Growing up, when your dad tells you about one of his “rules to live by”, it becomes gospel for the rest of your own life. One of CPSR’s RTLBs that always stuck with me was: when travelling on a plane, be it for a vacation, a work trip, or visiting family, if you are not playing at least two rounds of golf on said trip, you don’t bring your golf clubs. The logic being that if you only have one round lined up, it’s not worth the hassle of dragging the travel bag through the airport, taking up all the space in the rental car, pissing off all the women in the family who also have to wait for your golf bag to come out last, etc. For just 18 holes, renting sticks has always sufficed.
Of course, rules are meant to be broken, particularly when you get to a place in life when stuff like that doesn’t matter to you anymore. Not to mention the fact that if I told my dad that used to be one of his rules today, he’d probably look at me funny and say “I don’t remember ever saying that.” That’s what dads do when they get older.
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Nowadays, my dad keeps a second set of clubs down in Florida at his deceased father’s Jupiter apartment, which is still in the family. Much like the garage fridge, you know you’ve made it in life when you have a second set waiting for you in America’s Sunshine State. My father has also reached a place in life where he goes on many multi-day golf trips that require bringing his clubs, so when he just goes away for a weekend with my mother, or makes the cross-country trip to visit my sister, the clubs stay home. He plays enough already. His original rule was probably concocted in his brain when he still had to travel with three kids while stuffed into 31D and the thought of forking over an extra $30-50 for another bag fee made him physically ill. The 2026 version of my dad, who has “made it” in life, probably doesn’t even look at the baggage fee receipt anymore. Must be nice.
For those of us who still count ourselves among the common folk, it’s an internal debate we all have in our minds when travelling and ideally playing golf at the destination. I recently went from New Jersey to California and back, with only one round of golf lined up since it was a work trip. I brought my clubs just in case a second opportunity to play arose (it did not). Was it worth it to shoot an 83? Was it worth arriving back in Terminal A at Newark airport on a cold, wet, dreary Tuesday evening, waiting 45 minutes at oversized baggage and never seeing my clubs come out, only to walk down to the United Baggage Service window to find out that the clubs were actually in Terminal C the entire time? Hard to say.
That’s the other scary part about always bringing them. You increase the chance that something catastrophic happens. Like the clubs never showing up, or being in a different terminal that requires a packed shuttle ride, or some bag handler unknowingly destroying them beyond recognition. I’ve now travelled with mine so many times that the former has happened to me multiple times, including once before a four-day trip to Bandon Dunes (I birdied the first hole with a rental set at Bandon Trails, so it all worked out). Fortunately, mine have always been on another plane or at another airport and have arrived within 24 hours of my arrival wherever I was staying. We’ve all heard horror stories from people who never saw their clubs again or had half the bag snapped in half. Nightmare fuel.
To me, though, it’s almost always worth the risk. It’s worth upgrading for the Uber XL. It’s worth the stress of following the United app’s “bag tracker,” which is about as accurate as a way-too-early Mel Kiper Mock Draft. It’s worth dealing with the exasperated sighs from your wife as you watch bag after bag that isn’t yours go around the carousel of death. “It’s always the stupid golf clubs,” she groans.
It’s worth it all for the greatest feeling of all: when that travel bag with the faded Ping logo appears at your destination in a reasonable amount of time and everything inside is intact, including the three different pairs of shoes you shoved in there. After experiencing that high, it really doesn’t matter how well you play, what you shoot, or how frustrating it is to play Tetris with everyone else’s bags in the boot. The clubs you saw off five hours ago, wondering if you’d ever reunite, are now with you again in all their glory.
If you are guaranteed to play at least one 18-hole round, and you are a fairly good player who has gotten used to your own clubs, you bring them every single time and twice on Sunday. If you’re a chop who can’t break 100 with your own clubs and you’re slated to play a nice resort course that has top-of-the-line rentals, I’d say it’s perfectly fine to leave yours at home and see how the other half lives. But I certainly wouldn’t stop you from bringing what you’re comfortable with, either.
