Doses of Cold Reality

I am not a good golfer. This is a truth so obvious that its acknowledgement causes no pain. My short game is garbage, my putting inconsistent. Fairway excellence? It’s rare.   

Any fantasy of becoming good – one borne out of an absorption in endless YouTube videos where silky influencers make impossible shots look routine – is extinguished by a sport that doesn’t yield to delusion. 

Several weeks ago, I played four rounds at two excellent courses. The golf took place in a cloudless southern climate, where humpback whales could be seen breaching off the coastal holes. The description of what follows is an indictment of someone whose self-pitying marred sustained appreciation of the locale's sheer beauty (I realize that complaining about the psychological trials of golfing during the winter can seem obnoxiously indulgent, but whatever).

Before the trip, I believed myself a changed player: buoyed by positive reinforcement, there would be fewer blow ups, shots wouldn’t get rushed and no longer would I duff irons after promising drives. 

I'd undergone a maturation that would make these bad habits obsolete. “It’s only golf, it doesn’t really matter,” I would repeat, as if articulating the cosmic unimportance of hitting a plastic ball would negate the anger resulting from doing it badly. 

By the fifth hole of the first round, I’d lost all composure. A grown man of serviceable athleticism had dissolved into a puddle of anxiety – rushing and shanking fairway woods on my way to not finishing the hole, having forgotten every truism I’d memorized pre-round. And then, of course, that hated, swelling sense of anxiety which powers every meltdown took hold. Maybe you've been there: standing over the ball with no idea of what to do, a poor result seemingly inevitable. It is the truest reminder that golf pays no heed to your pleasure. 

There are few hobbies people pay so much to enjoy that foment the same degree of self-loathing. Unlike in hockey, where the margin for error is higher (bad passes can still find a teammate’s stick), golf abuses every failure. 

Missing the ball by only millimeters will grossly transform a shot’s trajectory, changing the course of your round and potentially jeopardizing a team match. You will swear a lot, and behave like the sort of unruly toddler adults make private criticisms of. 

You may hate yourself. Your friends may hate you, too.

And yet I continue to play, in search of an illusory sense of control the game will never permit. Golf rewards only the application of proper physics, never delusion. And maybe – beyond the rare moments when things go as you intend – this is its true value. In a world of imposed subjectivity, golf shows you what’s real. 

Whether your temperament can withstand this truth – and the gulf between what we believe about ourselves, and the shortcomings we too infrequently admit – will dictate one’s fortune. 

Reality’s cold dose is hard to swallow. Golf will ensure its consistent ingestion.