LEMONT, Ill.-
For most golfers, the year’s first snowstorm means it’s time to put the clubs away. Or book a flight to California or Florida.
But for a small group of friends in suburban Chicago it means putting on long johns, sweat shirts, sweaters, boots, jackets, wool hats and gloves. And, oh yeah, breaking out the snowshoes.
For about two decades they’ve been playing at Cog Hill Golf & Country Club through whatever weather is thrown at them: rain, snow, howling winds and temperatures well south of zero. Anything short of lightning and they’re out there.
“When’s the last Sunday I didn’t play golf?” Jeff Brinkman, a printing business executive, asked himself recently as he drove to the course two days after a storm buried it under a blanket of snow. “I can’t remember.”
In a sport known for its devotees, these guys–all in their 50s–are among the most devoted.
Cog Hill remains open year round, but except for one Sunday each January when a couple of hundred golfers play in the Eskimo Open, Brinkman and his friends have the course to themselves.
“I’ve seen evidence of (others) because we see beer cans out there,” said Rick Morel, a commercial insurance broker. “I’ve never seen anybody.”
The weekly outing traces its roots back 20 years, to a day in late fall.
Richard Schneider was golfing for just the third time in his life when the course began to look like one of those little snow globes.
“The guy I was learning the game from said, ‘We’ve got to go in, you don’t play golf in the snow,'” said Schneider, who owns a fabric business. “I thought this was really cool.”
Cool enough to keep him and a core group of four or five friends coming back week after week.
Except for the snow everywhere after the season’s first storm, the golfers went about their business much as they did the previous week, when it was warm enough for Brinkman to wear shorts.
They paid their greens fees, and grabbed a scorecard and little pencils–which worked out nicely, since ink pens would have frozen in the 10-degree temperature.
On the first hole, they pulled out drivers, grabbed bright orange and green golf balls and placed them on little piles of snow–nature’s tees, they call them–made with their feet. Then they smacked the balls down the fairway.
The balls didn’t travel nearly as far as in fair weather. For one thing, they don’t compress when they’re struck in cold weather, so they don’t fly as far. And when they land, they often stop abruptly, burrowing in the snow the way they would in a sand trap.
Though it might seem players would lose a lot of balls, that’s not the case. On a smooth carpet of snow–where the only marks might be rabbit, coyote or deer tracks–it’s often easy to find a hole left by a flying golf ball.
“All you have to do is find the last mark and dig a few inches ahead and scoop (the ball) out,” Morel explained.
In fact, come January or February when it really gets cold, some balls that would otherwise disappear in water hazards bounce off the ice–something Brinkman said he looked forward to after losing a ball in the still-flowing creek.
It takes more shots to get to the green, but they’re taken quickly. There’s no agonizing about bad lies because fairways, roughs and sand traps are all under the same snow. So are the greens, which means studying the putting surface like pros on television is a waste of time.
There’s nobody on the course holding them up. The snow “cuts down on the riffraff,” said Dave O’Keefe, a lawyer.
Of course, it’s REALLY cold.
In one of the few concessions to the weather, their personal “winter rules” don’t require that the ball find the bottom of the cup. Instead, one of the golfers walks to the pin and draws a roughly 6-foot circle around it with the end of his club. The golfers only have to put the ball inside the circle–sometimes with a putter, if it’s really cold and icy, but usually by chipping it in with a wedge.
If the ball does drop into the cup, they get to subtract a stroke.
“We make up our own rules,” Morel said.
That came in handy when O’Keefe split a ball in two and the others allowed him to hit from the spot where the half that traveled the farthest ended up.
The men say their outings are about more than golf. They point to the hawks in the trees and the way rabbit tracks stop halfway across the fairway–evidence a hawk has left its perch for a snack.
“It’s good exercise,” said Morel. “In the wintertime I feel cooped up, because you are always bundling up, running from one indoor spot to the next.”
They also swear it helps their games.
“Most amateurs overswing,” said O’Keefe, who said the snow forces them to take smaller, more controlled swings. “You’d fall over if you overswing.”
That’s especially true when the snow is deeper than it is on this day and they walk–and hit the ball–while wearing snowshoes.
The men finish their round–O’Keefe’s 76 is the best score–in slightly more than 3 1/2 hours. Normally, they would have been out there a bit longer, but on this day the unthinkable happened: Schneider didn’t show up.
“He’s pulling the old, ‘My wife’s having a baby’ excuse,” joked O’Keefe. “It’s just too cold for him.”
Schneider had expected to play, because doctors planned to induce his wife’s labor the next day. Then his wife threw a wrench in those plans–she had a baby girl about five hours before tee time.
He was back on the course the next weekend.
