There is a moment that arrives at the first tee of every cold, wet, badly-windy round that begins the same way for everyone who has signed up to play it. The player looks at the sky. They look at the wind sock above the clubhouse. They look at the second hole, which they cannot quite see for the spray coming off the eighth green. They consider, for the third time since they parked, the small, sensible, entirely reasonable decision to pack the bag back into the car, go home, and play another day. They do not. They tee it up. They top the first one twenty yards into the gorse and walk after it, and three hours later, with their hands the colour of a putter grip and their socks fully through the lining of their shoes, they sign for a card that, in places, is the best round of their year. This piece is in praise of that round. The bad-weather round is the round most amateurs will not play and is, for almost all of them, the round they would learn the most from playing.
What the bad-weather round teaches
The first thing the bad-weather round teaches is that the player has, for most of their golfing life, been swinging too hard. The wind, when it sits in the high teens and is gusting into the twenties, has the same effect on a struck golf ball as a magnifying glass has on a typed page. The flaws the player has been getting away with on a calm Tuesday morning come into sharp, unflattering focus. The high block that, on a still day, finds the right side of the fairway and the player tells themselves was a fade, lands in the right rough on a windy day and is a fully-fledged push. The wedge that, on a still day, sails over the back of the green and the player tells themselves was a clean strike, lands in the bunker on a windy day and is exposed as a thinned eight. The wind is the cheapest coach the amateur game has. It charges nothing in fees. It tells the player, by the close of the front nine, exactly which of the shots they thought they owned they merely got away with.
The second thing the round teaches is that the swing the player has been working on in the indoor bay for three months is not the swing that will produce the lowest score in conditions. The player who has spent the winter trying to add five miles an hour of clubhead speed, on the principle that the modern game rewards distance, discovers, with some surprise, that the round goes more smoothly when the eight-iron is hit with a three-quarter swing and the driver is left in the bag in favour of a hybrid off the tee on the holes that are crosswind. The shot the player needed is the shot they would not have practised under any other set of circumstances. They will practise it now. The next time they play the same course in similar conditions, the shot will be there, and the round will not feel quite as much like an act of survival as the first one did. This is the way the amateur game improves.
The course in conditions
The third thing the round teaches is that the course is a different course in the rain and the wind from the course the player has been playing on calm days, and that the different course is, in almost every important respect, the more interesting one. The bunker on the right of the seventh, which the player has never seen the inside of in fifteen years of summer membership, is suddenly the bunker the prevailing wind is asking them to hit a draw away from. The green on the twelfth, which the player has always treated as a place to roll a putt at, is suddenly a green that needs to be approached from the left side because the wind off the right would push anything held into it off the back. The angles the architect built into the course, which were quietly there all along, become the angles the player has to use to score. The course the player thought they knew turns out to have been a fair-weather acquaintance. The real course is the one the wind exposes.
The bad-weather round also produces, for the player willing to walk it without complaint, a quality of attention that the fair-weather round almost never produces. There is no checking of the phone in a thirty-mile gust. There is no idle chatter about the office on the way up the long par-four into the rain. The player is present, because the conditions do not let them be anything else. The decision about which club to hit becomes a real decision, with consequences in either direction, rather than the slightly bored selection of a seven-iron from one-fifty that the calm round has trained the player into. The round, for the same reason, takes the player out of their head in a way the still day cannot. There is no recursive worrying about the takeaway. There is the question of what to do with the next shot, in this wind, on this lie, to this pin. The mind quietens. The score, frequently, surprises the player on the way home.
The case the round makes
The case for the bad-weather round, in the end, is the case for treating golf as the game it actually is, rather than the game the broadcast and the practice range have been suggesting it is for the last thirty years. The game is not, at its heart, a contest of swing speeds on a still range in front of a launch monitor. It is a walk around a piece of ground, in the weather that is there on the day, with a small bag of tools to negotiate the journey. The player who has only played the game in fair weather has only played half of the game. The other half, the half that involves a hot tea in the halfway house and a pair of dry socks pulled from the trunk and an eight-iron half-stuck into the wind from a tight lie on a fairway the player can barely see, is the half the player will remember in October. The summer rounds blend together. The bad-weather round is the one the player talks about in November, in a bar, with the people they played it with. It is the round the game is, on balance, more about than it usually admits.
There is also a small, slightly unfashionable case to be made for the social fact of the bad-weather round. The player who turns up at the first tee in a forecast that has caused half the club’s members to cancel discovers, on the practice green, that the other people who turned up are people they have not played with before and, in some cases, are people they will play with for the rest of the season. The bond formed in a bad-weather round, in a way that has been remarked on by every golfer who has played one, is the bond of a small adventure shared. The fair-weather round produces no such bond. The fair-weather round produces a pleasant morning. The bad-weather round produces, more or less reliably, a story. The next time the forecast looks unforgiving, do not cancel. Pack the rain gear, the spare gloves, the extra socks, and a small flask. Tee it up. The round you would not play if anyone asked is the round you will be glad, in October, that you did.