Previously, on Golf Life Crisis… in a cliché-laden opener, life changes in an instant (Flushed | s0e1).
So we know now that a) I’m a real-life version of a meme, b) I take the coward’s way out when opening blog posts, and c) a little over a year ago I hit a golf ball properly for the first time and knew in that moment that nothing would ever be the same again.
Which, despite hyperbole being pretty much the default state in this modern world, actually isn’t an exaggeration, as this Prologue – and in fact this blog’s very existence – will make clear.
It is, though, a pretty remarkable and unusual experience: scales falling from one’s eyes in an instant, only less ‘biblical conversion’ and more ‘lifetime sentence of buying Pro V1s to replace the latest batch that you rope-hooked into a farmer’s field. You absolute moron.’
What it does mean is that it’s hard to match that opener for instantaneous drama and life-changing impact. The difficult second blog post.
Because although everything had changed… not much had actually changed, at least not right away. Except for my viewing habits, delving into not so much a rabbit hole as a Mariana Trench of golf on YouTube: Rick Shiels, Peter Finch, GoodGood, Danny Maude, LiterallyAnythingWithGolfintheTitle.
Bed became less of a place to sleep and more of a place to watch hour after hour of course vlogs, club reviews, driver fittings, and swing tips. Like Patrick Stewart in Extras, I wanted to see everything. Hook it up and pump it directly into my veins.
I knew golf… apart from how to actually play it. I was having lessons every few weeks, and felt like I was making progress: half-decent contact as often as not (or so it felt), a lot of time spent on various driving ranges, and a few jaunts around two ‘academy’ courses – aka pitch-and-putts with better marketing – at a couple of local clubs.
But nothing that would be classified as Proper Golf™. And it stayed that way. The honest truth (brace for a lot of that over the coming months/years) is that I was scared. I’d found this thing that I really loved, wanted to be good at, and felt like I had potential. But putting it to the test was an undeniable moment of reckoning, like asking out that girl in Sixth Form who almost definitely likes you and lent you the textbook that one time and seems to smile at you occasionally and isn’t just being polite… but maybe let’s not put it to the test, eh?
I was also scared of the imagined embarrassment. And while rarely (although sometimes…) as bad in reality as in the mind, golf just is a sport where the scope for embarrassment is high. The focus is usually on one person at any given time. What you’re trying to do is patently obvious to anyone watching. You can get paired up with randoms. Or, even worse, be asked to play through. And there’s no way of signalling to the world that you’re new and rubbish and very much aware of it. [Note to self: research ‘L plates for golfers’ as a potential business idea.]
It was all enough to keep me on the bunny slopes for more than three months. Until, on the evening of July 25th, 2023, I ventured to Lansdown for my first 18 hole round.
114 shots later, I came home, mindset some combination of ‘imminent rage blackout’ and ‘just witnessed a war crime’.
(Before anyone says, ‘114 shots is good for a first round, stop complaining you massive bell’… you might be right, I don’t know. What I do know is that, delusional or not (definitely delusional), I genuinely thought I’d shoot under 100. I had no conception of how different it would be to strike balls off turf rather than a range mat, how varied the lies would be, how easy it was to get into trouble and then how hard to get back out of it, and on and on. And so, for the first – and most definitely not last – time on this journey, that abyss between expectation and reality opened up, and I tumbled headlong into it.)
I didn’t sleep that night, the horrors of the round playing on a loop in my head. Pow, right in the kisser.
I couldn’t shake it. And so, two days later, I tried again.
103.
Progress.
Will that rate of progress continue? Or – ominous leading question alert – most definitely not? That’s next time, on Golf Life Crisis…
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