A Miserable Golfer's Guide To Enjoying Miserable Golf --- It's a good walk spoiled. Or is it a mediocre walk that's simply made worse by terrible play?

“The other day I played a miserable round of golf, a rotten sport invented by bored Satanists to rid the average human of all self-esteem. I enjoyed it very much.

 

A few observations:

 

Midweek summer golf is the best golf. I know that spring golf has its advocates, and that fall golfers get excited about wearing the overpriced sweater vests they bought on the Scotland trip, but I believe golf is best when it is played in a dead August heat in which you break a sweat just parking the cart. Midweek summer golf should have thin crowds, soggy humidity, mosquitoes as big as squash balls, and at least one person in the group who stays on the phone, because they think people at the office actually care that they're not in the office. Nobody cares.

 

Nine holes feels like the proper amount of golf. This is common sense. Get yourself around in two hours or less, leave without sobbing, punching someone or burying your clubs at the bottom of a lake. I don't understand humans with the temperament to play 18 holes on the regular. This feels like a holdover from colonial times, when there were few activities, nobody had an Apple watch with notifications. How do people have this time? Are they retired? Unemployed? Independently wealthy without a care or obligation in the world? Do they never have to go to the supermarket, the hardware store or fritter away the rest of the afternoon on a text thread? How can they focus for four hours? I cannot devote four hours of attention to anything, not even my own children. I would worry about offending my children, but they stopped reading after the first paragraph.

 

There was a brief time in my life when I thought I was becoming a fairly decent golfer. That time has passed, and was surely delusional. Today I arrived at the course with a single objective: Finish without maiming any creature, especially myself.

 

This was a public course with a casual vibe, but it still had a handful of rules including: You must wear a collared shirt. This is my way of telling you I forgot to wear a collared shirt. I wasn't wearing a T-shirt -- it was more like a poly-blend athletic shirt which makes me look like someone who once walked past a yoga studio without going inside. Before the match, I went to the pro shop with the vague intention of buying a collared shirt, but after flipping through the 60%-off rack and seeing nothing that wouldn't turn me into Rodney Dangerfield crashing a cocktail party, I decided to see if I could just sneak on to the course as my slovenly self. I gave a knowing nod to the guy at the counter, as if to say: This isn't a big deal. He gave me a look that said: This poor guy has much bigger problems than not wearing a collared shirt. Which was very true.

 

We didn't warm up on the range before the match. This is the correct strategy if you play six times a decade, as you don't want to waste a good shot, you want to carry over all that momentum you have from March 2022.

 

When I thought I was becoming good at golf -- again, a delusion -- I used to pay very close attention to equipment and have actual opinions about gear. Today you could send me out onto the course with a bag containing a pogo stick, a copperhead and a mackerel, and I wouldn't notice. It's liberating. Gear is tyranny.

 

There's always a moment of excitement opening a pocket on a golf bag you have not opened in a long time. Either this contains tees, $20 or an egg salad sandwich from the 90s.

 

Light money was wagered. I mean really light. Like gas money. Like enough gas to drive across Syracuse.

 

My partner and I made the mistake of playing with young people, a couple of kids in their early 20s who play fairly regularly. Old people: Do not do this. You will watch them drive off the tee with such supernatural physical might you will wonder if you play the same sport. They will watch you tee off, and think you look like The Mummy.

 

Someone once said that every round of golf contains a shot that makes you question why you ever took up golf, and one shot that makes you think, Huh, maybe I could be pretty good at golf. I disagree with this slightly: Every round of golf I play contains 20 to 40 shots that make me question why I ever took up golf. But the other part is true, and it arrived for me on an approach shot from the fairway, when I passed over the pogo stick, took a 6-iron, and lofted it gently onto the green, less than 3 feet from the pin. It was beautiful. If I had been Scottie Scheffler himself, I couldn't have done it any better. Shot of the day, my partner exclaimed. It was the shot of the day. I celebrated by three-putting (really) and returning myself to the desolate mire of my meaningless existence.

 

I didn't lose a ball or take any kind of penalty the entire day. There is something uniquely depressing about that: doing nothing egregiously wrong, and still being horrible.

 

That is golf's true power: its ability to inflict humility upon all of us. You see it in the professionals, who play better golf than we could play in 30 lifetimes, but then bogey a crucial hole and return to the clubhouse emotionally crushed. I'm charmed by LeBron James's nascent golf career: How someone at the top of one athletic profession has decided to start at the grim bottom of another. James surely has no shortage of pros begging to help his game, and he's still tangled in a herky-jerky backswing (being 6-foot-9 surely doesn't help). Golf is ruthless this way. It doesn't care who is playing. It's cruel to anyone.

 

We beat those kids, by the way. They got cocky, gave us a few strokes, and we edged them on the last putt on the final hole. Serves 'em right. Never mess with The Mummy. Not when Syracuse gas money's on the line.” [1]

 

1. A Miserable Golfer's Guide To Enjoying Miserable Golf --- It's a good walk spoiled. Or is it a mediocre walk that's simply made worse by terrible play? Gay, Jason.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 18 Aug 2026: A16.