I grew up in the town of Saranac Lake, N.Y., in the Adirondack mountains south of Canada, where we had two claims to fame. The first was that famous people used to come for the clean, crisp air when they wanted to try to beat tuberculosis. That stopped in the 1940s when they invented the cure, and we’ve never forgiven Selman Waksman, Elizabeth Bugie and Albert Schatz for their meddling. Our second claim to fame, though, persists: it’s really ****ing cold. So cold that we were often the town namechecked on the morning shows as the literal coldest place in America. My childhood is full of bad memories like sitting in a frozen car for 20 minutes before it would warm up, or shoveling snow for three hours only to have to do it again the same day, or having baseball practice in the high school gym in mid-May because the field is covered with snow. As for golf? For six months of the year, forget it.

This is why I live in North Carolina now. It’s Dec. 18, and I’m writing this as fast as I can so I can play golf in 65-degree weather. And my childhood spent suffering in the north is why I feel absolutely no guilt when I taunt my editors and colleagues who still live in New York and are reduced to putting in their basements until the thaw. MOVE SOUTH, FOOLS.

And yet, while browsing the Golf Digest archives recently—something that is incredibly fun and which you can do here—I came across a piece of total insanity that earned my respect and in fact my awe. This is a story from Golf Digest’s February 1954 issue, back when men were men and a bit of snow and cold couldn’t keep the greatest generation indoors. As Jack Fairlie and Joe Fitch wrote, a group of psychopaths from Bronxville, N.Y., playing out of the Siwanoy Country Club—host of the first PGA Championship in 1916!—started calling themselves “Snobirds” and playing in every kind of abysmal winter condition you could imagine. In fact, they had a tournament series, and it dated back to 1908. Other than a hiatus during World War I, they only missed two rounds—once when it was so icy that someone scored a literal 82 on the second hole, and another time when fog reduced visibility to 10 feet.

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Otherwise, they had been at it for 44 years, playing, as Fairlie and Fitch wrote, in “freezing rains, hail, two feet of snow and 10-below-zero weather.”

The story is full of great quotes—”Snobird golf is the great leveler,” for one—and it actually seems like a pretty coherent system. They played once a week in Sunday qualifiers from December through late January, after which a match-play bracket led to the championship on the final weekend of February. Weather sometimes forced them to play on “sand greens,” or on a “snow course of nine holes,” and often they had to use brooms to mark the holes instead of flags—useful for sweeping a path from the line to your putt, which was deemed legal.

The lead photo from our 1954 feature on the Snobirds at Siwanoy Country Club.

I know what you’re going to ask—what happens when you lose your ball in the snow? Simple. Just put it where you think it landed, with no penalty. Even if you find the ball buried in the snow, you get to shovel the snow aside. Red balls help for actually tracking the shot, and you still have to treat a water hazard like a water hazard, even if it’s frozen over.

After reading about this, I couldn’t resist calling Siwanoy to see if the Snobirds were still at it. I was gratified to hear that 70 years later, the tradition was still running and is now more than 100 years old. The slightly less bracing news is that compared to the 1950s, when they had more than 80 members involved, there were now about 20, there are just two qualifying rounds instead of eight, and worst of all, the nice person on the phone told me they had just finished their championship for 2024. In mid-December? In the climate change era? That’s glorified fall golf. Nevertheless, I’m glad the Snobirds still exist.

And if they still exist, and back in the day they were playing in literal feet of snow and hail and ice and every other miserable condition (except fog, which I now consider the toughest of all elements), what’s your excuse? Why are you sitting at home taking air swings, or playing that lame simulacrum called simulator golf? Get out there! Get out in the snow, and the cold, and the rain, and the wind, and become your own personal Snobird! Self-actualization is there for you, folks, if you can only muster the courage of our ancestors.

Now, I must bring this piece to an end. My tee time is a few minutes away here in North Carolina, and I’m thinking I may have to bring a pullover in case the temperature dips into the 50s.

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com