hereupon I’m working on a Golf Digest story about dressing for cold-weather golf. Tim, Hacker (real name), and I did some research on Sunday (see photo above). The temperature (21 degrees) equaled the wind speed (21 miles per hour), yielding a windchill factor of -459.67. Among the keys to staying warm was layering. Here are the five layers that Tim wore above his waist:

There were so many leaves blowing across the greens that trying to clear the line of a putt was usually pointless. Tim said he wished that Edwin Watts or Golfsmith or someone would sell a Tee Gun, like a nail gun, for driving tees into frozen ground:

Porter + Cable tee gun (artist’s conception).

Here’s Tim struggling to get a tee in the ground on the eighteenth hole (note the howling of the wind):

Afterwards, we warmed up over cheeseburgers at one of our several winter clubhouses, the G.W. Tavern:

The day before, I’d done some preliminary cold-weather research in New Haven, at the Harvard-Yale football game. It has become traditional, apparently, for residents of Yale’s Saybrook College to take off their shirts for a little while toward the end of the game—a ritual known as the Saybrook Strip. As in most of the schemes that men cook up for getting women to take off their clothes, virtually all of the clothes that were taken off were taken off by men:

My father was a Saybrook man. As far as I know, this ritual did not exist in his day. He and I did have a Game-related ritual of our own, however. We had a standing five-dollar bet, which the loser paid off in ways that did the winner no good. In 1983, when Harvard won, 16-7, he paid me with a check embedded in a block of Lucite:

If the Sunday Morning Group used the same payment method, I wouldn’t have been the big loser this past weekend. None of the cash you see in the photo below is moving toward me:

Nevertheless, it was a perfect day for golf, and you can never be sure how many of those we have left.