Depending on where you are in the world, you might be in the same boat as me. The weather is still hot but the rain is showing its face. In another month or two, humid conditions are going to be the norm. While I certainly don’t mind this, it does present a practical problem or two. Muddy lies, limited roll, huge pitch marks and that eternal question, how to dry out golf grips during and after your round.
Do You Need to Dry Your Grips?
You might actually wonder why you should bother at all. Surely they just dry on their own? Well, yes and no. During a round, the bottom of your bag is fairly humid if you are playing in the rain from the wet clubs that are constantly coming in and out of the bag. The odds of putting a club away that isn’t perfectly dry and pulling it out again a few holes or less later and finding it dry and tacky are approximately the same as me basing my entire scoring strategy around sinking everything on the greens. That’s basically as close to a zero as you can get.
On the course, there is only one real way to keep the grips from being too slippy. This is using a towel. In fact, if you are playing in rain, you probably want a couple of small hand towels because once they get wet, all you are really doing is spreading the water over the rest of the grip.
In fact, the real key isn’t what to use to keep the grips dry, it is how to use it. What you really need to think about is keeping the towel itself dry. This makes sense if you take a moment. Your grips will get wet. This is inevitable. Of course, you can avoid doing stuff like lying your clubs down on the wet grass to limit the problem, but pulling a club out and hitting a shot with it will involve at least some water getting on there.
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I think the smartest way to deal with this is by making use of two things: firstly, your umbrella and secondly one particular pocket in your golf bag. You might have seen other golfers do this already, but you want to hang a small hand towel in the spokes of your umbrella. This is actually about the driest place you can get on the course in the rain. Don’t take it from there ever. Simply take the club you have pulled from your bag to the towel before and after the shot.
The other thing which is underrated is the insulated/waterproof pocket in your bag. This is where you want to keep a second towel to replace the umbrella towel when it inevitably has absorbed a little too much moisture. If you are really obsessive, you can keep this towel in a zip lock plastic bag inside the pocket although that might be taking things a little bit far for most of us.
Using Common Sense
Doing this stuff is basic common sense because if you can’t grip the club properly, your chances of hitting a decent shot decline dramatically. However, the real issue is what to do when you get home. We have all left a wet or even slightly humid set of clubs in the bag after a round and found the next week with that delightful musty smell and slimy feel to them that never quite seems to go away again. Don’t be that guy.
The first thing to do when you get home is to take everything out of your bag. For the grips, now is the time to give them a rub down with a dry towel. As on the course, I prefer those towel that swimmers use that seem to absorb a huge amount of moisture.
giving them a rub down and then simply leaving them to air dry is generally fine, but depending on how often you plan on changing the grips, you can do one more thing. If you take a hair dryer and just spend five to ten minutes working on blowing warm air on the grips, it will make a difference. Don’t get them too close to the dryer because this can do damage, but 8-12 inches away is fine. When you have finished, the grips will feel warm but not hot. You can give them a final wipe with a towel and then leave them out while they finish drying along with the bag and the rest of its contents.