For several years now I have been asking the club to allow me to play golf at daybreak. It would allow me to get in 9 holes from a cart in way under an hour, 35 minutes was a recent time. This year, sunrise golf has been instituted and it is a roaring success.

Speed golf off a cart is like speed chess, it seems like the same game but different factors come to the fore. first there is the lack of warmup – you knock it down the fairway and play it as it lies. The other is that it simplifies your mental prep – playing alone and fast means I have to find the ball so I become very good at tracking and finding balls but foremost, I try to keep it in the fairway. I count every stroke but will allow a free drop if I never saw the ball in flight -I figure a playing partner if one had been present would have tracked it. The course is mine and that is the most important thing. It’s meditative and calming to be alone in all that splendor.