Let’s all play more foursomes.
For 2026, I have a golf goal that’s right up there with weight loss, reading the classics and saving money. The dividends stand to be life-changing if I can only muster the discipline.
I’m talking about playing more foursomes, of course. True alternate-shot. Like so many people in our society obsessed with success, I can struggle with being too self-centred, so what healthier way to check the ego than to fully enmesh my golf game with another? By comparison, foursomes makes four-ball – casually referred to as “best-ball” or when the lowest individual score of two partners counts for each hole – hardly seem like a team game. Like soccer or hockey or businesses where individual performance is secondary, a footnote even, in foursomes you’re truly sharing and passing the puck. Whether you leave your partner a kick-in birdie or plugged in a bunker, emotionally you live and die double while hitting half the shots. As a bonus, golf becomes a two-and-a-half-hour game. When played knowledgeably by pairs waiting ahead in landing zones to hit approaches, four golfers leapfrogging around in less than two hours is not unheard of.
Sticking to this resolution won’t be easy. Most courses aren’t operated to accommodate this much faster format. Also, our friends, same as us, with busy lives, don’t want to settle for anything less than what they think is the full golf experience. But courses could offer discounted rates at designated times, making up for it on the ledger with faster pace of play.
If you can convince your regular group to try it just once, they’ll see how fun it is when the good shots feel twice as good and the bad shots sting twice as hard. Obviously, on trips to special courses you’ll want to play your own ball, but at your home track you’ve lapped a thousand times, mix it up.
Many clubs in Britain are “two-ball clubs”. At Royal Wimbledon, Aldeburgh, Swinley Forest and so on, usually just two balls are in play. What we think of as “regular golf” is played in twosomes, and when there are four golfers, it’s alternate-shot. From an early age and across a range of skill levels, the rhythm of foursomes is embedded in their psyche. Elsewhere, we tend to get psyched out. The only country club foursomes I’ve witnessed were as a caddie in an annual husband-and-wife tournament quietly dubbed The Divorce Open. Organisers openly acknowledged the psychological strain of romantic partners leaving one another sidehill four-footers but made no effort to change the gestalt of the event.
For our elite male golfers, the innovative Zurich Classic in New Orleans went to teams in 2017, but otherwise it’s just once every two years in the Ryder, Presidents, Solheim, Walker and Curtis Cups. Like cannon fodder, we send out our finest in a format with which they are unfamiliar and are never surprised to see them gunned down. The script we saw at Bethpage is well-worn: even if America loses in four-ball, they’re confident they’ll storm back in the singles which embodies their rugged individualism.
During the two years I lived in Scotland, we played foursomes often, partly to quicken the pace in inclement weather as well as to avoid the hassle and haggle of strokes. Provided four golfers are in a reasonable range, pairing the A with the D and the B with the C generally makes it equitable, same as in basketball or tennis. The capricious nature of foursomes tends to overwhelm the handicap system.
What if the more national governing bodies created new championships for foursomes? States and clubs would support it by creating their own tournaments, and our next generation would grow up more comfortable taking turns. Foursomes is also a great format for an avid golfer to teach a beginner.
Oh, and let’s have none of this modified Pinehurst Foursomes crap, where both partners hit drives and then choose the best one and alternate from there. It’s a shame this gutless format is named after America’s golf mecca.
“What’d you shoot?” Too often an obscene question. Join me in my quest of self-improvement and you, too, can have a perfect reason not to answer.
Photograph by tony marshall/getty images
