Wind noted that a competitor once wore three pairs of socks, underwear, pyjamas, a pair of rain trousers over his regular trousers, a heavy shirt, six sweaters, two scarves, two pairs of gloves, a woollen hat and the kind of face-protecting hood called a balaclava.
For the moment though, it is still autumn or fall when the mornings and evenings are cooler and the days shorten, as do our drives. Like labourers treading grapes in a vineyard, we crush fallen leaves under our feet.
Change is the price of progress. Before experiencing the delights of next year’s spring and summer, one must endure the perils of cold and rain, frost, snow and wind. There is no pleasure without pain, and for golfers, the pain is about to begin.
Fore!
John Hopkins
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