By Reid Champagne, The Washington Golf Monthly Earlier this month our region experienced “record” temperatures with heat indices approaching 110. By afternoon, the golf courses were deserted, everybody apparently deciding it was too hot to play. Everybody that is, except for me and this guy named Mel, who was strapped to some kind of IV, and claimed he couldn’t buy life insurance at any price.

Frankly, I was surprised and a little more than disappointed in my adopted regional countrymen. Way Down Yonder In New Orleans where I grew up and spent my summers on golf courses, days with temperatures of 100 degrees and indices higher than that were simply referred to as “spring”.

Seriously, what we experienced here for a relatively few days starts in New Orleans around Easter, and there’s no break until Halloween. Not even when it rains. Beginning in May, when it does rain, it rains steam, the potentially refreshing droplets of wetness, hissing as it hits the sidewalks and streets, then rising in billowing clouds like some giant outside sauna. As kids, when it got too hot and sticky even by New Orleans standards, we’d run behind city buses to cool off.

But we played golf, dangit! We certainly didn’t let the cramps, dizziness, and nausea that occasionally accompanied those blistering rounds stop us. We figured heat stroke was like any other disease; if it didn’t kill you, you gradually built up an immunity to it. It seemed to have worked for us anyway.

I remember one summer having a daily pass to City Park #2, one of three municipal courses New Orleans operated. We paid a little over $30.00, and that gave us unlimited playing privileges Monday through Friday for the entire month.

We started in May (schools down there let out in May, since classrooms weren’t air conditioned, and to conduct classes after about May 15th apparently violated certain clauses of the Geneva Convention.) But heat outdoors? We didn’t care. Heck, we had long since outgrown our childhood fears of oppressive bayou heat, when we’d purposely get into trouble so we’d be punished and forced to stay indoors all summer long. By high school, though, we were men, and men attacked the heat with a vengeance, if not common sense.

My buddy and I started out on City Park #2 every weekday morning about seven. We played straight through until about 5:00pm, stopping only long enough to inhale a hot dog and sign waivers relieving course officials and the city of any liability for our welfare. We’d get a good 45 holes a day in, then go home and drool in the shower until our parents made us shut it off before we ran out of cold water.

My partner that summer was a good golfer, but didn’t have much else going on up in the clubhouse, if you get my drift. He tended to hit the ball straight and long down the middle of the fairways, which by the nature of fairways, were open expanses devoid of trees and other instruments of breeze and shade.

I on the other hand couldn’t hit a fairway if it stood perfectly still in front of me, instead of undulating like an ocean, and swaying from side to side the way they did, presumably as a result of what a doctor later told my mother were heat induced optical convulsions.

In any event, I couldn’t keep the ball out of the trees. Which meant I spent a long time filching around in the shade of the woods, while my partner wilted in the middle of the fairway waiting for me to hit. When I would find my ball, I would inadvertently keep it in the woods until I reached the green. There, I would emerge refreshed, at least more refreshed than my partner, who by the time he reached the green could barely stand up straight.

Even though he would be lying two, I would usually win the hole, because when I got over my ball, I only saw one ball and one hole. He, on the other hand, couldn’t distinguish among the four or five balls and holes he was seeing, thanks to heat-induced delirium, and would invariably 5 putt.

Have I made my point about playing in the heat yet? Try this: it was so hot one Christmas morning that I got badly sunburned riding my new bicycle all day long. Or how about this: the difference between air and water in New Orleans is so close chemically, that you could buy goldfish and keep them in a bowl of water or on a couch at home. The fish could survive swimmingly either way, though your mother would tend to object to sprinkling fish food on her good sofa.

In short, I have never felt it has ever been too hot to play golf. Now, I have felt that it was too hot to play golf and drink beer. I’m not an idiot. My rule is for every three beers consumed when temperature and humidity are above the 95 range, then consume at least one of those little white paper cones of water.

If that doesn’t work, then the back-up plan is to let the dizziness help slow down your swing, the cramps balance your follow-through, and the nausea offset your despondency over your score. And should it reach the point where you actually stop perspiring, look on the positive side: you won’t leave perspiration stains on that brand new collared golf shirt; you would look good being buried in it.

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