Golf Fore the Good

It was more than a weather window. It was more like the barn door was left open. And apparently every one of the damn horses had escaped and were lined up on the tee at the local municipal golf course for a mid January run.

Call us golfers crazy, but you would have been well outnumbered today at courses all over Cape Cod. It was worth every minute of the hour and a half wait to get out and play eighteen holes.

Our bitter winter weather had broken and slowly improved day by day since the weekend. My golf buddies and I thought maybe the fact that it was Tuesday would serve to thin out the hordes. Weekends at the course can get jammed when our fairways are snow free and it seems everyone else’s north of the Mason Dixon line lie buried under the white stuff.

Local practice defines that there be no scheduled tee times from November until spring. It is catch as catch can, with no rangers and a skeleton staff in the clubhouse. When along comes a day in the fifties, blue sky and a fairly stiff but warm southern wind… that’s just too much to resist if you’re the kind of golfer who keeps their clubs handy all winter. We have a lot of those in this neck of the woods; stubborn Yankees too stupid to come in from the cold but smart enough to recognize a good thing when it comes along. When you add in the transients, escaping their own courses that lie in the snow belt just to the north of us, the line for the tee can get tremendously long.

Tuesday or not, we thought we’d face about a half hour wait. “Two hours” a dejected couple said to me as I jaunted across the parking lot toward the clubhouse and they plodded back to their car. You would have thought they were giving away Titleist Pro V’s by the dozen if the crowd for the tee was any indication. Carts and bags and golfers nearly dancing with joy snaked from the tee box around the shack and half way down the hill to the practice green. Hurry up and wait.

There were too many golfers to even count foursomes and do the math to know how long it might truly be before we reached the tee box ourselves. For some reason, it didn’t seem to matter. Facing a delay like that if we’d booked a tee time would have been hugely frustrating. But this day was a gift and even waiting in line, slowly edging toward the tee, was a joy, just to be outside without layers and layers of clothing and winter gear. The company was good and the weather was great. Barely a murmur of complaint was heard up and down the line. Everyone of us standing there waiting to stride down the fairways knew just how lucky we were to be at the golf course and not somewhere else.

None the less, one member of our threesome grew antsy. Temporarily satiated after whacking a bucket of balls, the extended delay to get out to play was no longer appealing. Or I have another theory; because this golfer was only days away from a steamy tropical vacation, a fifty five degree day just wasn’t that special. This lack of enthusiasm worked in our favor. Reduced to a twosome we were invited “up the line” by another twosome and cut a good sixteen minutes or more off our wait time. In a mere 90 minutes from check-in we were making our way down the first fairway.

Good things come to those who wait. The next four and a half hours were proof of that. Golf in the dead of winter in your shirtsleeves in New England; it doesn’t get much sweeter than that.