Ah, fall golf.
Cool, crisp air. Lush fairways and greens. And a kaleidoscope of brilliant reds, oranges and yellows that makes you feel emotions you didn’t know you had.
If only golf this time of year didn’t also bring with it one of the game’s supreme nuisances: fallen foliage. We’ve all been there: You pure an approach to 15 feet only to stroll up to your ball and find your putting line obscured by dozens of dead leaves, if you can find your ball at all.
What to do?
Well, at least a few courses — including one major venue — have gotten creative, adding to their greenside offerings a suburban garage staple: leaf blowers. Clever, right? A few sweeps with the handheld machine and your line, if not the whole putting surface, is clean and green.
At a recent round at Hazeltine National, TikToker Katie Kelby posted a video that showed a battery-powered Milwaukee leaf blower parked by a green next to a sign that reads: “This blower is to assist you in cleaning debris from the putting line.”
“One of my favorite parts about this golf course,” Kelby says of the U.S. Open, PGA Championship and Ryder Cup site.
Here’s another course with the same amenity, complete with a handsome holster:
When blowers are used appropriately, the results can look like something like this:
No blowers at your course? Bring your own! No, seriously. If Twitter is any indication, plenty of golfers have taken to the practice. Stuart Bottrill, a PGA professional in England, shared this picture recently from his local club:
And here are a couple of more sightings:
Canada is more commonly associated with snow blowers, but at 4 Seasons Country Club, in Ontario, the leaf-clearing variety have been known to see some action:
On the Metro Detroit Golf Podcast a couple of years back, golfers who pack blowers became a talking point, with one of the hosts saying, “I’ve never even heard of this but people were posting…that they were bringing portable leaf blowers to the golf course to blow the leaves away as they were looking for their golf ball. Part of me doesn’t even think that’s real.”
“I believe it’s real. I 100% believe it’s real,” another voice chimed in. “Look, I wouldn’t do it because I would be royally made fun of…but it would make it easier. If you’re putting and there’s leaves everywhere and you want to give yourself the perfect pathway to the hole, why not?
“It’s crazy,” the first host said.
Perhaps, but in all the right ways. Blower-toting golfers, we salute you…