If I said Mixed Foursomes, you should be afraid, very afraid. This rendition of the game of golf is littered with the broken hopes and dreams of golfers like a graveyard in the middle of Greenland. There is something about alternate shot golf over 27 holes that can bring the strongest man to his knees. Women are somehow tougher than men in bearing up under the pressures of this format.

The more fragile male ego makes more out of the multitude of disappointments, jam packed in this nearly 6 hours of unrelenting golf.

Format From Hell Mixed Foursomes

Yes, I can only speak from experience and may be speaking out of turn for the male gender. Perhaps, there are golfers who relish this format and look forward every year to this honour board event on the golf club calendar.

Talk about discomfort and spending prolonged periods in foreign territory out on the golf course. You soon realise that your ability to play golf is a tenuous construct dependent upon hitting the ball where you have some familiarity.

Nothing Mixed About The Discomfort In Foursomes Golf

Every shot struck in foursome’s golf can put your partner in the shit, if misdirected enough. The English language soon runs out of ways of saying you are sorry. The gender divide can make this experience even more debilitating. Keeping the mood light is a must under these circumstances, but 27 holes stretches the relationship. I understand why golf is best played as a solo game in the company of others. Stuff ups are galling when they are our own but when shared in a team format they feel much worse. “Girls line up on the pink line and boys on the blue” – a Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing and Charm School memorable line from that movie. Boys and girls playing golf together can mess with your head, in my view.

Picture this. Your erstwhile partner has put you in the back bunker with no green to play with. You skull the golf ball violently across the green into a very deep side bunker. She skulls it right back at you, over your head, back into the rear of the original bunker. Your fellow golfers cry out in mirth that, “it is 15 all, as if tennis was the game now being played. Absurdity mounts along with the score on this hole. You don’t know where to look, down at your shoes or high into the sky, anywhere but here and now in your playing partner’s direction. Eventually, you splash it onto the green and together take a couple more putts for a well deserved 9 on a par 4. The joys of mixed foursome’s golf.

The driver can become a poisonous serpent in your grip. Putting can feel foreign, like Chinese food for breakfast. Building up a consistent tempo is not on the cards in foursomes’. You find yourself walking to the next tee looking forward to hitting a good drive and, then, realising that it is not your turn.

My kingdom for some plain old stroke or Stapleford golf.  Something to get your teeth into, whether it be for better or worse. The precarious mixed foursomes or foursomes of any kind can really get your goat. I place this format in Dante’s very worst level of hell. The funny thing is that I play it so infrequently that when it comes around again I have conveniently forgotten the extremities of its direness. Memories of having kids and child birth play similar tricks on the mind of mothers, according to those in the know.

Mixed foursomes, you should be afraid, very afraid.

©GolfDom