A Good Walk Spoiled
Whatever golf lacks in blood and sweat, it surely makes up for in tears.
“The PGA Tour and LIV Golf, the insurgent league bankrolled by billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, said on Tuesday that they had agreed to a merger, ending a bitter and costly fight for supremacy of men’s professional golf that had divided top players, everyday fans and corporate sponsors.”
- New York Times (June 6, 2023)
Given this week’s pro golf news - proving further that there can be no “good” and “bad” golfs, just bloody golf - I thought I would share an essay I wrote last year. It certainly had the golfers messaging me at the time.
There has been no return to the course for me, my sentiments are unchanged. Still, to my golfing friends and family, I love you all the same!
The hardest thing about golf isn’t perfecting your swing or learning to putt, it’s playing with someone you don’t like. More than just “a good walk spoiled”, as the saying goes, in my experience it can be a bad date enforced, too. There’s nowhere to hide. Even if you wander off alone into the bushes after your ball, you always wind up back at the hole or the tee, and there your playing partner is again. Ready for a chat.
Despite golf’s many other well-documented frustrations, I think this is why I eventually quit. I don’t mind spending time socializing one-on-one or in small groups. It’s actually my preferred format. But not with golfers. Or to be fair, not with a golfer in the act of playing golf. There are people I love who play golf regularly and I’ve learned it’s important I resist the temptation to spend those particular uninterrupted hours with them. It somehow conjures such a wretched state of mind.
I remember one horrendously hot day, playing with an old schoolmate, who loved to linger over each shot. Golf is a pastime heavily encumbered with rules, both written and merely murmured. One of the latter is to not take too long over your shot, as other players must wait still and silent for you to finish. Golfers are very delicate that way. In any other sport a player will have everything from their haircut to their mother insulted while they try to complete a task.
But the golfer is given their silence, with the understanding not to milk it. This particular guy might as well have brought a bucket and a three-legged stool. I stood beside him on the fairway, under the opposite of shade, as he wiggled and waggled, took multiple practice swings, adjusted his grip, shifted his feet, and damn nearly cooked me whole. Time and time again. Every inch of me wanted to scream “Just hit it!” But you can’t do that, not in golf. Instead I took out my tiny pencil and silently marked my card: Never again, not with him.
Wasting four or five hours on people like that meant nothing back then. I’d play with anyone. Time was abundant, something to kill. Now that I’m a father, I tend to agree with the Hannah Gadsby joke, something about if you’re a father and play golf, you’re a cunt. Harsh, but she’s got a point. It’s an awful lot of time to spend chasing a ball while someone else chases your kids.
Somehow my dad found other ways to avoid us and didn’t take up golf in earnest until I was finishing high school. I’d gotten into it much earlier. An uncle introduced my middle brother and I to the most prestigious Club in our hometown, which I joined in my teens. It seemed like the right thing to do, even impolite not to accept the introduction. I liked sports, and was always interested in rules and customs as a kid anyway. Golf seemed a good fit.
Going to a strict Catholic boys school had prepared me well for the ridiculous bylaws of what Americans call Country Clubs, but after a while the Club’s memos regarding facial hair, the correct height for one's socks, or whether or not one should change one’s shoes in the parking lot felt like a put-on. What are they going to do, belt me? I mused. If the deranged priests at school never caught me, I didn’t fancy these bastards stood a chance either.
Once my father finally discovered the game, my exclusive membership (which my parents were funding) bore a whole new appeal. Previously just another symbol of affluence, now it meant my father had ready access to 36 of the finest “links” holes in the land. As my guest.
He was a poor conversationalist and true beginner golfer. As such, our rounds together were mostly forgettable. I wasn’t amazing, but I had youth on my side, and started playing much sooner in life. As such my swing, if not perfect, was at least relaxed. While his, no matter how many lessons he took, looked something like a man trying to chop wood in a phone booth.
Watching your dad be bad at anything is hard and for a game that prides itself on presentation, out on the average course, golf can be the most awkward of sports. The faux etiquette, the digging through mud or shrubbery in slacks to find a two dollar ball, the keeping track of everything with tiny pencils and scorecards and public handicaps. Whatever golf lacks in blood and sweat, it surely makes up for in tears. My father and I persevered for a time, but never clicked as a pair.
My mother and he never really clicked either, and after they separated I ran off to a different town for a semester, to clear my head. My father visited once, for a medical conference with a fellow doctor friend who I’d known most of my life. He asked if I wouldn’t mind “introducing” them at the local sister course of my Club. I agreed, really just to get some time with my dad, as I would be required to accompany them for the round.
At the very first tee his friend began bragging about a shiny new driver in his bag, and didn’t stop. By the fourth or fifth tee I finally cracked, and did what always seemed the natural thing in that situation: asked if I might have a try. He handed over the club and I fired away. It hit well enough and I was soon wandering off to somewhere along the edge of the fairway, in search of my ball. My father walked down the other side of the fairway with his braggart surgeon friend, then trotted over to me, bag in tow.
“Rod asked me to ask you not to borrow his clubs again,” said my father. With a straight face. I waited for him to laugh or say something like, “So I told him to fuck off and play at someone else’s club then.” But he didn’t and I went back to finding my ball. Located somewhere at my feet, beside my heart.
Then we all met up at the green, compared notes and went on playing the game, like nothing had happened. Because that’s what you do in golf. It’s another one of those unwritten rules. You’re allowed to be a complete asshole (within the written rules) and no one is supposed to do anything about it. Not at the nice Clubs, anyway. It’s a pure distillation of the disingenuous rot in so-called “polite” society, from which golfers are most often drawn.
I’m sure if I thought long and hard enough, I could recall at least a dozen such instances of golfing dickishness. I played for a year or so after that, but golf and I soon drifted apart and in my early twenties I happily renounced my Club membership.
I’d learned the game okay, lowered my handicap to a respectable number, too. But it wasn’t enough to keep me playing the game within the game. The frustrating, lonely, elitist, racist, mean and selfish charade that golf is at its very heart. Maybe I just don’t have the stomach for it. So I quit and I’ll never go back.
Don’t try to talk me into it, either. I’ll just wander off.
