Say what you like about the President's Putter, and there are plenty who do, the members of the Oxford and Cambridge Golfing Society are unrivalled in the richness of their explanations as to what has just happened to them on the golf course. The President's Putter is the annual knockout competition limited, almost, to those Society members who have won a Blue in the sport.

If the word “lost” is at one end of the scale of explanations for a defeat, then the eloquence of a competitor beaten yesterday morning would be at the other. “On the 19th I was as chaff under the wheels of his chariot, old boy,” said this man, defeated on the first extra hole of his third-round match.

The 82nd President's Putter had begun on Thursday in a pea-souper. Fog is a nightmare for golfers to deal with. You can't blow it away, touch it or wipe if off your hands. The only advantage is that you can hit your ball out of sight. Just before lunch, a golfer was trying to describe what it was like to play when visibility. was so poor.

“I can best explain it by saying that it was like losing your virginity,” he said. “You knew what you were supposed to be doing and what the target was but you weren't quite sure how to do it and none too clear about the route you were supposed to take, nor even that you had done it.”

At this he paused and a smile spread over his face. “But when you discover you have got there, then by God, you felt pretty damned good about it.”

Thursday's fog was replaced by a startling drop in the temperature yesterday. By the time John Smith, the energetic club secretary, arrived at Rye at 7.20am it was minus 7.2C (19F). His shoes clanged on the iron surface, which was lightly covered in frost. “It's a day for madmen or magicians,” he said.To cap it all, a sun worthy of an Alpine ski resort would soon rise and beam from a cloudless sky.

This year's event continued the trend of attracting a few golfers with very good handicaps. Ian Henderson plays off plus one, as do Charlie Rotheroe and Amir Habibi, while Claudio Consul is plus two and David Hayes is plus three.

Not that such handicaps were any guarantee of success in the conditions. Hayes and Henderson, who have between them won four of the past six Putters, were dispatched in the third round, their ball-striking lessened by the effects of bone-hard fairways on which golfballs ricocheted as if on a snooker table. But Rotheroe, the defending champion, survived and Consul is beginning to look as though he might be about to win his first Putter.

At a sporting dinner in London the other night glasses were raised to Molière, who quoted the line: “You should eat to live, and not live to eat.” That notion would last less time than it takes to polish off a portion of roast pork or roast beef at Rye. Even now, when the clubhouse is half its normal size because of refurbishment, a dining room complete with crisp linen tablecloths, gleaming cutlery and glasses is provided. Eat to live, indeed.

At dusk last night it was convivial in this clubhouse, where there were enough blue blazers and coloured corduroy trousers to start an Aquascutum sale. You would have been hard pressed to know who had won and who had lost. But that is half the point of it. It is the taking part that counts in this event, at which Malcolm Peel, 76, is this year's oldest competitor and Will McPhail, 19, the youngest.

After his defeat, a friend commiserated with David Normoyle, the American who came to Cambridge to do a doctorate on “Bernard Darwin and the Development of Golf Literature” and will shortly be handing in his thesis. Normoyle gave his wellwisher a pitying glance. “If you think the point of the Putter is to come over and win, then you have completely the wrong attitude,” he said. Well put.