For Glove or Money?

From a very early and impressionable age (or at least as soon as you took up the game), I’m sure you will have been handed a glove and told to put it on before swinging a club in anger. The virtues of wearing a golf glove didn’t have to be explained, their use is an integral (if a little odd to the outsider) part of the game. Soon you fall into one of two categories; the first, the player that justifies the expense by proclaiming a need for additional ‘grip’ or ‘feel’; and the second, those of us who now simply find it weird trying to play without one.  I, for one, fall into the latter and probably deserve to be the subject of much ridicule as a result.

What’s worse is when you start to consider how much you’ve spent on cabretta leather over the years.  I suspect my expenditure alone would be enough to wipe out the national debt of a small country.  Still, I can’t do without them, so I’m sure I’ll continue to squander more cash in the future!

At least I can console myself with the knowledge that my reason for wearing a glove isn’t as ridiculous as some others.  Take Tommy ‘Two Gloves’ Gainey, for instance, whose preference for a glove on each hand is a throwback to his days as a professional baseball player.  Heaven knows what Tommy’s glove bill would be if he were paying for them himself.

On the other hand (no pun intended), there are those top pros who don’t wear a glove at all. Fred Couples is clearly too cool for a glove and the ironically named Lucas Glover chooses to go without, too.  Both have been down the stretch of a Major with sweaty palms and prevailed, so there’s some anecdotal evidence at least that you don’t need a glove for grip quite as much as the manufacturers would have you believe.

But what truly amazes me most about gloves is the state we’re happy to let them degenerate into.  How many of us are guilty of delving into the deepest darkest recesses of our golf bags to extract a crusty, creased, mouldy excuse for a glove that’s a struggle to even put on, let alone aid our game.  But we persevere with it nonetheless.  As we do with the glove that hasn’t been rescued from the bag after the last rain-sodden round and has shrunk three sizes, developed a shiny film on its surface, and now possesses the gripping qualities of a wet bar of soap.  We wouldn’t play with a ball that is no longer round, so why do we persist with a glove that no longer grips?

As I see it, the answer to all this goes one of two ways.  We should either accept the need to buy gloves more regularly or we need to learn to play golf the ‘Glover’ way.  The latter requires an admission that you never really knew why you were wearing one in the first place (like me), while the former requires remortgaging the house.

But I suspect the manufacturers can breathe easy.  It may lead me to penury, but I value my self-respect too much to go without and I suspect I’m not alone.  And don’t you just love putting on a new glove, even if it is just once in a blue moon?