Golfpocalypse is a weekly collection of words about (mostly) professional golf with very little in the way of a point, and the Surgeon General says it will make you a worse person. Reach out to The Golfpocalypse with your questions or comments on absolutely anything at [email protected].

RISE UP, MUDDERS

This morning at 4:15 a.m. I received a notice on my phone from the National Weather Service advising me to stay inside due to flood warnings here in Durham, NC. (I appreciated this warning, which came with the same loud beeps they use at nuclear power plants during a meltdown, because I was definitely about to take a joy ride in the middle of a tropical storm at 4:15.) Schools are closed. A few miles away, in Greensboro, the PGA Tour delayed the first round of the Wyndham Championship and will probably cancel it altogether. It was pouring all night, and if they can’t play at a Tour course, with its fancy drainage systems, there is absolutely no prayer for me to get out anywhere local.

I still want to play.

I almost want to play more. And sure, a part of this is simply because I’m a child who wants what the world is telling me I absolutely cannot have, but another part is that playing golf in awful weather is one of my secret joys. Living in North Carolina, the vast majority of my summer golf happens in ridiculous, soul-killing heat, while my northern European genetics are screaming at me to go find a fjord. I play anyway, lose gallons of sweat, and basically look like a grotesque Lawrence of Arabia crossing the green desert in my cart. I have a rule that I never let the heat stop me when I want to play and have the time, but by August I’ve got almost nothing left in the tank, and have to run on fumes until the fall rescues me. (Fall weather in North Carolina comes roughly in January.)

RELATED: This video of a golfer playing Cypress Point in 70-mph winds is not for the faint of heart

That’s the nightmarish status quo. So if it’s cold, or wet? This, to me, is paradise. I will get out there and play in almost anything. One of my fondest memories is playing with my friend at Pinehurst on a discount January weekend in 30-degree weather and literal snow. We toughed it out and earned the grudging respect of the southerners working the course who wore 12 coats each. One day last summer, in a heavy rain that didn’t shut down the course, another friend and I played what we called “Scottish golf,” getting absolutely soaked over nine holes.

I shot a 40 that day—a good score by my standards—but the great thing about bad weather golf is that it takes me out of my head, and I can forget the score. Simply finishing in the snow or mud or rain is its own reward; you can safely throw the standards out the window. You enter full survival mode, but with extremely low stakes…this shit is fun. It doesn’t matter if you hit six straight balls out of bounds, because deep down you understand this one is about the experience, and you are superior to all the cowards who stayed inside: a true sicko.

Also, there is absolutely nothing better than the post-round shower when you’re freezing and soaked. I would stay in that shower for three hours if the hot water heater let me.

FIVE TOUR THOUGHTS, OLYMPICS EDITION

EMMANUEL DUNAND

1. I can’t stop thinking about Jon Rahm. Like a lot of golf fans in 2024, things that happen on LIV fly completely under my radar, so I have to remind myself that he’s actually having a very good year over there. The dude is second in the standings, and just won his first event in the UK. I say this because from my vantage point, it looks like he’s completely crashed and burned since leaving the Tour. He’s struggled at the majors, and the only time I see a clip of him on LIV is when he’s mad at the music or the cameras.

At the Olympics, when the back nine began Sunday, it finally felt like we were going to see the Rahm of old—he had the field at his mercy—and then he endured a back nine nightmare that verged on ridiculous, going +5 on his last eight holes and falling from gold medal position into a devastating T-5 finish that he readily admitted was more painful than he expected. Yet again, this was more fodder for my sense that unlike Koepka or DeChambeau, going to LIV has somehow crushed the guy and depleted all his competitive instincts. But then I remind myself that he’s doing just fine on LIV itself, and try to reckon yet again with a guy who seems to be living a double life inside professional golf. At the U.S. Open, I asked him if he was happy—just generally—and I still catch myself wishing there was a window onto his brain that revealed his true feelings about the last year.

2. In the aftermath of Xander Schauffele’s insane finish at the Open, I wrote that he was player of the year, and also that him winning the final major was the only outcome that could have loosened Scheffler’s ironclad grip on the prize. With the gold medal, Scheffler has seized it back, and I can’t see things changing from here no matter who wins the FedExCup. I still put Schauffele’s finish at Troon on Sunday as the best back nine under pressure I’ve seen this year, but what Scheffler accomplished in Paris is an extremely close second.

RELATED: Does Scottie Scheffler’s season deserve an asterisk?

3. I’m a bigtime hater of the Olympic format—I’ll never understand why they don’t do team match play to give people a taste of something different, and I have been saying this for a decade—but I have to admit that when you stage a tournament with a field of 60 players where 35 of them are semi-anonymous dudes with absolutely no prayer of cracking the top 15 and the other 25 are the best players in the world, it makes for a pretty sick Sunday. This is a great stroke play cheat code. It’s like a PGA Tour signature event, except you also get a few big name LIV guys, and after the game’s stars, you fill out the field with me and 30 of my low-handicap friends to ensure that you don’t get a Kurt Kitayama or Chris Kirk type mucking up the leaderboard.

4. I have a secret love for courses like Le Golf National that get a ton of hate beforehand from the architecture heads, but end up producing really fun tournaments. I’m going to start calling this Valhalla Syndrome, and I’ve got it bad.

5. There was something so compelling about Tommy Fleetwood’s situation on 18 after his approach, where if he wanted to force a playoff for the gold medal, he had to chip in, but if he was too aggressive and botched it, he could play himself out of any kind of medal. In any other big event, there’s no question—you’re going hard at the pin. But to lose your spot in history as an Olympic medalist would be a special kind of devastating, which made this the one time where there was some serious value in a second-place finish. I have no idea if this even crossed his mind—he seemed to hit a pretty normal shot—but I thought it was fascinating game theory regardless. Personally, I would have gone full coward; gimme that medal.

THE ABSOLUTE IRONCLAD LOCKS OF THE WEEK

Harry How

The Golfpocalypse is not a gambling advice service, and you should never heed anything written here. Better picks are here.

Record through 2 weeks: 1-9. (Oh hell yes, we nailed Ernie Els at the Kaulig Championship! Ignoring the warning above, bet your entire house on these picks!)

At the Wyndham Championship, if they ever play, I’m taking Billy Horschel, because I think we are shaping up for a Horschel Autumn the likes of which we haven’t seen since 2014. The Horschel Vibes were through the roof at the Open, where he would have fought his way into a playoff in a world without Xander Schauffele, and I think he’s ready to go on a tear.

At the women’s Olympic Games, I am riding with Nelly Korda. This may seem like a cowardly pick, but when you consider that I just looked at the leaderboard and they’re already halfway through the second round, it becomes especially cowardly. I tried to warn you above with the silver medal talk, I am always going for the cheap win.

At the Boeing Classic senior event, I have to ride the hot hand and pick Ernie Els again. He’s the only one who ever believed in my picks.

RELATED: Nelly Korda’s Olympic golf goal is as adorable as it is delicious

THE “DUMB TAKE I KIND OF BELIEVE”

Last time, I argued that I would probably kick ass and take names in my first round ever playing links golf, but instead I got slaughtered. Undeterred, I have a new take for you, and it’s a little bit out of left field:

Bunkers in the professional game should all be in godawful shape.

I spend a lot of time complaining about the bunkers on my home course, which are usually either bone dry and hard, with no sand, or fully soggy so you’re basically hitting out of mud. (Sometimes, if you’re lucky, the entire bunker is under water, and you can drop on the grass.) But it occurred to me recently—are bunkers not hazards? Does anybody get mad if the rough or the woods or the fescue eats up your ball? Why should professionals have perfectly groomed sand that makes it easy for them to go up-and-down? From now on, I want to see bunkers that are essentially concrete, with those little dried up rivulets from the last rainfall and footprints everywhere. We’re sand-coddling these guys.

THE READER STORY OF THE WEEK

Here’s Grant on bad weather golf; he doesn’t quite share my love:

The worst weather I ever played in was last April, at Lonnie Pool Golf Course in Raleigh, NC. It’s NC State’s home course. We had played Tobacco Road the day before and I played alright so I felt good about it. Right before our tee time a huge storm blew through. Got delayed 30 minutes or so. Played in intermittent rain and 20-30 mile an hour winds. It was cartpath-only so every shot was a slog, and it felt like all the cartpaths were on the left hand side. That’s not good when you’re in a group of slicers. Nobody in our group broke 100 — I’m a 10 handicap or so, and so was another member of our group.

The upshot of the story is that we played it again the day after this year’s U.S. Open and vowed to get our revenge. I got dumped by phone call after the ninth hole and failed to break 100 again.

Oof. You never want your girlfriend and the golf gods on the same page. Total nightmare.

Previously on Golfpocalypse:

Caring what other people think of your golf game is annoying to other people

Sympathize with Rory, because choking sucks

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com