We teed off at 7:07 at Twin Oaks under a sky that never broke — a hundred percent overcast, low sun somewhere behind it, a warm rain that hung on all morning. Just Ian and Max, and the three of us. You'd written "too hot" before we started, and you weren't wrong; even at seven the air sat heavy on us. You opened with a good one, though — driver down the fairway, 9-iron on, two putts for a clean par. A round starts better than that only in dreams.

The 2nd cost us a stroke we didn't have to give. The drive found the fairway bunker, and from there the par 5 turned into a grind — out of the sand, into the rough, a wedge that didn't get close, and a bogey. That short one from twelve yards is a spot you usually make count; this morning it leaked away from you. From there, though, we settled into something steady. The 5-iron on the 3rd was the best swing of the front — 189 off the tee to the heart of the green, better than you manage from there most days. On 4 you missed the green with the 9-iron but stuffed the pitch to a tap-in, and the pars just kept coming: 5, 6, then a bogey on 7 where the tee shot leaked right into the rough and the up-and-down wouldn't fall.

"Playing like crap but scratching out some pars. Not too bad considering how tired I feel."

By the turn you'd made your peace with it. "Playing like crap but scratching out some pars," you wrote on 9 — "not too bad considering how tired I feel." That was the round exactly. The swing wasn't there, but the scorecard didn't much care. On 8 you rolled in a sixteen-footer for par that had no business dropping, and we made the turn at two over, tired and damp and hanging on.

The back nine was more of the same, and I mean that as a compliment. Pars on 10 through 13, most of them scratched out the hard way — a fourteen-footer holed on 10, a fifty-two-footer cozied up to gimme range on 12. Then 14 slipped, a rough-to-rough par 4 that ran to bogey. But 15 was the one to remember. You laced a 5-iron off the tee, then flushed a 9-iron from 134 to nine feet and holed it for birdie — a hole and a half you'd usually leave out there, made back in two swings. That was the round rising up to meet you.

Then 17 took most of it back. The 6-iron went long into the rough, and the 58 out of there — a shot you're better than — came up short. The next one caught the bunker, and by the time it was over we'd carded a double. The par 3 that bit us. Nothing to be done about it. We steadied on 18, driver, 7-iron, a wedge to twelve feet, two putts for par to close.

We walked off 18 at 11:27, four over, in the same grey we started in — tired, sunburnt under a sun we never saw, seventy-six on the card. If golf is a game of scratching out pars when the swing's gone missing, we played it about as well as we could today.