Golf Fore the Good

“The forties?” my customer exclaimed. “I can’t imagine playing golf in the forties!”

He didn’t mean the decade; he meant 40’s - as in degrees of Fahrenheit. Either concept seemed, for him, definitely out of the question.

The gentleman lives in Georgia. I’m not sure but I’m guessing that perhaps he is a southern native, so sincere was his shock when I mentioned playing golf here, up north, at this time of year. Even my brother - who has been living down south so long that he now speaks half as much but the words take him twice as long - will play golf with the temps in the forties. I suppose there must be a little Yankee stoicism left in him even after all these years, after all - but please, not to be confused with the baseball Yankees, because my brother’s speech pattern may have changed but he is nothing if not still a Red Sox fan!

Perhaps my client once lived in the north but now, comfortably settled in a moderate southern climate for so long, he enjoys enough year round true golf-weather days to not have to lumber out on the course in inclement weather just for fun.

Or maybe he just isn’t as compulsive with regard to playing the game as some of us, and doesn’t suffer the urge to play golf so overpowering it consumes all thought. It transfixes us.

Just this week I received an email from another client mentioning that he’d squeezed in nine holes the prior weekend. Under the guise of checking in on his summer home, he had headed south from snow piled streets, and drove an hour and a half and onto our little snow free spit of land, clubs in tow. He actually used the words “I got my fix.” He and a whole lot of other golfers- we’re all addicts. We must play.

I was finishing up my phone conversation with my customer from Atlanta. As he voiced his disbelief with regard to playing winter golf my other phone rang. It was my golf buddy. I smiled as I picked up the line and he said, “It’s 43. It’s beautiful out. How about a round?”