Wrap up warm: Winter golf is finally upon us

Winter has been a bit like Bernhard Langer this year, a bit slow to get down to business, but it won’t be long now before we start reaching for the bobble hats and the long johns.

Golfers are a hardy lot, and have been braving the weather since biblical times, when Noah popped into B&Q and the chap behind the counter asked him: “Are you down for the midweek medal on Wednesday?”

“I’m hoping to,” replied Noah. “But have you seen the forecast? Anyway, just in case we’re rained off I’d like a thousand wooden planks and two boxes of nails please.”

There’s nothing like winter golf for character building. Firstly there’s the small matter of getting dressed up for it. Once the leaves have dropped, the Greg Norman Shark collection stays in the drawer and your outfit is based more around a recent visit to the Army and Navy stores. And once you’ve turned yourself into something resembling a North Atlantic trawler skipper off you trudge to the first tee.

Eventually you reach the green, but no sooner have you bent down to mark your ball than you realise the gravity of your error. The ice-cold rainwater dripping off your Gore-Tex jacket, which had hitherto dripped harmlessly to earth, now becomes a mini Niagara Falls cascading down your newly exposed flesh and into your underpants. A breach of etiquette it may be, especially when your opponent is in mid-putting stroke, but a small scream is, in the circumstances, entirely permissible.

You soon learn that bending down to attend to your ball, for whatever reason, is to be undertaken as infrequently as possible. Teeing it up for your drive for example. Or removing it from the hole, unless you’ve wisely invested in one of those putters with a suction type attachment on the handle. What you never do is bend over to clean it, with years of experience telling you that seeing your ball turn into a Malteser is infinitely preferable to an ice bath down the back of your boxers.

Where I play, at this time of year one of the hazards is the number of acorns littering the aprons of the greens, many of them semi-embedded and hard to spot. And even if you do spot them, the penalty for bending down to dig them out is too awful to contemplate, and so you take them on, like someone in a sports car with his foot to the floor steering straight at a sleeping policeman.

With similar results.

It is one of the unexplained mysteries of science quite what damage a half-buried acorn can inflict on a speeding golf ball. The iceberg that did for the Titanic wasn’t as lethal as your average acorn intercepting a Titleist, which one minute is skipping nicely over the ground and looking like ending up a stone-dead gimme, and the next minute shooting 90 degrees sideways, cannoning into the bunker rake, before finally coming to rest in an unplayable lie under a bramble bush. At times such as this I permit myself, assuming it’s not a mixed foursome, an exclamation marginally stronger than: “oh bother.”

On the subject of acorns, it’s a good idea at this time of year to limit your liquid intake, as this involves, for gentlemen golfers at least, the seeking out of a suitable tree for recycling purposes.

This involves five minutes of adjusting your waterproofs and another five minutes – especially when it’s chilly – trying to locate your recycling equipment. Which, in really cold weather, occasionally has to be declared lost.

One trick I’ve learned at this time of year is to play in shorts, which might look silly, but at least it spares your trousers from a visit to the washing machine after every single round. But you can still end up, if you have a tendency to hit the ball fat, needing to put yourself through a car wash to get rid of 18 holes of accumulated mud.

At certain times of the winter, however, mud will not be the problem. Once the frost gets into the soil, you can watch your ball soar majestically into the air from a perfectly struck pitching wedge, float gently onto the front of the temporary green, and then take off like a Harrier Jump jet and straight over the out of bounds fence.

Some people are lucky enough to play their winter golf on links, where you can usually get your tee peg into the ground without the assistance of a pneumatic drill, but there are other potentially nasty meteorological features, the most vicious of which is wind.

The Dunhill Links tournament is held every October in Scotland, and one of its supposed drawing cards is the prospect for spectators of seeing people like Hugh Grant and Michael Douglas hitting golf balls. Assuming, that is, you can recognise either of them when the weather, as it often is on the East coast of Fife in October, has everyone wrapped up to the eyeballs and bent double into a gale.

I remember Sam Torrance played in it at Kingsbarns a few years ago, with his head buried inside a windcheater trying to light a roll up, and a shriek of horror which caused Bobby Charlton to abort his backswing was later confirmed as having come from a lady spectator, after a violent gust blew open the door of her Portaloo.

One way to avoid playing golf in inclement weather is to fly south for winter, like some species of bird, and another is to turn professional. I’ve just looked up the European Tour schedule from now until April, and the respective venues are as follows. Sun City, Leopard Creek, Johannesburg, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Thailand, Delhi, Johannesburg (again), Florida, East London (we’re talking South Africa, not Tower Hamlets), Pretoria and Morocco.

Quite what relationship any of these venues has with Europe is not immediately apparent, and while there might be a certain amount of irritation involved in checking in and out of all those airports, you get the feeling that it’s a long time since the likes of Lee Westwood or Ian Poulter threw a woolly hat and hand warmers into the suitcase.

Call me a curmudgeon if you like, but the next time I’m thawing out in the clubhouse with a Bovril and brandy chaser and some bloke on the telly wearing a short sleeved shirt, nicely creased slacks, and a pair of Oakley sunglasses hits his ball into a shimmering blue lagoon, please don’t expect me to ever feel so sorry for him.

Tagged Golf in Winter, Martin Johnson