Why Is Golf So Addicting?

I keep an eye on an Instagram account, @sobagolfco, and recently the person who runs it uploaded an old interview in which Dan Rather spoke to Alice Cooper. During that interview, Cooper started discussing sobriety and golf, saying that almost every man he knew who had become sober went on to play golf, after which he laughed and gave a reason for this: golf was also an addiction. The way he put it sounded just like something Alice Cooper would say and it made me laugh.

However, after a while I began to think about my own life.

I golf a great deal—more than I used to and more than I ever intended, even though I had moved into a golf community, so what could I have expected? On some mornings I work out on the course before most people have even had their first cup of coffee. I am aware of the days when the range is quiet. My views on putters are quite strong, even if I couldn’t explain them to someone who doesn’t play the game.

There is an increasing number of courses that I’d like to see, Pebble Beach being one that I can quite reliably predict I’ll visit. Even when I’m not playing, I keep thinking about golf and at times I’m already planning the next round before I’ve finished the present one.

Maybe Cooper is right. There are many things that I enjoy which haven’t slowly reorganized various aspects of my life. Golf has done so even though I never made any particular deliberate decision to let it. When I first started out my aim was to play better, and at some point that turned into an obsession.

There Is Always Another Shot

The simplest explanation is that golf is a difficult sport and there are a great many people who are really good at it, but I don’t think that difficulty alone can account for this. There are plenty of difficult things which people just leave alone. Golf has a more specific method of holding your attention: it makes the kind of player you’d like to become seem just within reach.

When you score 95 and think that breaking 90 will put things to rest, you then finally manage to score 89 and realize that 85 now seems completely reasonable. After breaking 80 and before you’ve had much time to enjoy it, you start remembering the three or four absurd things that prevented it from being 76.

What is more surprising is that you don’t need to play very well in order to keep the entire relationship going. Suppose you play awfully for three hours and then hit one shot exactly as you had imagined it. It could be an 8-iron from 150 yards; you remembered to hit down, the contact seems solid and the ball starts on the line you had decided before sinking towards the flag. There is a sense of satisfaction there, along with a feeling more like relief. That golfer is real.

You weren’t just imagining him on the practice range.

I believe that is different from just enjoying a good shot. It appears to show you what kind of performance you are capable of more frequently. You don’t have to become that player for the whole afternoon; it’s sufficient simply to have a few glimpses of greatness to keep yourself in good form. Of course, my preference is to keep my rounds below 80 and simply not manage to do so. But on the days when I can’t achieve that, I still usually leave with something I’d like to try again.

Never mind if I learn something.

The fact that at 58 makes one of the things I appreciate most about the game is that I can still get better at something that is truly difficult. A large part of adult life is about learning how to carry out familiar responsibilities in a reasonable manner. We learn our jobs, settle into our routines and work out ways of getting through the week. There is a certain comfort in that, and I don’t want to overlook it.

Yet I do enjoy having something in my life where I don’t already know how the afternoon is going to turn out or what I might find out about myself by the time it is over.

Golf is excellent at maintaining that sense of uncertainty. Once you think you’ve got a good grasp of the driver, the putter suddenly seems like a foreign object and may as well be put on time-out. Only after you’ve finally learned how to compress an iron do you end up being far too enthusiastic about a chip and send it over the green. There’s always more that can be improved upon.

I can go into the practice area at my home course and leave having picked up some knowledge about contact, or putting, or how little it helps to get annoyed with either of those. Progress is good enough to keep me encouraged but at the same time unreliable enough that I can’t rely on it.

Somewhere to Put Your Attention

The part of Cooper’s remark that remained with me was the fact that he was referring to sobriety, not to having a lower handicap. I am not saying that golf acts as a treatment for addiction or that his experience can be used to explain the recovery of anyone else. What I find interesting is the practical question which lies beneath it.

When a person is attempting to lead a different sort of life, what do the hours which used to be taken up by the old habit now consist of? What is there to look forward to? And who do you expect to see?

Golf provides some quite ordinary solutions. For example, there’s the Tuesday night league and the game at noon on Friday. Your name appears on the tee sheet in Golf Genius, and three other people are relying on you to turn up. Of course, it’s a money game. There’s also a practice range and a putting green at which an hour can easily pass before you’ve made up your mind about whether you’re putting any better.

You have to clean your clubs, replace your grips, enter tournaments, and the weather forecast now demands far more of your attention than it did before.

There are also the little rituals—making the coffee, getting dressed, packing the bag, and leaving enough time to play a few shots before the first tee. Although from the outside none of these seems like much, together they give part of the week a sense of structure. There’s a place one has to go, something one has to prepare for, and a reason to get going. I can see that someone might become attached to them even before deciding whether the golf was any good.

When golf has found a place in my weekly schedule, it doesn’t always remain there. It has altered the way I think about traveling; now I want to go to places because of the golf courses they have, even those in small towns which previously would never have persuaded me to leave the highway. I take notice of old clubhouses, and I often ask myself why a particular hole was constructed that way and what the land was like before it was decided that eighteen holes should be included.

Golf has provided my photography with a new subject, and on some occasions the photograph is just as interesting to me as the shot I am supposed to be preparing to hit.

It has also affected the amount of walking I do. I enjoy taking my bag with me when the weather isn’t very hot, not only as a way of paying homage to the traditional game but also because I find pleasure in walking around the course in that manner. I am more conscious about what I wear, not since I believe golf requires another person to be keeping an eye on everyone’s clothing, but because getting ready has now become part of the ritual. I like the few minutes between shots when no one has any need of me.

Although I wouldn’t necessarily mention these points in an account of why I began playing golf, I should miss them now.

People should also be included in that explanation. Golf has created friendships which probably would not have come about in any other way, together with those small, special communities that form around regular matches. There are the Tuesday groups, the Friday players, and the men who still meet at the Tavern to talk about a round which ended at eleven thirty in the morning. There’s the person at the pro shop who knows you’re playing before you even mention your name.

In the end, the course becomes a place where you lead your life, not just a place you go to carry out an activity. This point is very important.

The Cruel Part

It by no means follows that becoming involved in golf will improve your skill at it. After having spent so much time attempting to get better, I know that being enthusiastic and treating the game with determination aren’t always one and the same. You can carry on practicing for weeks, get to the first tee with the intention of showing off all you’ve learned, and hit the ball so far off the line that the five-dollar ball will never be seen again.

The situation isn’t as bad nowadays, but when I first started, I sometimes felt as though I was paying for someone’s child to go to college at Titleist.

The same sort of problem occurs on the putting green. A five-foot putt is hard enough without having to stand over it and in your mind calculate just how much you need to make it. Once you’ve taken into account the score, the match, and what missing the putt might imply about all that practice, you place an altogether minor task with far more responsibility than it deserves. I am well aware of how easily I can do that.

While I go to the practice area because I want to get better, the desire to show that I have improved can make it hard to play the shot in front of me.

The contradiction that I continually return to is this: golf leads me to want to improve, yet it also places me in situations where being too concerned about the outcome becomes the issue. It is important to put in the effort, just as it is important to know when to stop carrying over what I’ve been thinking or practicing into the next swing. I can prepare for a shot, decide what I’m aiming to achieve, and then make the best effort that I can.

But I cannot demand that the result should justify the time I have spent thinking about or practicing golf.

I refer to my reminder as “Forget and Forget” — that means you should forget the bad shots as well as the good ones. A poor swing needn’t carry over to the next tee, and a good one doesn’t ensure anything about the next approach. The shot immediately in front of me should receive its own consideration.

Although I am still better at explaining this than at putting it into practice, I am starting to realize that what I am working on involves more than just my golf swing; it also concerns the way I react when an afternoon doesn’t turn out as I had intended.

Still Becoming

It perhaps helps to understand why golf has been taking up a greater share of my life. When I first decided to get back into the game, my goals were quite simple—they were to hit the ball better, reduce my handicap, and stop spending so much money on it. I still have those aims. At the same time, I now also want to see some of the courses that I haven’t played yet, to understand aspects that I had previously overlooked, and to become a better kind of company when my game isn’t working well.

There is a great deal more to work on than I realized when I resumed playing the game after 14 years in Ouray.

I enjoy the fact that I can still feel nervous about something as trivial as a golf match. I enjoy the idea of meeting someone at the first tee and, by the time the round is over, still knowing absolutely nothing about him except that he likes his new driver. I enjoy being surprised by a shot that I didn’t know I had, even if it’s followed by a double bogey. All of this shows that I haven’t worked out the game yet, but it does indicate that I’m still interested.

I believe there is a distinction between enjoying something one knows well and having something in store for oneself. Golf provides me with both of these experiences. Although the course and the people are familiar, there is still the chance that I might have an afternoon that is entirely new to me. At my age of 58, I don’t consider that a negligible point.

There are aspects of the player that I would like to become which I have only occasionally seen, and other aspects which I am just now beginning to think about.

I can’t say whether that’s what Alice Cooper had in mind; although I get the joke, my calendar provides very little support for the defense. Yet when I consider all the things that would be missing if golf weren’t there, it’s not just the games themselves that come to mind, but the people I look forward to seeing, the places I hope to go to, and the sense that I haven’t yet learned something important to me. I should still like to break 80 the next time I play; I’ve only managed to do it a few times.

I’m also interested in finding out what else might take place.

Until Next Time,

MVM