Obsession

A van would be nice. Something with a bed, a little kitchen, and enough space to keep his clubs out of the way. He had a lot of clubs. Triples in most sizes, but as many as six putters, and probably twelve drivers.

He did not have a van.

Today he woke up in Flagstaff. He was getting ready to make the jump out to Cypress Point outside Monterey. Itching to leave, actually. This place had been feeling stale for days, but it just wasn’t warm enough yet. Before that he had limped his way West with a bum choke, manually pouring gas into the carburetor every time he wanted to start the car and playing holes all across the South. Winter was ending and he was ready to wrap his way back East for Pine Valley and Shinnecock Hills when the air warmed. Those were courses you could spend a few months at without getting sick of it.

He brewed up a cup of instant coffee on his little Jetboil stove and started rearranging his interior for travel. So limited was the room in his shitty little car that he had to perform this shuffle twice every day to get a “bed” laid out inside. Depending on the course, he often found nearby parking and just slept under the stars off the throughway of the closest hole. Flagstaff only had one public course, and he had already burned some bridges trying to park overnight in their lot. He had taken to a sleepy residential street behind the grocery store for the past week. A little too well lit, but safe and close enough to the green anyway.

He rolled in well before the sun, with a light bag and a few choice clubs (a flatstick, a sandie, two blades, a shovel and a big dog). The clubhouse didn’t open the doors until 8am. He wandered over to the driving range and started collecting balls by headlamp. After half an hour, he had filled two grocery bags—he knew where to look—and started warming up his drive at the range. Another hour would bring sunrise, and some people to play with.

His first twenty or thirty balls were straight pops with no power. He couldn’t bring power to his swing without warming up anymore. Some days, he couldn’t even do it then. Every swing hurt a little, because he pushed right at the edge. After an hour, he had pushed that edge further as his body warmed to the motion. He didn’t even notice the pain. Maybe because it was so constant, or maybe because he was too focused on the craft to think about anything else. Focus on the craft was his method for ignoring pain going back a long time now.

When other people started to arrive, he began the next part to his routine. He would hop on as a fourth with anyone willing. When nobody was willing, he would work on his short game at the putting field or his long game at the range depending on his mood. When things moved well, he played two rounds before lunch and two after for 72 holes. That was an exceptional day, but a 54 hole day was fairly routine. Lunch was always the table scraps he got from the club, secured by trade with the wait staff. They all wanted something different wherever he went, but whatever they wanted he could get or already had.

Sometimes, after he had been in one place for long enough, he would get to know the other players. No matter where he was in America, they were the same people though. A husband and wife that were using the game to find some kind of common ground. A businessman trying to level up to gain respect with clients. Young men, burning a day in revelry. Groups of women—always older, always from money. Accountant types, who took diligent score. Artistic types, who didn’t keep score at all. Serious players, the kind that only let him join after whispers about his game had spread. He had seen them all before. He wondered sometimes, how they saw him.

He looked older than he was, he knew that. He had been circling the continent on a never-ending road trip for over a decade. He was nearly always tired, and looked it. His diet sucked, product of having no kitchen. He had money, but only the bare minimum to get from place to place. It was hard on him, and he knew it showed on his face. He was lonely. He was sad. Maybe they saw all that, but probably not. People see so little.

She would’ve been eighteen last week.

There were days, increasingly common, where he didn’t seem capable of amassing the energy to head over to the green. This was usually an indication that it was time to move on to the next place. Not because that was a cure for whatever ailed him, but because it was the only thing he could really do about it.

So that’s what he did.

There were so damn many next places. He would arrive with excitement each time and begin the task of learning the air and land. How the ball flew from the tee box, and how it behaved when it inevitably crash landed. This crash was the true heart of the game, he felt. Of life, he knew. Crashes happened in lakes, sand, rough, fairway and God willing: the green. They might be abrupt, with a near vertical trajectory that caused the ball to crater and move hardly a foot from the point of impact. The trajectory could be near horizontal instead, and the ball might skip along the earth like a throwing stone in water. He was dedicated to controlling this crash. It was an all-consuming dedication. Rather, he wished it was.

There was really only so much time in a day which could be dedicated wholly to a single thing. Even allowing for time spent meditating on his chosen subject, he would inevitably find himself thinking of other things. His daughter, for example. His wife, for another.

Each day like the one before. Up early. Shitty coffee. Searching for balls to drive. Sunrise alone, the beauty of the coming day unnoticed. Singularly focused. A machine performing a function does not ask why the function is performed.

He spent a morning with a married couple. This one might survive, he thinks. The man doesn’t explain too much, and that seems like a good sign. Before lunch he jumps on with businessmen. They can’t play for shit. One offers him $100 to teach him to drive. It is not possible to teach him this, he’s tried more times than he can count with others like him. He takes the money. Scraps for lunch. Drunks in the afternoon. Tomorrow the same. Yesterday the same. Every day the same. Almost total focus on the craft. Almost.

Loneliness isn’t a measurement of how many people you know, it turns out. He knows thousands of people, spread across the states. Nobody knows him. That’s the true measure of loneliness, he thinks.

He had only one avenue to a good day: play a lot and think little. Exert control. He had so many avenues to a bad day. Yet, most weeks were filled with good days by his admittedly fucked up standard. He knew, better than anyone, that the old saying was not accurate. A good life was not a collection of good days. How you define a good day changes with time, usually slowly but occasionally all at once. How you define your life is only ever possible in the present moment and only really matters at the end of it. What happens if your definition of a good day changes in all that time?

He played a lot, there is no doubt about it. He was good, maybe even great. He didn’t concern himself with the complete picture of his game. He focused only on the thing directly in front of him at any given moment. A perfect putt. Complete control over a drive. Popping out of the sand with backspin that seemed to defy physics. Every shot he took was imperfect. Every time he took out a club he had the chance to correct the imperfection. He knew he never would, thank God. There is no better definition of obsession than this. He was good at golf, maybe even great, but he was perhaps the foremost expert on planet Earth when it came to the subject of obsession.

Evenings in the car were the worst part of the day. The car sucked pretty bad, but that wasn’t why. He couldn’t distract himself there, and so he spent more time thinking than he wanted to.

In movies, the conversation always happened at an impressive desk with an important man made more so by all of the framed degrees and other awards of merit behind him. In life, she simply asked them to step outside the room so they could talk in the hall. Doctors probably don’t even need a desk, they seem to be on their feet running from room to room all day. What is the correct response when a doctor tells you that your daughter will die?

We all die. A doctor only tells you something like that when the timing is off. The correct response was to comfort his wife and to spend whatever time he had left with his daughter. Or even to freak out and become hysterical, letting them comfort him. He walked out of the room, out of the hospital, drove home alone, got out of his car, wandered to the golf course that he lived near, and began an obsession. It didn’t have to be golf, he just lived near a golf course.

She would’ve been eighteen last week but she doesn’t get older anymore. Every day he gets a day older and he doesn’t have it in him to do anything about it. His wife did.

The sun rises on him at the range again. Every shot hurts a little, every ball crashes. He focuses on the crash, the true heart of the game. Of life.

The bones of this piece came to me shortly after I moved near a golf course in 2021. Not every day, but a lot of days in the summertime, I wake up pretty early and ride my bike over to Eldo for some rock climbing. Ideally, I get to the park around sunrise. So, I leave in the dark most of the time and until I found a shorter way I would bike past the golf course. Always—I mean always—there are a few people there hitting balls at the range by headlamp. I don’t like golf, for myriad reasons, but I recognized a bit of a kinship with these people. From a distance, we resembled each other in all the ways that mattered to me.

A healthy amount of obsession has helped shape me for the better, no doubt about it. Obsession can turn unhealthy though, and in fact that is probably inevitable. Not everyone is prone to it, but I am. I have to check myself constantly and I have many safeguards against my nature. I do this because I want to be happy, and I want to be there for the people in my life that need me. I set out to write a piece about my own obsessions through the lens of a sport I basically don’t know anything about. That felt like a funny joke to me, of which the punchline is an important truth. If being into golf is stupid, so is everything else. You can quibble about water use or terraforming or whatever—and 9 times out of 10 I would—but you can’t argue with the fact that maniacal engagement with a pointless endeavor hasn’t really got a whole lot to do with the endeavor itself, does it?

I did not set out to write something so dark, and for that I’m sorry. I just needed to strip this poor guy of his safeguards, I guess. Not everyone is prone to this type of thing, but maybe you are.

If so, mind your safeguards.