The pleasure of good company.

Ask a golfer about the best round of their life and they will usually tell you the score. Ask them about the round they remember most fondly and they will tell you who they played with.

Golf is, oddly, a game you play alone in company. Nobody can hit your shots for you. But the hours between shots, the walk down the fairway, the wait on the tee, the talk on the way to the next hole, belong to everyone in the group. Good company does not lower your score. It does something better: it makes the score matter less.

The old foursome

Harry Vardon, six times Open Champion, was a sentimental man about this. In The Complete Golfer he laments that the old-fashioned foursome, in which partners take turns hitting the same ball, was giving way to the four-ball game, in which everybody plays their own. “To my mind,” he writes, “the old foursome provided a much more interesting and enjoyable game than its successor, and tended much more to the cultivation of good qualities in a golfer.”

You can see what he meant. In alternate shot you cannot sulk about your own game, because there is no such thing. Your bad drive becomes your partner’s awkward second; their beautiful pitch rescues your mistake. You learn quickly to say “sorry” and “good shot” and, above all, nothing at all at the right moment. It is a little education in tact. If you have never tried it, find a friend you trust and give it a go. It is also much quicker.

Getting ready

Part of the pleasure of a round starts before it, at home. There is something steadying about the small preparations: cleaning the grooves, counting the balls, finding the glove that still has some life in it. Some golfers polish their shoes the night before a big game, as their grandfathers did. Others have a favourite sweater, soft with years of washing, which they would never admit to thinking of as lucky.

None of this makes a measurable difference to how you play. All of it makes a difference to how you feel on the first tee, which is not the same thing but is not nothing either.

What to wear

Golf has always had a slightly theatrical relationship with clothes. The plus-fours and tweed jackets of the early game were country clothes, sensible for walking all day in the wind. Then came knitwear, which remains the most practical thing a golfer can own: a good wool sweater keeps you warm when the weather turns, breathes when it doesn’t, and looks better with each year.

The best advice is the simplest. Dress for the weather, wear shoes you can walk eighteen holes in, and choose things that will still look right in ten years. Style on the course, like style anywhere, is mostly a matter of not trying too hard.

A notebook in the bag

One ritual worth adopting is keeping a golf journal. Not a scorecard, which records only numbers, but a small notebook where you write a few lines after each round: who you played with, where, what the weather did, the shot you will remember. Over a season it becomes a record of friendships as much as of golf.

Read back a few years later, the scores fade into insignificance. What remains is the morning the mist lifted on the fourth, the friend who holed out from the bunker, the long lunch afterwards. That is the real game, and it is the part that good company makes possible.

The handshake

At the end of the round, whatever happened, you take off your cap and shake hands. It is the oldest ritual in the game and still the best. It says: whatever the card says, we did this together. Then, usually, someone suggests a drink, and the round continues at the nineteenth hole.