A good day to play
It’s a cool Thursday afternoon in October – you can feel it in the air, winter is on its way – and the wind isn’t making things any warmer.
Up on Frasers Mountain, where the sun was only occasionally showing itself from behind the clouds, about a dozen or so golfers are getting in another round, a couple of weeks before Glen Lovat Golf Course is set to close for the winter (weather depending, their tentative closing date is Oc. 31).
Bernie Delaney is waiting on the sixth tee: a group of four just finished on the green, and Delaney, who is golfing by himself on this day, is in no hurry.
“I love golfing,” he says. “I mean, the weather’s fine and I’ve golfed in worse. It’s a nice afternoon, so why not?”
Delaney, a transplanted Cape Bretoner, is a retiree and lives with his wife Karen just a few hundred yards away from the grounds of Glen Lovat (“about two three-woods away,” he says) and has been a member there for five or six years.
After a couple of squirrely shots on the sixth hole – an inviting little par 3 – someone suggested that an intrusive photographer was disturbing his swing, but Delaney dismissed that notion.
“It’s me,” he says. “I’d love to blame it on that, but it’s me.”
Fall colours
The fall foliage is starting to dominate the grounds of Glen Lovat.
Gregory MacKeen and Robert Russell just finished playing nine holes of golf and wanted to take a quick golf cart ride around the back nine, to see what they’d be missing.
They worked together for close to 30 years at St. Martha’s Hospital in Antigonish, says MacKeen.
“We’re playing terribly, but I got earplugs,” he adds with a grin, as he slips on the headgear to get his ears warmed up.
Russell grew up playing in Scotland — the very birthplace of golf, more than six centuries ago, as most historians agree — before moving to Canada in 1975, so he doesn’t seem to have a problem with less-than-ideal weather.
“It’s a beautiful day,” says Russell. “A beautiful day to golf.”