Snow Golf...Yes, Snow Golf...Really!

I was born and raised in the winter climes. A four-year college escape to North Carolina and a one-year hiatus in southern Ohio did little to disconnect my nervous system from the effects of snow. I have hit golf balls off mats, from heated stalls, onto ranges covered with the white stuff. I did, on occasion, play across completely frozen golfing grounds, when the weather was dry, the air was crisp and the green grass, abundant…

Yet nothing prepared me for snow golf.  True snow golf.

The Buffalo Olmstead Parks System (the only big city park system run solely by volunteers, they tell me) put on Flurrious! in 2011. A winter carnival of sorts, Flurrious included a six-hole snow golf tournament, played out over the normally-benign Delaware Park Meadows golf course. Designed by Anonymous, a 20th century poet and philosopher, DPM notes among its challenging elements the positioning of enormous trees directly in front of at least three putting surfaces (not to mention a par three whose green may only be reached through a curling canopy of arbor.) Some call it quirky, others don’t, but DPM is a player’s course…in winter.

David Hoover, director of the Olmstead Parks, set up the snow golf course with serious ambition. Holes measured 280, 310 and 155 yards. Had we been using ProVs, gutties or even featheries with scars, things would have been ducky. We weren’t. Fresh out of the box platform tennis balls, with surfaces smooth as … platform tennis balls, reminded us that dimples and scars are what keep golf balls airborne. We were lucky to smash one of those pink eggs 75 yards. Roll? Forget about it. The PBs hit the powdery white stuff and dove under as fast as cars. After the first tee ball, we determined that stationing a spotter some 50 yards out was the only method for preserving our preciously-brief supply of balls. Among our foursome, we succeeded in losing only one ball, so our method and aim were true.

After the tournament ended, we gave Dave our ideas for ways to improve the course for year two-2012: drag the course with snowmobiles to create firm fairways; shorten the holes to 225 yards for par fives, 150 yards for the par four; make the putting surface a few inches above the ground, so that the hula-hoop liner sits on the snow above the hole, mimicking the real breach in a golfing green.

We wandered back to our cars, blisters already formed and swelling on our feet, thankful for the chance to run the virginal meadow of Delaware Park, swatting at pretend golf balls, playing at springtime.