Lately I’ve been doing something called the morning pages, a journaling exercise in which I unload the contents of my monkey-mind onto lined paper before they muck up my day. Golf, too, quiets the noise. It’s like my morning pages, but with sunscreen. Or, if country music is more your thing, it’s that old Ray Price song “Make the World Go Away” (and get it off my shoulders).
Even just a pleasant memory of a great round can be a powerful thing. Maybe it’s those lush green spaces, good for the soul, or the challenge, which clarifies the mind. Scientists tell us the game can lower blood pressure, heighten mindfulness, and reduce cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone.
Like so many others, I intuited this early on and fell hard for the game. I took a job hand-picking the range at the Stanford Golf Course and yakked with fellow pickers Bags, a transplanted Bostonian who was always going on and on about the Celtics and “No. 33, Larry – Larry Bird!”; and Vinnie, an ancient old crank who kvetched about the price of a dozen balls and said most duffers wouldn’t be able to feel the difference between a Titleist and a beat ball. The work itself was contemplative – not so for getting pelted in the cage while driving the tractor – and it got me access to the course, where I could step into another, far superior world.
Those rounds at Stanford provided ballast amid the topsy-turvy sagas of Gunn High School, where it felt like everyone else was smarter, better looking, and getting invited to better parties (or any parties) than I was. Smashing my drive over Junipero Serra Boulevard at the par-5 first hole blessedly erased all of that. By the time I reached the par-4 12th, I’d slipped the shackles of my teenage concerns and eased into an altogether superior headspace, going from why I couldn’t find a girlfriend to whether to aim to the left or right of the famous fairway trees.
My favorite relaxation technique continued into adulthood with games at WPA-era gem Pinecrest making moot my early-career concerns at the Idaho Falls Post Register newspaper. Later, at Sports Illustrated, a bunch of us had planned to play golf at a staff tournament in Bethlehem, Pa., on 9/11. Upon listening to the grim news on the drive there, many turned around upon arrival. But some of us, having reached our loved ones and knowing we would be unable to get back to the city, did play that day, even if no one cared about some silly tournament. We were lucky; here was the game I’d always considered a port in the storm being that more than ever. (We spent the night with an editor who lived in Montclair, N.J.)
Much later, while trying to start a new golf magazine with mixed results, rounds at Essex County Country Club, a terrific course in New Jersey, took the edge off.
Sometimes, just as a mental exercise, I go back to a round at Eastward Ho! in Cape Cod, Mass., the late-afternoon sunlight glinting off the water as we stepped up to the par-3 15th hole. Just then a catamaran came about on the calm swells below, the boat being skippered by my father and one of his oldest friends. Up here on the grass, Eastward Ho’s signature hole awaited; down there it was smooth sailing. All was right with the world, and isn’t that what golf is meant to give us?
Amid far too many handwringers and fingernail chewers, and with the news cycle choked with awfulness, golf reminds us that there’s at least one way in which everything is OK. And when the light is right and the catamaran cuts through the waves and the signature hole beckons, it’s a lot better than that.
This year, mother nature decided to hit me with an actual, honest-to-god winter, the first one I can remember in 15 years since my wife and I moved. Typically, there's golf to be played at least in spurts between December and March, and if there's snow, it's the kind that sticks around for a couple hours before the resurgent sunshine turns it to water and mud. This time, though, freezing temperatures and lingering snow kept me indoors, and it made me realize something: I need golf to be outside. I never thought of the sport as an excuse to be in nature, but it has come to fulfill that function for me in a way I didn't notice until it was taken away.
(My response, by the way, was to become a cliche of a middle-aged man and dive into bird-watching. If it holds any appeal to you, I recommend it wholeheartedly as a way to keep in touch with mother nature when the golf course is off-limits; snow and cold aren't going to keep you out of the woods.)
Since coming to that realization, I've become more conscious of the soothing aspects of simply being outside when I play golf. This isn't easy for me, because my natural state of existence is pretty far from Zen. I spend a lot of time angry at my own game, and on the rare times when I'm thinking about nature, a lot of that thought is spent on lamenting the summer heat or studiously running esoteric formulas involving the dew point to decide whether I should take a cart or not.
But not only does absence make the heart grow fonder—it opens our eyes to the gifts we couldn't recognize when they were in front of us. Walking nine holes outside had a restorative effect on my psyche, my mental health, that wasn't apparent until I had to spend entire days indoors and couldn't fail to notice the creeping sense of lethargy and ennui. Even then, it took me a while to suss out the cause, and it wasn't until I began forcing myself to take walks despite the nasty winter weather that the difference became apparent, and with it the realization: Oh yeah, my head isn't screwed on straight unless I'm outside, and I'm not outside unless I'm playing golf. Ergo, golf is the conduit to nature, and nature is the conduit to health. Let's all raise a glass to golf, the middleman we never knew we needed.
It reminded me of when my oldest daughter was in her infant stages and was in the midst of a crying jag that nothing would stop. I'd pace the house, bouncing lightly, I'd sing to her (this probably made it worse), and I'd offer whatever bottle or novelty chewing device was most readily available. But I soon learned that only one thing could fix it: stepping outside. The minute that fresh air hit, her face would un-contort, and a look of quiet curiosity would spread over her features. Nature was the cure.
I wonder if, in less obvious ways, that dynamic persists as we grow. Because we don't have the easy feedback of crying squalls, we can't read the cause-and-effect quite as cleanly, but that doesn't mean it isn't playing out internally in equally profound ways.
Which makes golf one of the most crucial things I can do for my own secret psychological health. Once you know that, you start to notice and appreciate things a bit more—the way the loblolly pines seem to sway perilously in even light wind; the water snake that weaves his sinuous way through the creek on the front nine; the golden wheat color of the grass in winter, and how it might be as beautiful as the lush green that follows.
None of it is a cure-all. I'm still embarrassingly reactive when it comes to my own game, and I can still go long minutes locked inside my own head. But then the shot is over, the club is back in the bag, and I'm walking again, one foot after another, a slight breeze blowing if I'm lucky, and I'll take in the trees and clouds and birds or simply close my eyes, and at first I'll feel a conscious sense of gratitude, and then, briefly, I'll disappear.
