Crinkly Grass

The old bar joke about everyone looking better at closing time applies equally well to golfers in April, especially those of us who live in the northern reaches of the middle of the country. By the time March rolls around, the indoor golf domes are packed, and if the line of people at Golf Galaxy's cash registers was ever as long as those waiting to try new clubs in its simulators, Dick's would have had to pay a lot more than it did to buy the chain.

We got an early blast of spring in Minnesota this year, and a bunch of courses scrambled to open their doors March 24 to take advantage of golfers' deprived state.

I was out the next day. The greens were brown, hard and pocked with pitch marks from the previous fall. Water remained in some low spots, and the fairway grass crackled under our feet. The trees were bare, the bunker sand hard and wet.

But I didn't resent paying full price for my first ever March round in Minnesota, and neither did the hundreds of other golfers who took every available teetime that day.