When The Good Wind Blows

I hate the wind. I hate the cold wind worse than the warm wind, but from my perspective playing golf in a twenty mile an hour wind, hot or cold, is harder than Chinese arithmetic. Standing on the tee box with a twenty-mile an hour wind blowing in your face is difficult for Tiger Woods, so you can imagine how disheartening it is for someone like me.

It’s embarrassing to hit the ball up in the air and have to call for a fair catch. Tee it low they say. Well, if I teed it any lower I’d have to dig a hole, which I have done from time to time.

A cross wind is no bargain either. Somehow the wind is always blowing opposite to the dogleg. Make hay on the down wind holes you say, but did you ever notice how few downwind holes there are when you really need them? I once played a round when a front came through just as we made the turn, making every hole into the wind. By the end of the round I was ready to take up ultimate cage fighting.

Putting in the wind is not a lot of fun either. Let’s just say, when youre putting stroke has as many moving parts as mine, and the wind starts blowing me around, I couldn’t roll a softball into the Grand Canyon. How do you keep a putt low anyway?

You would think a guy from Texas would learn how to play in the wind, but I haven’t. It whistles by my ears and into my head. Even on those bonus downwind holes I try so hard that I over swing and screw up even that opportunity.

I also hate the way my legs and other things look in the wind; you know how your pants cling to you in funny ways.

And what about my hair? You can see from my picture that I’m not a slick down sort of guy, but that doesn’t help. Keep it causal I always say, but when the wind is blowing so hard that your eyebrows are standing at attention, there is no way the hair on your head survives even with a hat. Hat hair is bad; swirling, grease-ball, bed-head hair is even worst. Imagine what it does to a comb-over?

When it’s cold the wind also makes my nose run and when it’s hot the wind blows hay fever from hell up my nose, so there is no way to win. And although I have no scientific proof I can quote, I swear playing in the wind makes me more tired. Perhaps it is leaning against the wind, or hunching up my shoulders when the wind is cold; whatever the case may be, at the end of a windblown round I feel like someone beat me up.

Why don’t you quit, or at the very least stop playing in the wind, I hear you saying, and frankly I have considered such drastic measures, but that was before the great day. On that great day the wind was blowing a steady twenty-five miles an hour gusting to thirty-five when I caught my last drive of the day on the screws. With three witnesses I stepped it off at 335 yards. Then with a mere 190 yards to the green I hit my trusty hybrid to within three feet of the hole and one putted for a natural eagle on the par five eighteenth.

Needless to say there was a bet and a press, which I won going away. Since that day I have lost more bets than I have won. I have had more bogeys than pars, no birdies and nothing close to an eagle.

But I know there is another one out there, isn’t there?