Golfpocalypse is a collection of words about golf (professional and otherwise) with very little in the way of a point, and the Surgeon General says it will make you a worse person. Reach out to The Golfpocalypse with your questions or comments on absolutely anything at [email protected].
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There are two sayings I hear on the golf course that I hate with all my heart:
1. “You’re not good enough to get mad.”
Yes, I am. I was good enough to get mad when I couldn’t break 100, and I’m good enough now that I sometimes break 80. As my colleague Luke Kerr-Dineen put it, you don’t have to be a master chef to get pissed about screwing up dinner. You don’t have to be great at something to care about it; I love golf, I take it seriously despite being average, and when I suck egregiously—I’m talking the kind of total collapse where you close your eyes and see the flames of hell—I get mad. Now, I grant you that there are levels of mad, and I strive not to embarrass myself, but the notion that I should walk around with some dopey grin all the time actually makes me more angry.
2. “A bad day on the golf course is better than a good day in the office.”
Nope. Maybe this is skewed by the fact I like my job, but if I go out and shoot a smooth 83, and two days later I feel like a stranger in my own body and lose six balls in the first five holes? Send me to my desk with chains on my legs, please. Hell, I’d rather be kneeling on rice and getting pelted with deli meats than losing my mind on the course.
Which leads me to my main point: Sometimes I’ll just abandon a round. I’ll sense that the game is not there, I’m no longer enjoying myself, and it’s going to end with some stupid act of frustration like chucking an iron in the woods or writing my name in gasoline on the fairway. (Related note: I have not broken a club in almost a year!)
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Worse, it will cement a mental association of bad vibes with golf, and that’s a dangerous game. Once, while working a horrifically boring summer job during college, I listened to Bob Dylan while I sat in front of the computer, and without knowing it my brain was connecting Dylan to the mundane act of filling out spreadsheets. It was years before I could listen to him again—I’d be right back in that stupid office. I also couldn’t drink tequila for a decade after college, for similar reasons. Bottom line, I love golf, and because I love it, I eject before it gets truly miserable.
Now, there are some obvious instances when abandoning a round is totally fine. Playing alone? Sure, walk off at your leisure. Nobody gets hurt. With strangers? They don’t care about me, I don’t care about them. Good day, sirs.
On the flip side, there are obvious moments when you just can’t walk off, like if you’ve taken a golf trip with some friends, or you’re playing in a team event. Once, I got my stepdad and two friends onto Pinehurst No. 2, and even though I’m a ride-or-die Pinehurst guy, when we got there it was insanely hot, the group in front of us was blasting country music from their carts, and my game totally abandoned me. Pinehurst no. 2 is the absolute worst place to play poorly—I saw the ghost of Donald Ross laughing at me—and when it became clear that the round would exceed five hours, I wanted with all my heart to escape. But I couldn’t. I had to grin and bear it, so I did.
It’s the gray areas where things get tough. My general rule is that if you’re at your home course during a normal round and things get very bad, it’s okay to jump ship if you’re playing with multiple friends, since they’ll still have some company when you leave. (I don’t think I’ve violated this too often, but I’m also glad there is no historical record.) The other day, I was set to play with my friend and his girlfriend, but I had played like hell two days earlier and my range session was a disaster. There is no sport like golf where you can feel totally competent at one moment and then lose everything, and the fact that I was very tired left me in a raw emotional state. I walked to the tee, hit a weak fadey drive toward the cart path, said, “I’m done,” and left.
Now, that time I felt a little bad. I apologised, and they were nice about it, but I’m starting to worry about a couple things. First, nobody I play with ever seems to abandon a round, no matter what. It’s no shock that I’m more temperamental than my golf friends—I’ve known this for a long time—but nobody else is walking off the course four to five times per year, and that is a little unsettling. Second, I pride myself in having a certain amount of life resilience, but isn’t this the opposite? Isn’t this just shying away from the slightest pain?
Here’s how I rationalise it: In life, you have to summon the energy to be strong through the really hard stuff, and maybe part of fortifying yourself is giving the Dikembe Mutombo finger wag to the smaller bouts of suffering. When things fall apart on the golf course, when it gets beyond recovery, why subject yourself to misery and make everything worse? I sort of hate the term “self-care,” but I will use it opportunistically here—I’m doing self-care.
There’s a third saying you hear all the time about this sport: “Golf doesn’t build character, it reveals it.” That one’s probably true. And what it reveals about me, at the times of abandonment, is that I can be self-centred and moody and impulsive. I’ll take it. I want to love this game a long time, and if that means walking away to avoid a fight, so be it.