Tenkiller Golf Club - Winter Rules

Winter Rules!

When you own a golf course, you're in the weather business. Our course is in eastern Oklahoma, where the weather comes in extremes. Thunderstorms and lightning take several trees a year (though we have plenty to spare). Last summer was the fourth year of a drought and neighboring Texas and Oklahoma made news for 95 straight days without rain. 123 degrees is the hottest temperature we ever saw on a thermometer. Before that stretch of July and August heat, we had a couple of record rainfalls that filled nearby Tenkiller Ferry Lake to 27 feet above the high water line of the reservoir. Flooded marinas were closed through the July 4th weekend at the lake and long after it had stopped raining for good. But we had more than eight inches of rain on the June day that the 100 mostly Indian boys of the Adair County Golf Association were playing their first tournament at our course. The testimony to the draught is that the golf course sucked up that water and threw the rest away so fast that we had them out on the course an hour after it stopped raining. It was our last rain of the summer.

The ice storm that devastated Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma over Christmas was the opposite end of this spectrum of weather extremes. The three owners of the golf course live in Denver and drove in just before Christmas on the day that the first wave of snow and ice arrived. The winter's first Canadian "artic express" swept deep into the south with frigid temperatures, and in Oklahoma, Arkansas and all of Ozarks, the frozen air blended badly with tropical moisture out of Mexico. On the last stretch of I-40, ten inches of heavy snow in Oklahoma City had become snow and freezing rain at the golf course. In the hardwood forest that surrounds the course, every branch hung with a crystal clear coating of clear ice a ¼ inch thick. It was beautiful. It grew to an inch thick before the storm broke more than two weeks later. Throughout thousands of square miles of hardwood forests, the sound of fracturing limbs were like the report of rifles on the opening day of deer season.

Click here to see a virtual view of the 17th fairway covered in ice and snow

You can play at the Tenkiller Golf Club virtually any day of the year. Some days are a lot colder than others and the members who don't flee south for a season on the Gulf Coast, drape their carts with tents to seek shelter from cold winds. The ball feels like a rock when you hit it and roles forever on frozen ground. There's no crisp ping from a frozen titanium head. We came down for the weekend of our employee Christmas party; we also came to play golf. In part, we had to play golf because we wanted to check out the changes from continuing renovations and redevelopment at the course. Besides, we've been coming here monthly for two years and we always play! This time it took us the two days to complete 18 holes.

Our game was a four-man "scotch" with two teams playing alternating shots. That, of course, means both golf shots and swigs of 12 year-old MaCallan. The bet was a buck a hole. Though we tried to convince some of our members to join us, only four of us had the courage (or stupidity) to face 10-degree temperatures with high winds and blowing snow on Saturday. The wind chill was way below zero and we came in after every other hole to warm up and check on the football scores. Ron Kosmatka, our PGA pro at the golf course, played in a team with Paul Phillips. Tom Hunsucker and Steve Mikol, the other two owners of the course along with Paul, were the second team. We needed a set of rules to match the conditions

The strategies of our games were keyed a maximum of 20 strokes allowed on any hole. Since we also had a 7-putt limit, the best strategy was to do whatever you could to get onto the green in fewer than 13 strokes. If you could get on in say 10, you had a good shot at winning the hole with a 17. The trouble was, getting a ball to actually stick on the green was nearly impossible. Built as "push-ups" in what we generously like to think are reminiscent of Donald Ross designs, the greens were so icy that we could have been on skates.

In fact, almost every square foot of the tee boxes, fairways and greens were coated with two to four inches of a mixture of snow and solid ice so slick that nothing would stop the ball. Only the canopy of the trees and the beds of pine straw provided relief from what was otherwise a sheet of ice. Our pro thinks he may one day land the green on the 299-yard, downhill par-four 15th. He certainly tries on every drive. It should have been easy to reach the green on the icy surface. But first you had to literally chop out a couple of foot pads for a stance on the ice in the tee box. Sometimes you had to get down on your hands and knees to hammer in a tee. Hitting off a sheet of ice provides a whole set of problems which no golfer ever deals with. When the club strikes a ball resting on ice, something really strange must happen because the ball will take off in any direction -- or be left sitting in place. Paul plays to a 12 handicap, so the number of times he whiffs in a given year can be counted on a couple of fingers. Addressing the ball while standing on ice, he whiffed five times on just the 11th hole.

We were able to coax two more foursomes to join us for the second nine played on Sunday, probably because there wasn't any wind. Otherwise, the conditions were no better. Ron played in a group that couldn't even walk on the 12th green without crawling, and both teams just took the 20 strokes rather than slip and fall in any more attempt to get on the green. Someone in our foursome had to retrieve the one ball that stuck.

Once on the green, putting was so hard on the icy surface that Steve had a three-foot putt on 14 that ended up more than 20 yards off the green. On some greens we'd try to putt to obstacles like a leaf frozen in the ice or a dimple on a pitted, windblown surface. Little snow drifts were another good target on the way to the cup. If the pins were in the cups, the rules said you only needed to hit the pin. The cup was filled to the rim with solid ice with the pin frozen into the middle. On a few holes, the flags had been blown out of the cup early in the storm and lay frozen in the surface. We chopped out the cup as best we could with a three iron. In truth we rarely sunk putts, but there were a couple of miraculous 10 footers that amazed all of us. If a ball ever stopped on a green, we rushed to mark it with a swing of the putter that would chip out a dent to keep it in place on the frozen surface.

Chipping has a whole new meaning hitting off of (or onto) ice. Since getting the ball to stop on the green was nearly impossible, chipping was pretty much out of the question and we typically putted from as far as 50 yards off the green. However, Tom had to chip out of the woods on 14 and landed the ball on the green. Paul had an amazing chip on 18 that somehow stopped within the leather. He's lucky we conceded that putt because his second putt would have been on the lake. He finished with a 13. Nobody else ever got onto the 18th green even though Tom and Stever were there in three. That means that the two of them alternated for 17 strokes from within 10 yards of the pin and never made it on. Two of Steve's shots (putts really) to the 17th green had to be retrieved from the frozen lake behind him. We looked like rescuers stretching out on all fours and using branches to save some kid who had fallen through thin ice. In fact, we probably risked that very event, but had to go after the hot pink balls. There were, after all, only enough of them to cover the six teams in three foursomes and nobody wanted to go back to the frozen yellow range balls we used on Saturday. Amazingly nobody lost a ball in two days. It helps when the water hazards are all frozen solid.

Tom and Steve won with a score that would look great to a professional bowler. More importantly, Steve won his side bet with Tom. When we arrived in Oklahoma on Friday, Steve slipped and almost fell while walking to the car. He boasted to Tom that he had never in his memory slipped and fallen on ice or snow, attributed to growing up living on a lake in Wisconsin where long seasons of hockey and ice skating, ice boating, ice fishing and many other winter sports give him a sure foot on the worst of surfaces.

Tom, who will bet on anything, gave four to one odds on a $10 bet that he would go down before we left Oklahoma on Tuesday. Nobody could have guessed that the challenge would include our round of golf on a sheet of ice. In two days of golf, Tom and Steve were the only players or spectators who didn't go down during the weekend. Paul grew up in Iowa and is a great skier, giving him a better ability than most to recover from a near fall. He went down hard on Sunday. Ron fell more than 20 times. His 8-year old son Eric fell 10 times while following our play on just one hole on Saturday. He played on Sunday and went down at least a dozen times during the day.

The two days of what we now call the Winter Rules Tournament were great fun and we'll make it an annual tradition during our pre-Christmas visit, adjusting the rules to suit the conditions. Golf is like that no matter what the USGA says! Though we made the best of bad circumstances and had a lot of fun, this ice storm was a serious and costly event in our lives as owners, and disrupted the lives of many tens of thousands of people throughout our region. More than 100,000 homes lost power, some for weeks. Our home at the golf course was one of the few with electrical power and, therefore, heat. We had three families living at the house through the long Christmas storm and its aftermath.

The golf course got hit hard with thousands of downed limbs littering the ground. Ten trees were destroyed, some of them oaks and hickory trees that have stood against such storms for 150 years. The extreme cold and hard freeze may have destroyed the same greens that we almost lost to heat last summer. Its sounds like its time for a road trip to check on the damage and deal with whatever the next challenge is to redeveloping this peckerwood course. We will, of course, play golf -- and have a ball! Because, Winter Rules!