FASTER. GOFURTHER.

When you’ve earned the reputation as the game’s most forgiving driver that also ranks as one of the longest, the next step is obvious: You make it longer. So we did, by engineering a new facedesign optimisation that produces faster ball speed for our biggest distance gains to date, with a sound that is music to your scorecard.

As someone who pays monthly subs to quite a few sports clubs and leisure centres – not all for myself, I must add – I was heartened to hear about the recent case of the golf club member whose legal bid to get a partial refund on his annual subscription due to enforced course closures caused by the pandemic had his case – and it must have been a man –thrown out by the court.

Well, it wasn’t thrown out as such, but the judge ruled in favour of the golf club and no refund was deemed necessary. You can read more about the story on page 4, but, needless to say, the result no doubt caused a huge collective sigh of relief in the manager’s office of golf and sports clubs and leisure centres across the country, many of whom quite rightly feared that had the case been successful it would have opened the legal door for millions of other members to make similar claims, inflicting further financial misery on many venues that are still reeling from the impact of Covid losses, and are now currently suffering under the impact of sky-rocketing energy prices and runaway inflation.

Quite why someone who clearly enjoys their golf – or at least I hope they do – should want to claim back what could only have been a few hundred pounds at most, in the knowledge that it could have ended up costing his club hundreds of thousands of pounds, is quite beyond me, but I’m sure he had his reasons. I, for one, am hoping the club refunded his entire annual subscription and sent him on his way, as he clearly doesn’t have the greater good front and centre of his mind.

While, with the massive benefit of hindsight, it was ill-judged of the UK government to shut down a sport that could, as was later so ably proved, be played safely without transmitting Covid by making a few simple adaptations to normal behaviour, the temporary closure of golf clubs seemed more a show of solidarity with those who took part in contact sports and in enclosed venues, where there was a very real prospect of a mass transmission, than it was about the dangers of playing golf.

Having just emerged from one of the wettest March’s on record, and a pretty frosty January and February, which enforced the closure of golf courses up and down the country for many days, I’m sure that if you are a member of one of these clubs your first thought wasn’t “Hmmm, I wonder if I can claw back some of my subs this month because of the rain/fog/snow/frost’? If it was, you probably need to take up another game or better still, move to another country where the winters are less inclement, but where it’s also probably too hot to play in the summer. You win some, you lose some.

While I will readily – if not happily - admit to being something of a fair-weather golfer – I don’t often choose to play if its lashing down when I’m leaving the house and the forecast for the rest of the day is miserable – I, like most golfers in the UK, pay my annual subs on the basis that I know that the course isn’t going to be in tour-level condition over the winter – although the majority, I might add, are still in brilliant nick thanks to tireless work from greenstaff and the wonders of modern drainage and course machinery. But I also know that I will still be able to get more than my money’s worth come spring/summer/autumn, when the warmer and longer golfing days more than compensate for my self-enforced winter hibernation. Golf has its own way of levelling itself out. A bit like when you tear it up on the front nine, you always know that you’re going to finish 6, 7, 6 and lose two balls.

For those of you who don the waterproofs and windbreakers and head out on the course in all weathers, and in all seasons, I salute you, but I also know that you’ve probably experienced some of the best rounds of your golfing lives on those damp winter days when the sun is low on the horizon, the tee sheet is sparsely filled, there are no leaves on the trees to prevent your ball from getting caught up in the foliage when you try to find a way back to the fairway, and the frosty fairways give you an extra 50 yards of run. You can’t put a price on that, can you? Hopefully most of you reading this have already renewed your subs for the coming season. If not, crack on. Pound for pound, it’s the best money you’ll ever spend.