Golf courses are at their least photogenic in late winter, their bare trees and dulled, dormant fairways still a few weeks from the earliest infusions of spring color.
But even if the landscapes are not the prettiest, the memories that take shape on the golf course in February can be just as vivid as the ones molded during a Memorial Day buddies trip or a record-low round at summer’s peak.
Winter is when you can learn the basic golf swing and hit a driver for the first time, under your grandfather’s guidance, on the empty schoolyards of early March. You can reflect back to the time when this same determined twosome, one year later, battled through nine holes while staving off an aerial assault from hail and sleet.
There’s the time spent on the high school golf team, when the first weeks of the season passed with little more to do than chip plastic balls into nets set up in the school’s empty hallways, or watch player after player swing a hinged practice iron, often with a frustrating lack of success. The excitement of taking these same swings to the course — finally! — was tempered by the unwelcome discovery of winter greens and a late-afternoon chill that required gloves and three layers.
Ah yes, temporary greens -- those crudely chalked fairway circles with a flag jammed in the middle. Without them, there would be no debating whether holing out from the fairway for the first time should really “count” the same as sinking the same shot on a normal green. It was a bounding 5-wood, eighth hole at North Woodmere Park. The memory remains rich, with or without an asterisk in history’s record book.
The playing partner who witnessed that shot hop and roll into the makeshift hole huddled years later inside a golf cart parked on a frozen fairway in Middle Island. This time he watched from behind a ski mask as an awful iron shot careened toward a water hazard, only to skid off the surface and come out clean on the other side. In the same round, his own perfectly struck wedge landed beside the flag, then ricocheted off and over the green like a vending machine Super Ball. The pair’s earlier gift from the golf gods was now paid back in full.
These are just a sampling of the contents of a single golfer’s memory bank. Long Island’s cold-weather players could share thousands more. Even dressed in pale green and soggy yellow, a golf course in late winter can still make a surprisingly bright stage.
[This column on winter golf was originally posted by Golf On Long Island and adapted for publication in the March 2013 issue of Networking Magazine.]
