Rain delay at the Memorial
The weather during Friday's second round of the Memorial Tournament in Dublin, Ohio was foul for much of the day. At least it was when I started to write this piece in mid-afternoon. It wasn't as ugly as in Toronto, where the wind howled, the rain didn't stop, and Union Station was flooded. But it was bad enough, and caused a nearly two-hour suspension of play in the middle of the day. It also put me in mind of the fact that golf is, after all, an outdoor game. Bad-weather golf is part of the deal.
Mind you, Rory McIlroy, who won the 2011 U.S. Open in ideal conditions, played poorly a month later in the Open Championship at Royal St. George's in Sandwich, England. He finished at seven-over par, 12 shots behind his fellow Northern Irishman Darren Clarke, who won. Go figure. They both learned to play in weather that is rarely balmy, and where the wind usually blows. Hard.
"I'm not a fan of tournaments where the outcome is predicted so much by the weather," McIlroy said 11 months ago at the Open. "I'm looking forward to getting back to playing in nice conditions in America. I'd rather play when it's 80 degrees and sunny and not much wind."
"Eighty degrees and sunny and not much wind?" That wasn't the case at the Jack Nicklaus-designed Muirfield Village Golf Club during Friday's second round, that's for sure. "Nice conditions in America?" Not quite.
But as I say, it's golf. "Nae wind, nae rain, nae golf," the Scots like to say. Well, that should be "gowf," not golf. And yes, it can be goofy golf, and scary golf. The 1895 Open in St. Andrews featured a ferocious turn in the weather that cost Sandy Herd his chance to win. This was in the final round, and the weather, described as a "violent hailstorm," hit for 30 minutes while Herd was playing. As Charles Mortimer and Fred Pignon wrote in their history of the Open, "The greens were coated white and putting became a farce; in Sandy's memory those hailstones loomed 'bigger than marbles.'" Herd dropped shots. The weather soon cleared, J.H. Taylor started his round, and he went on to win." So it goes in the game that can't be played under a dome.
Meanwhile, it's interesting that golfers who travel to the U.K. and Northern Ireland from the U.S. and Canada will play in foul weather there that they would never accept at home. Over there, golfers consider it all part of the adventure. And if they don't go out in bad weather, well, the locals certainly won't give them any sympathy, or buy them a beer, for that matter.
I spent the summer of 2000 in Dornoch, the town in the Scottish Highlands where Donald Ross was born and where he gained his sense that golf should be an adventure. That's what happens when you're the professional and greenkeeper at the Royal Dornoch Golf Club, the stirring links where yes, sun can shine and warmth can descend on the rumpled ground. But just as often—or more often—the weather can turn nasty. Suddenly.
That summer I was sitting in the clubhouse enjoying a Royal Dornoch club ale one day, and looking through the big windows out to a gale. Rain was coming sideways. The weather wasn't fit for anybody to be outside, but then, through the mist, I saw a couple of golfers themselves bent sideways and coming across the final green. The day had finally proven too much even for their hardy golfing souls, as they had cut across from another part of the course to reach the clubhouse. I took my notebook out, knowing this might be something I'd want to use in the book I was writing about that summer.
The men were bent nearly ninety degrees to the ground. They walked across the 18th green and nearly impaled themselves on the flagstick, which they couldn't see. Thankfully, they made it into the clubhouse none the worse for wear. Soaked, chilled, but none the worse for wear.
As I write, the conditions at Muirfield Village have settled down a bit. Players are still in sweaters, and there's some wind. But the worst seems over. That's a shame. I'd like to see how McIlroy and Tiger Woods would handle conditions such as those I see outside my office window in Toronto: Wind, rain. Foul.
Then again, I'm inside. If I were in Dornoch, perhaps I'd be playing. Perhaps.
RELATED LINK: More blogs from Lorne Rubenstein
---
Lorne Rubenstein has written a golf column for The Globe and Mail since 1980. He has played golf since the early 1960s and was the Royal Canadian Golf Association's first curator of its museum and library at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario and the first editor of Score, Canada's Golf Magazine, where he continues to write a column and features. He has won four first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, one National Magazine Award in Canada, and he won the award for the best feature in 2009 from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada. Lorne has written 12 books, including Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters (2003); A Disorderly Compendium of Golf, with Jeff Neuman (2006); This Round's on Me (2009); and the latest Moe & Me: Encounters with Moe Norman, Golf's Mysterious Genius (2012). He is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame and the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Lorne can be reached at rube@sympatico.ca . You can now follow him on Twitter @lornerubenstein