Golf - More on That Later

If I wanted to make my relationship work, I was going to have to work on my golf game...

 It doesn't really matter which relationship I'm talking about because a lot of my relationships have golf as a focal point. Much like many of the sports in my life, we've gone through our highs and lows but none more unique than golf. From a sport that I enthusiastically fell in love with to the thing that drove me crazy and eventually drove me in a tiny golf cart right back to love again - it's both the nature of the game and the nature of my relationship with it. So I suppose we start at the beginning... 

I'm sure I'm remembering it wrong but when we moved to Florida, it wasn't too long after my dad started taking me to the tennis court with him. We walked through the dark pink gate in the backyard to the tennis courts behind our house and I'd hold a racquet as big as I was as my dad softly hit tennis balls for me to chase. I hated it. But the outfits were cute. A few years of summer tennis camp attempts to get me to love the game and the ever present reminder that if I wanted to be great, I had every resource available to me (more on that later), tennis never really stuck. My parents finally accepted I was more of an "inside" activity kind of kid; dance, art class, figure skating... so when my dad took me to the driving range, I'm sure it was Tennis 2.0. To be fair, I was 9. It was Florida. It was hot. I wasn't very good. But it was a time when my dad treated me like an adult so I thought it was pretty cool. My dad loved to golf, his friends loved to golf, the coolest people I knew loved to golf so it couldn't be that bad right? Obviously I needed to know how to golf to be cool (more on that later). 

The Tennis 2.0 pattern followed, I'd go to the driving range with my dad. We'd hit balls for as long as he could stand my whining about how it was hot, there were bugs, and how I wasn't hitting the ball well. We'd chip and putt and he'd make up challenges for me whether it was a certain distance or number of balls from the same spot. I wasn't very good but it was fun. Until it wasn't. Golf camp was where I stopped having fun. I was fortunate enough to be one of the first students at the IMG Golf Academy in Bradenton, Florida. Before it was the five star campus it is today, it was a quiet driving range, chip and putt, with access to various golf courses throughout the county since they didn’t yet have their own. Even among the modest surroundings, I knew I was around great golfers, golfers far better than me. Golfers who cared a lot more about the game than I did. Golfers who wanted to take it seriously. Now I know what you're thinking, you said golf camp was where you stopped having fun so why were you "fortunate enough" to go? It's complicated. I was fortunate enough to be there because of my dad's job. No one cared that I wasn't a great golfer, they cared who I was related to. I didn't need to be good to be there but I needed to be good to keep up. And I couldn't. 

“Golf is deceptively simple and endlessly complicated.” - Arnold Palmer

Imagine for a moment you're a 12 year old who just wants to have fun in a group of girls who are competing for their chance at their dream. To me it wasn't that deep. To them, it was everything. It was the thing that some of them moved halfway around the world for, leaving their families and friends behind. I tried to take the training as seriously as they did but because I knew I didn't belong and they knew I didn’t belong, I kept my own expectations in check. All the cool people I knew could golf really well and I couldn’t. So I must not be cool. This wasn’t the first time I was bad at something – I was constantly told things I was bad at, whether it was at school, dance, singing, skating, there was always someone better than me that teachers and peers couldn’t wait to compare me to. I was comfortable being bad at things (more on that later). Golf camp was the first time that being bad at something made me feel small. It was the first time that I felt like the only reason I was there was because of my dad. I never wanted to feel that way again.

It wasn’t that I didn’t learn a lot, I certainly became a very good golfer (I have my moments). It was that the game became associated with feeling inferior. It was a constant reminder of what I needed to correct or improve or control and for me, it was difficult to see improvement or to psychologically feel better about my game. I didn’t feel like I could get better, the grown ups in the room made it seem like I was as good as I would ever be but wasn’t that the point of training? Wasn’t that the point of practice? If you already have to be good to participate, what’s the point? Golf and I had met a roadblock in our relationship. I didn’t feel like going around it or through it at that point so I just sat by it for a while.

Fast forward a few decades, I wanted to find a better way to spend time with my boyfriend. We have a lot in common but sometimes it’s hard to find a thing we both want to do together. Golf is usually something we can agree on. But if we wanted to make golf a more consistent part of our relationship, I was going to have to improve my relationship with golf. It wasn’t golf’s fault that I didn’t like it all the time, it was the system in which I had learned about golf. Long hours at the driving range, uncomfortable shoes, forcing yourself to stay longer than you wanted to, sunburns, bug spray, bad Gatorade and granola bars, outfits I didn’t like, mean girls who didn’t like me, (don’t get me started about trying to golf as a middle school girl who just got her period) but most of all a feeling of dread at not being very good and the fear that came with it being pointed out constantly... This needed to change.

In my mid 20’s I made myself a promise as I moved to a new city and had to make friends – I promised myself that I would never force myself to stay in any social occasion I no longer wanted to stay in. If the party wasn’t fun anymore, I could go. If the girl’s night was too much drama, peace out! And I decided to apply that attitude to the driving range. No longer was I forced to stay long after I wanted to leave. If I hit a dozen balls and got bored, okay. If I chipped and putted for 20 minutes and then started getting eaten by bugs, I could go. I didn’t have to suck it up or stop complaining, I could just get in my car and go home. I’m not going to be a professional golfer, I never was. It was never in the cards for me, no matter what anyone else wants to say. I learned the things I needed to learn in my time training at IMG in both golf and tennis - that these are fun activities for me to participate in with my friends and family, not my profession. That discipline and dedication are important pieces of the puzzle but neither of them matter if you don’t love the sport. But mostly that I don’t need to fight to prove myself or try to belong in places where I simply don’t belong.

That last lesson isn’t a bad one. By finding out where I didn’t belong, it made it easier to find where I did. It made me appreciate the places where I did belong, where my eccentricities were celebrated instead of criticized, where my talent could be lovingly developed instead of developed in fear. Golf and I just had to redefine our relationship so I could use it as a tool in all the rest.