When is the better time to play: dawn or dusk?
Dawn
The sun inches above the horizon, throwing its first rays across a resplendent, empty course, eager to flourish its newly mown greens. A medley of birdsong announces the start of another glorious day on planet golf and your arrival to be first out to enjoy it.
Playing golf at dawn feels like you’re being given privileged access to a secret garden – an untouched golfing paradise that’s been prepared and opened up just for you.
The air is still, and a glistening dew causes the fairways to sparkle and steam as the morning sun illuminates and warms them. The early daylight is crisp and clean and there’s beauty in every blade of grass.
The professional welcomes their first customer of the day with a camaraderie not afforded to later starters, and you feel like something of a pioneer as you’re given the nod to “play away”. Teeing off first, whether with friends or just as a solo, you can play with total freedom, knowing there’s an empty course ahead of you.
Round in under three hours, having played to perfect putting surfaces in perfect peace and quiet, you feel refreshed, energised and ready to start the full day that still lies ahead.
On competition days, you have the pleasure of being first to post a score. Often enough, you’ll be ‘leader in the clubhouse’. And on plenty of occasions, you will have posted a good score. How much easier is it to play at your own pace when the greens are immaculate and receptive and the wind is yet to get up? The early starters often take the spoils.
Dawn is the ultimate time for golf. Enjoying the course at its brilliant best and at your leisure gives you every chance to play well. What better way could you begin a day?
Dusk
Who among us can honestly say they haven’t enjoyed beyond all measure stepping on to the 1st tee as the sun begins to lose its fire on its merry way down to meet the horizon? Any breeze will typically die away like a whistling kettle removed from the hob and there’s a wonderful sense of becalmed stillness.
This sensation is all the more marked if you’ve just rushed straight from work or finished a long journey to get there. It’s the first time you’ve stopped all day and there’s an almost tangible feeling of readiness and oneness with nature for the round ahead.
You look down the fairway, where the contrast between light and shade ’twixt hump and hollow showcases the course in all its three-dimensional splendour, especially so on one of our coastline’s gloriously rumpled links. This is even more overpoweringly therapeutic if you’ve endured a particularly stressful or hectic day – golf’s perfect antidote to life’s tribulations. You sweep your opening drive away, then watch it land and hug every contour before rolling out to its conclusion. Time seems to almost stand still.
There’s no sense of urgency even though you may be battling the daylight to make it round. This is because you’re likely to have the course largely to yourself, and you’ll be amazed at what levels of darkness you’re prepared to play on into when the golf itself is all that matters, not the scorecard.
If you’re lucky, you may even be able to play out twilight golf’s most fitting final act on the clubhouse terrace. With the dying embers of sunlight finally disappearing, there can be no better end to a day than that first sip of a refreshing post-twilightround pint.