The Grill Room: Nae wind, nae rain, nae gowf

Writing from Chicago

Tuesday, January 28, 2025 

For those of us not in the sunbelt – and lately, for many of those in it – golf these long winter weeks of short days means watching it on television or slugging balls into a simulator screen.

Or, on recent weekday nights, watching players slugging balls into a simulator screen on television. In other words, TGL. Tomorrow’s Golf League. (Really, it should be Tiger’s Golf League, but he’s being modest.)

Golf indoors with balls hit into a screen the size of one better suited for a drive-in movie and chips and putts played out on a rotating green that changes its shape more than Jackie Gleason on a diet is interesting, to a point. Seeing notables of the PGA Tour cavort on this playground in prime time is fine, but to what purpose?

Monday night’s contest between Tiger Woods’ Jupiter Links and Rory McIlroy’s Boston Commons was the best of the quartet played so far, decided 4-3 in overtime by a chip-off, like a weekend event at a country club.

However, while there’s money at the end of the line, one more $21 million pot of gold in an endless series of rainbows, the stakes otherwise seem as trivial as some club credit in the pro shop after beating the guy in the next row of lockers. Right now, all we have are guys on teams with names as phony as those in Roller Derby – really, Boston Commons? – playing simulated golf in ideal conditions under roof.

Therein lies the problem. Ideal conditions.

The arena is too comfortable for the players. It should be named Sofa, not SoFi. It’s as antiseptic as an operating room. They don’t need a referee, they need a doctor. Sterile conditions are fine for “Chicago Med” in prime time, but this is golf. As the Scots say, “Nae wind, nae gowf.”

Let’s remodel this new barn and add the reality the rest of us play in. Let’s add wind. Turn the joint into a wind tunnel worthy of testing a jet fighter. Add some giant fans that can put a 20- or 30-mph wind into the players’ faces or at their backs. Or over their left shoulder just to make it really hard.

Vary those conditions from hole to hole and from shot to shot, the same as it is in the real world.

Then let’s add in some spray, a heavy mist at times to further simulate real golf. Let the players feel it, program it into the simulator, and now let’s see how many pixelated fairways are hit. Let’s give that tee-fairway square the ability to tilt as well. No more flat lies in the fairway or rough, please.

Let’s see Tiger needing to hood a 3-iron into the wind from a sidehill lie to reach a green with a back pin guarded by a bunker 220 yards away with some rain in his face. Then let’s see Rickie Fowler try to hit the same shot. Then try to make a curling 25-footer with his pant legs flapping. We’ll hear that shot clock expiration buzzer plenty. (And get that to the PGA Tour pronto, please.)

Then, in lieu of the occasional hammer press, throw in an automatic press the way Sam Snead did to his pigeons at the Homestead for decades and maybe knees will start a’knockin.

Better than some hip-hop music and an artificial heartbeat in the background, no?

It would almost be real golf.

The most interesting games of this season’s NFL playoffs came when it snowed in Philadelphia and there was icy turf in Buffalo. To the pursuit of perfection was added the vagaries of chance. Long ago, thinking of such glorious inclemency, Steve Sabol wrote these words and John Facenda voiced them: “Do you fear the force of the wind? The slash of the rain? Go face them and fight them. Be savage again!” You can almost hear the music.

Golf needs a version of that, something that will make people talk about what they saw on a random Monday night over the water cooler on Tuesday and want to tune in again the next week. 

Or, we can wait for Patrick Cantlay to be funny. How much time do you have?

– Tim Cronin