Golf

Mark Brown

September 3, 2021

Bet you’re wondering what this one could be possibly about. Is it what lifts carry over over to the golf course? The connections between golf training and strength training? The second of those two questions is much more likely to be answered than the first. Partly because I don’t honestly know the answer to the first and, second, because I’m not that interested in figuring out the answer. This essay will touch on the second question but is far more interested in the organic shift I feel in identity that I have made in the last couple of years. Golf and lifting do overlap in areas of competition, training and space in my life but I found that as I got more serious about lifting golf became more secondary. 

I can’t remember exactly when I started golfing but I believe it was around 2008. I convinced my older brother, Steve, to pay for half of a starter golf set as a birthday gift. He had started playing a few years earlier and talked about it a bit. I had watched golf on television for years and was now ready to start actually doing it. Mini golf wasn’t cutting it anymore. Like everyone who plays golf, I was abjectly terrible in the beginning. I distinctly remember being at a range and someone seeing me swing so badly they actually had to say something to me about it in that first year. Learning how to hit the ball to make it go somewhat the direction I wanted it to was a major challenge. It is a frustrating sport in part because a golfer can do everything right on a shot and still get screwed. The biggest part of that frustration comes from the expectations a golfer sets on themselves when playing. Around 2017 I started making a goal of 5 pars a round then added 1 more to that in 2019 because I feel I’m good enough to make at least 6 pars on any course I place. When those personal goals aren’t met or the day isn’t going well for physical or mental reasons, emotions come pouring out and that is always a bad thing. All emotions, in my experience, have negative consequences. Yes, even the positive ones. 

After the New York Yankees lost in the American League Division Series to the Chicago White Sox in the 2006 Major League Baseball playoffs I cut myself off from being emotionally attached to spectator sports. Prior to that I was very highly attached to the performance teams I rooted for. It was part of who I was. I still follow and root for the Yankees, the Iowa Hawkeyes and the New England Patriots but it’s not life or death anymore. I successfully ripped a part of my self identity away. Spectator sports took on a different role in my life. Once I started playing golf, I started caring more about the activities I was doing far more than the ones I could merely watch. It filled the void that spectator sports had previously played, and I dove into sport with everything I had. I was a very emotional golfer all the way up till about 2016. My expectations for my play were far higher than they should have been. They should have been “be content with not sucking for 1 round” as opposed  the “I should be shooting 90 dammit!” I was at in my head. That led to a lot of temper tantrums and a lot of unfriendly words directed at a golf course that had very little to do with my hitting a terrible shot.

The self identification as a golfer allowed me a fuller emotional, physical and psychological commitment to the game. Golf is a sport with an expensive buy in at the start. Starter sets aren’t stupid expensive but those clubs are exactly what they say they are. They are clubs meant to be replaced by better ones at some point. Upgrading equipment is where the sports true level of expensiveness becomes really understood. I currently have about $2,500 in my  bag, including the bag, and that’s with irons that were on a severe discount. The more I played made me want to play more. What makes golf so fascinating is that it really is a grinder’s sport. Natural ability just doesn’t get anyone very far in golf. Progress in ability is marked more by improved and more consistent play. It is also not very linear, which makes it an easy sport to drive people crazy. Improvement usually leads to higher expectations and in a sport where progress is far from linear, frustration is never more than a swing away. If a golfer cannot control those emotions tied to expectations then it’s just not going to be an enjoyable experience. What combats that is a learned ability to subdue all emotions to put in the work of getting better. I many ways, the sport trains willpower more anything else.

The grind is what separates people who want to be better and those who are truly content with the status quo. They can say they want to improve, but they just aren’t putting in the effort to do so. Grinding happens in two ways in golf primarily: range time and course time. The practice range is for learning how to hit a ball properly and how far one can hit it then, after that, making adjustments. Grinding on the course involves putting all of the work done at the range with the intangibles that both athletes and media members talk about: determination, drive, focus, willpower, etc. One can learn how to hit a golf ball at the range, but only the course teaches one how to golf. I am not a great practice player because I just like playing more than practicing and with lifting in the picture heavily there isn’t much time to do it. I find that playing golf is more fun and rewarding when playing out on the course. The challenge to play better knowing that any day could be one of those days where nothing is going right is what gives that sense of accomplishment that is important to any endeavor. Pushing through the days where the golf gods seem to be against the golfer without emotionally breaking is when true progress is made, at least on the mental side of the sport. Playing well can be equally challenging because each hole that is completed just adds to the pressure of the moment and knowing one bad swing could kill it all. This is even before additional pressures from gambling or money, for professionals, comes into play.

It’s that grind that I understood and found my self identification with. I think it happened because I find that life is a similar grind that requires a similar emotional balance. There are going to be things in life that just aren’t fun but have to be pushed through to get to the other side. Golf got easier to take and the grind became more fun after I decided to let go emotionally on the course. Laughing at missed putts or terrible drives, sighing when having to hit the same shot I just did because I duffed it, and putting away the rage when mistakes piled on top of each other were all things that made me enjoy it more. When I started lifting in 2013, I found another activity with almost the same infrastructure of grinding as golf. I primarily looked at lifting as a way to help my golf game. I reasoned that if I got stronger I could hit the ball farther, but found that reasoning mostly faulty. My focus was still very much on golf despite going to the gym at least 4 times a week. I played a maximum of 20-25 rounds of golf a year so I lifted far, far more than I golfed. This all remained the case all the way up until 2018 when I became more serious about specific strength training goals. From 2013-18, I was rather aimless in my lifting goals but that was definitely not the case with golf. After summer 2018, I think training started to become more level with golf in terms of desire to succeed. 2020 was a year of change for a lot of people, but I wasn’t one one those people whose life was overly effected by it. My life is the same grind it has been since 2011 without any real change.

What did change in 2020 was the fact that I could afford to start buying gym equipment and started lifting in Pete’s, a friend from work, garage. I became much more focused on strength training and that focus took me down a path towards a combination of powerlifting and bodybuilding called “powerbuilding.” I had done a lot of powerlifting before and was reconnecting with it organically. I golfed quite a bit in 2020 so there wasn’t any change in the golf and lifting dynamic physically. However, I had a bigger sense of accomplishment from my daily lifting than my golf scores. The only thing I can point to about the competing feelings of accomplishment in golf and the powerlifting I was doing is that luck plays a much bigger factor in golf than it does in lifting. After I swing the club in golf, I can’t really tell what is going to happen when the ball lands. I just have to adapt to what does happen. This is very different in lifting where I am much more in control of the results of the lift. In a sense, the accomplishment of a heavy deadlift is much fuller than even a few good holes put together. The heavier the lift, the bigger the accomplishment. Even if golf could be seen as harder because of having to deal with a bigger luck factor, I just don’t feel the same level of accomplishment anymore. 

This feeling doubled down in 2021 when I started to feel myself getting stronger and lifting more weight, especially during the summer of 2021. My golf game is also improving as well and has matched my expectations. I have played quite well this past summer, shooting mostly in the mid to low 80s including another round in the 70s. Progress is being made in both lifting and golf but I feel a bigger connection to the lifting I am doing now than golf. I’m not entirely sure what is the driving factor is right now. I suspect it has something to do with the knowledge that there is a ceiling to how good I can become at golf because I just don’t put the time and money investment into it. The lifting helps golf through being more stable at the base and a stronger back but it doesn’t replace hitting balls or playing holes. That directly contrasts lifting where I feel I can truly make big strides in weight lifted and the body I can build in the years to come. That is not to say there isn’t a ceiling there but it feels higher than with golf. If you were to ask me what I was in 2019, I would have said I was a golfer. Now, I’d say I’m a lifter. 

Both sports have had an effect on me and what they have taught me. Had I started lifting before I golfed, I don’t know if I would have had the level headed approach to it that I did. Golf taught me the grind and emotional balance required to truly succeed with making progress in the gym. Perhaps it even influenced my overall life disposition, or maybe I just responded to it that way I did because I was a grinder to begin with. A true chicken or the egg proposition. I see life through the lenses of lessons I have learnt from the gym, and looking back on it all now it started earlier than that.