When the Wind Is Up

Even the dullest course is improved immensely by the wind, even though it is commonly considered the golfer’s worst enemy. When the wind is up, as it usually is on seaside links and prairie flatland courses, golf is at its best. In the wind everything is made more difficult. Holes normally requiring short irons to get home demand long irons, woods, or simply cannot be reached at all. While lies might invite the player to work the ball one way, the winds frequently insist he play it another way. Downwind shots, even the shortest, become the most testing to keep on the green. With wind all around the player’s ears and a need to multiply the break because of the wind, the shortest putts become uncommonly difficult. A links player finds himself at war during the entire round and this war counts as one of the game’s greatest pleasures. As much as the player can sense himself at battle against a course, he can also be surprised by its beauty and tranquility. Even on the wildest course on a windy day, he can experience a great calm. This is most likely to occur at twilight when the landscape is free of sharp contrasts and one senses, with the coming darkness, a quieting equality. From an elevated tee the player spies out below him irregularly spaced small bands of fellow players working themselves across a shadowed and patched landscape of browns and greens. On the tee’s promontory, the player feels that he belongs to a gentle community, whose sole and benign end is the many pleasures of a peaceful game. These meditative moments, of course, soon give way to the more immediate pleasures of aiming, swinging, and hitting  He cautions himself that a slow swing is better in the wind. He drills the ball into the wind with a low hook to gain the extra yards of roll he needs on the long par five he faces. On his second shot, he swings slowly, seeking a big long arc, intending to hit slightly up on the ball, so he will hit a high fade that will ride the wind and run to the wide open side of fairway from which the hole’s large terraced green opens. With his next shot, he catches just enough turf on the tight, thin, sand-based fairway to put just a little breaking backspin on his long running chip. It slides gently down the embankment and begins a suspenseful movement along the crest of the large green. With his pants blowing in the wind, the breeze humming up under the brim of his hat and around the back of his head, his stroke stays steady and even. His ten-foot putt spins perfectly, without a wobble, faltering only momentarily before it produces the friendly swirl and joyous clunk of the sunk putt. Feeling large-chested, he strides off the green. He alone of the foursome got a birdie on this holeand he knows few today will play the hole any better than he did. A shot can please a player for a variety of reasons: it simply felt good, had a favorable outcome, allowed him to win, got him praise from someone he respects, or proved his practice was not in vain. A shot can please him because it was properly executed, was part of a sequence of good shots, or because it reminded him of the pleasures of a past round he had or of a hole he once played, or because it brings to mind the good he anticipates in future rounds because he believes he can hit that shot again. The pleasures of a golf shot may baffle the philosopher who might wish to build a view of all life on simple and identifiable orders of pleasure and pain. Indeed, the pleasures of a single shot can be too many to enumerate and too subtle to elucidate.