We South Africans are fortunate to live in one of the most clement climates on earth, so when the weather gets cold, wet or both, it is not considered impolite to make yourself scarce from the golf course. Môre is nog ’n dag, as they say.
It is not so in other lands. In many parts of Scandinavia, for instance, the golf season lasts less than six months. That’s why Viktor Hovland learned the game on the internet and on golf simulators. In parts of the Far East it is sometimes simply too hot to venture on to the course. By contrast, much of the US PGA Tour is played on immaculate courses in perfect conditions, just about as far from the origins of the game as you can get.
From a South African perspective, golf and rugby share a common conundrum, which is that the inventors of the game never envisaged it being played in our climate. William Webb Ellis could never have conceived of rugby in Durban in February, when the humidity sucks the air from your body and the temperature nudges 40°C.
Similarly, the ancient Scots who used shepherd’s crooks to hit stones across the links-land were doing it as much to keep warm as with the aim of holing out. That’s why golf and whisky are indivisible north of Hadrian’s Wall, because after a few miles of stone hitting in a freezing gale, you’re in need of a stiff drink.
It’s my theory that the Scottish character is to blame for much of what is wrong with the game of golf. A natural pessimism brought on by the weather means that we have bunkers, rough, water hazards and a hole hardly big enough to fit a ball into. If golf had been invented in this country, imagine how different it might have been. No sand, no water, grass cropped close by elephant and antelope and a hole the size of a basketball hoop. We can but dream.
Be that as it may, one of the game’s greatest attractions is that you can play the same course in infinitely variable conditions. The Old Course at St Andrews, for instance, is a walk in the park for the modern professional right up until the moment that the wind begins to blow. Not for nothing do the Scots say ‘If there’s nae wind there’s nae golf.’ In this country perhaps only the members at Humewood and Atlantic Beach can relate.
South Africans do have one weather hazard unlikely to trouble your average Scottish golfer, however; the threat of sunstroke. Many years ago I played with a Scottish pro and his pal at Parkview in Johannesburg. The pal was a single-figure handicap who had got off the plane that very morning. His day job was piloting a mobile fish and chip van around Glasgow and as a result his skin was almost translucent; I could imagine a doctor eschewing the need for x-rays, in favour of holding him up to the light.
We began at 10am on a typical Highveld day; clear skies, cooling breeze, birds singing in the trees. The fish and chip man, in shorts and a pale golf shirt, lasted nine holes. He was then admitted to Milpark Hospital suffering from third-degree burns.
– This column first appeared in the Autumn 2025 issue of Compleat Golfer magazine.
Photo: Warren Little/Getty Images
