Wind: Golf’s least forgiving element

From a scoring standpoint, wind is golf’s least forgiving element.

A player can adjust to rain. It takes rain-resistant clothing, an understanding of what wet conditions do to the mechanics of ball flight, and composure.

More from Pro Golf Now

• Golf Rumors: LIV set to sign Masters Champion in stunning deal
• Fantasy Golf: Grant Thornton Invitational DFS Player Selections
• Brutal return leaves Will Zalatoris looking towards 2024
• Stars You Know at World Champions Cup Starts Thursday at Concession
• Fantasy Golf: An Early Look at the 2024 Masters Tournament

But the game’s best make those adjustments all the time. They even root for rain because it softens a course, making going for a pin similar to dart-throwing.

You can adjust for temperature extremes. Granted, a ball flies farther in hot, dry conditions and travels shorter in cold air. But that’s merely a matter of taking one more or one less club.

But sweep a 40 mph wind across a course – such as occurred Saturday at Riviera – and chaos ensues. There’s a perfectly good reason for that. Just try going out in such a wind and making a solid, compact, powerful swinging motion without losing your balance.

And if a player, even a highly talented one, can’t control his body through his swing because it’s being buffeted in multiple directions by an outside force, then golf is no longer a game of skill. It is reduced to a game of chance, if at that point it is a game at all.

Anybody who has attempted to strike a golf ball along a pre-determined line with a club in such blustery conditions understands the problem. That’s why play had to be suspended during the third round of the Genesis at Riviera.

You didn’t need an anemometer to measure the way wind turned Riviera Saturday from a golf course to an extremely large, tree-lined roulette wheel. All you needed to do was look at the scores.

For however many holes he got in during the wind Saturday, the average player shot 75. That was five strokes higher than those who made the cut averaged on the same course either Thursday or Friday.

On Thursday there were 41 under-par scores turned in. On Friday there were 44 more.

Now about Saturday. At the time play was suspended only 14 players had managed to break par for the day. More than three times that many were over par, among them Sung Kang. On Friday Kang had cruised around the course in 68 strokes, standing three under through 36 holes. In the Saturday gale, he made four doubles, three bogeys and shot 83.

From a professional standpoint, the problem with heavy wind isn’t that it makes holes longer or shorter, or even that crosswind holes are harder to target. They are…but the pros get paid to make that adjustment. The problem is the impact wind has on a player’s ability to control his own swing.

That’s what Tour golf is all about…swing control. Repetition. Predictability. Those are the traits Tour pros rely on, the must-haves. Those are also the traits that go right out the window in heavy gusts.

The other problem has to do with the impact of wind on the putting green. Again, we’re not talking about whether a ball rolls farther or less far in heavy wind; pros can make that adjustment.

But, on the kinds of heavily sloping greens that are common on Tour, the question is a far simpler one: Can a ball come to rest and stay at rest? You can’t play golf if you can’t mark your ball, return it to that spot and expect it to stay there until your club strikes it.

On some greens at Riviera Saturday, that, too, was too much to expect.

You can play golf in 20 or 25 mph winds. It’s challenging but it can be done.

At 40 mph, though – the speeds measured at times at Riviera – skill is overtaken by luck and serious, legitimate golf becomes open-air gambling.

That’s why wind is the game’s least forgiving element.