Diary Of A Secret Club Golfer: Temporary Greens Are Abhorrent... It's Just Not Golf!

It's that time of year again. We are fully in the trenches of winter golf and the prevalence of temporary greens, fairway mats and hole closures is increasing by the day.

In this situation, amateur golfers are faced with a tough choice. We can either accept the conditions for what they are and crack on anyway or decide to snub the opportunity to tee it up until the course is back to its best.

Despite playing a lot of winter golf, I despise temporary greens.

Fairway mats and hole closures I can accept to some degree, if absolutely necessary, but I would argue that golf clubs should be making the brave decision to enforce closures and remove the choice of whether to play or not from the club golfer...

Temporary Greens Are Abhorrent

There are many ways you can play better golf in the winter, but only when you have conditions that are conducive to a reasonable standard of golf.

Temporary greens immediately destroy any semblance of competitiveness or credibility in scoring, so what's the point in playing?

I am almost certain that my opinion on this matter will not sit will with a section of die-hard members that would play in a force 9 gale, sideways whipping sleet and light snow, so if you disagree with my stance head to the comments section below and leave me a line.

Unless you live somewhere with almost year-round sun, you have to expect when joining a golf club as a member that you aren't going to be able to play golf every single day.

Due to the increasing cost associated with being a golf club member, a reality where you might not be able to play every day might be difficult to swallow, but that's life - the course will be better for it in the long run.

The reluctance of many clubs to shut the doors when the course needs a rest is astonishing, but I understand the pressures they are under to provide a valuable service - especially in a time where membership numbers are in decline.

However, keeping the course open and accepting the footfall of hundreds of players surely causes more damage that will eventually lead to a longer period of temporary greens, fairway mats and the horrendously artificial alternate tee boxes.

Once again, I completely understand the reasoning behind introducing temporary greens and other such measures, and I can appreciate the necessity to protect parts of the course through turbulent and destructive conditions at this time of year.

I also recognise the financial reasoning for wanting to keep the course open, but, if the intention is to protect and preserve when the weather turns, the difficult decision to close the course might well be the right one more often than not.

I would argue that hundreds of feet trudging around a wet, soggy track, with balls plugging on every other shot and divots carving the landscape into a bog is not very fun, or good for the course, and charging a green fee for the pleasure is unlikely to drive repeat business.

That experience is often made worse when you only have 12-holes open and a 'green' that resembles a car park at a music festival - as you can't play competitively with any logical scoring system.

Putting becomes a pretty pointless exercise, which eliminates one of the most important facets of the game.

You can get by with a GUR bunker or two, as it's not critical you play the shot from the sand in order to effectively score your round, but not being able to putt on a proper surface is like playing basketball and shooting into a dustbin on the baseline.

In football, you see games postponed for unfit ground conditions. You certainly wouldn't see some ludicrous alternative where they can't shoot at a goal but instead have to run it to the corner flag and roll it into the quadrant to score.

I can't profess to be an expert in the recovery time needed for a course to return to normal playing conditions at this time of year, even with a period of enforced closure, but I would be surprised if having less traffic for a short period wouldn't help to speed things up a little.

Surely most reasonable club members would accept a trade-off where a period of closure leads to a swifter return to fully open conditions on the course - even if this process has to be repeated a number of times over the winter months.

Developing and making use of reciprocal arrangements with other clubs is a great way to ensure members can still play when their course is closed.

Partnerships between courses that stand up well to the elements in winter and those that are perhaps more enticing in the spring/summer can be mutually beneficial for all, and only takes a little forward planning by the relevant committees.

Alternatively, clubs could create partnerships with indoor golf facilities - offering discounted rates on bookings when play is not possible in the traditional sense.

To clarify, I am not a fair-weather golfer. I love to play golf in the winter, come rain or shine, but when asked if I fancy a knock on a 12-hole course with temporary greens, using fairway mats and alternate tee boxes, I'll politely decline. That's just not golf.