The first and most important thing I\u2019ve learned about golf is that I suck at it.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t worry \u2014 not in any special kind of way. The shanks would be exciting. The hooks would be riveting. The yips would at least give me a reason to go back to therapy.<\/p>\n
Nope, I just suck. I suck when I\u2019m thinking about every shot. I suck when I try to get lost in the round. I suck when I\u2019m unburdened by the weight of expectation. And I suck something very special and impressive when some portion of my dignity depends upon not sucking.<\/p>\n
The thing about sucking at golf is that it gives you a lot of time to think about your state of affairs. The scratch player might enjoy a brisk walk from tee to fairway to green, pondering the strategic challenge and the afternoon sun and the mowing patterns, but he will never understand how it feels to walk helplessly from 80 yards left after your first shot to somehow-further-left after your second. He will never understand what it is like to know your odds of par have dwindled from modest to almost nothing, requiring a Herculean heave \u2014 a true moment of genius \u2014 from the deep-s**t just to leave yourself 30 feet to stave off embarrassment. And he will certainly not know how it feels after you\u2019ve topped your ball from that location to five feet in front of it, then punched in a fury to 50 yards right of the green, and begun the long, shameful walk to the golf ball before he, the scratch, has even contemplated his approach.<\/p>\n
He will not know what happens in between all that running around between bad shots. What occurs within your head and your heart and your soul as you confront the chasm between what you would very much like to be and what is. He won\u2019t know the way that golf becomes something much more than an endeavor at mastery in those moments. And he won\u2019t know the act of defiance that is choosing to enjoy yourself even after things have gone so obviously wrong.<\/p>\n
This sucking \u2014 this interminable, unceasing failure \u2014 turns out to be the miracle of golf. To the scratch player, golf is something small and manageable, like a jigsaw puzzle that can be tamed under the right conditions. But to the sucker? Golf is unfathomably enormous, unspeakably ephemeral, and inherently absurd. It is not just a thing. It is the thing. The whole universe somehow lives within it, like a baby\u2019s cry or a first kiss or the first chords of a song from a past life.<\/p>\n
It was not until I read Michael Murphy\u2019s Golf in the Kingdom <\/a>for the first time that it occurred to me my sucking wasn\u2019t in vain. Murphy\u2019s meditations on golf as a panacea remain some of the most compelling words I\u2019ve ever consumed on the sport, and they illuminated for me something I had long known but never connected: Golf is a reflection of self. Not necessarily in skill or score, but in disposition.<\/p>\n Recently, I was fascinated to hear the golf meditations of a more contemporary philosopher: Noah Kahan<\/a>, the pop-folk singer-songwriter whose press tour for his most recent album,The Great Divide, has featured a startling number of reflections on the sport.<\/p>\n Kahan\u2019s interest in golf\u2019s grander questions of meaning are foreign only to people who have never heard his music. In the song Forever, he writes with a golfer\u2019s sensibility about continuing to show up despite your imperfections. (I broke a bone that never healed in my hand; so when I hold her close, I might loosen my grip; but I won\u2019t ever let her go.) But his interest in golf\u2019s role in those questions was a mystery until the blitz to promote his latest album, when Kahan took time in several interviews to rhapsodize about the importance of golf in his life and his psyche.<\/p>\n In a world full of enablers and yes men, golf is a place where the most successful among us can suck \u2014 somewhere honesty and humility arrive with equanimity. But it\u2019s rare to hear a celebrity suggest, as Kahan did in several interviews, that golf was less of a weekend hobby and more of a center of spiritual gravity.<\/p>\n The launching off point of Kahan\u2019s recent interest was a professional crisis. As he grappled with the enormity of following up a smash-hit album with another creatively fulfilling pursuit, Kahan ran into a period of prolonged creative burnout. At one point, things got so bad that he considered quitting music temporarily to take a job filling divots<\/a> at a local golf course in Vermont. <\/p>\n \u201cI was just looking for something I could do for the next few years until I figured things out,\u201d he said. \u201cMusic was just making me so unhappy that I was like, \u2018Why am I doing this?’\u201d<\/p>\n Kahan had fallen down a hole familiar to generations of weekend hackers: The thing he loved was no longer something he liked. Worse yet, he had no easy exit: Every time he opened his phone, he was greeted by dozens of notes from total strangers expressing their affection or animus for his work, or their anticipation of what was to come next. <\/p>\n Kahan suggested the external feedback had proved damaging. Some days, he\u2019d surrender the entirety of his emotional wellbeing to strangers on the internet. Other days he\u2019d ignore their comments completely, even the ones that might otherwise land profoundly.<\/p>\n Eventually, though, he found a breakthrough, and it arrived in a most unusual place: a golf lesson.<\/p>\n