Most of us sprung forward our clocks on March 13, always a reason for celebration. We’ve made the annual migration to Daylight Saving Time (yes, “Saving” is not plural) and will, until early November, enjoy daylight well into the evening hours. For golf, this is Daylight Playing Time.
I started writing this article after seeing a news release about efforts by the Colorado legislature, of all places, to dethrone Daylight Saving Time as the king of daylight and lock Colorado’s clocks at Standard Time forever. Colorado is the “outdoorsiest” of states with maybe the most physically active population in the U.S. Yet, one current and one former state legislator push the standard concept because, well, some people just can’t handle the one-hour time change. But give them a free ticket to Hawaii, with a four-hour time change, and they’d be all over that. So, yeah, get over it!
Kudos to the news reporter who interviewed PGA General Manager Matt Bryant of Green Valley Ranch Golf Club in Denver – an NGCOA member. Bryant succinctly makes golf’s case for DST in less than a minute. Bryant is featured at the 2:30 mark of this featured video.
Who is William Willett, and what does he have to do with Daylight Saving Time? Willett was a U.K builder who, in 1907, wrote a pamphlet called “The Waste of Daylight.” An original copy resides in the National Museum of Scotland, Science and Technology section. Willett wrote: “Standard time remains so fixed, that for nearly half the year the sun shines upon the land for several hours each day while we are asleep, and is rapidly nearing the horizon, having already passed its western limit, when we reach home after the work of the day is over. Under the most favourable circumstances, there then remains only a brief spell of declining daylight in which to spend the short period of leisure at our disposal.
“Now, if some of the hours of wasted sunlight could be withdrawn from the beginning and added to the end of the day, how many advantages would be gained by all, and in particular by those who spend in the open air, when light permits them to do so, whatever time they have at their command after the duties of the day have been discharged.” Nine years later, in 1916, the U.K adopted Daylight Saving Time, the U.S. in 1918.
Willett had to be thinking about golf, right? A leisurely nine holes after work, or maybe league play, or just some needed practice time. All with enough daylight to enjoy “after the duties of the day have been discharged.”
I would have gone on to harangue the Colorado lawmakers and their psychologists and scientists who insist messing with our body clocks is the next worst thing to leprosy. But then, another news flash lit up my screen from CNN – the U.S. Senate, deadlocked on so many urgent matters, found the time to unanimously approve a bill that would make Daylight Saving Time permanent across the country. It’s the Sunshine Protection Act, showing us that it’s at least willing to protect our right to enjoy more hours of productive daylight. The bill still has to pass the House and be signed by the president, who is a golfer.
Left, right, it didn’t matter. Bipartisanship is a wonderful thing. It’s not exactly the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, but every golfer and golf course in the country wins. And now, the good folks of Colorado can direct their legislators to more critical matters and not legislate sunshine.