“It appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory.”
“You’re looking at it wrong, the sky thing. Once, there was only dark. You ask me, the light’s winning.”
– Marty Hart and Rustin Cohle, True Detective
Sept. 11, 5:17pm
T-minus 6 days, 16 hours, 23 minutes
Right now, I’m camped out indoors, sheltering from an impending downpour. I spent the morning finalizing my trip to Chardon, Ohio and taking three times as long to do anything. I thought moving was complete once the furniture was built, but I didn’t realize how much infrastructure was in place in my day-to-day life until I had to start building it myself. For instance, that a real kitchen trash can with a lid is the only thing keeping swarms of fruit flies at bay, and that just using a spare cardboard box would invite a multi-front war. Flushing out my sink’s garbage disposal with boiling water was not how I planned to spend half an hour today.
So, when I checked my phone on the way to practice and realized we’d get pounded by a thunderstorm in 20 minutes, I realized I’d blown the good-weather practice hours to poor planning. I sped through a chipping drill way too fast for it to be effective practice, then got inside just before the storm was supposed to hit. I’ve been doing video work in an indoor-outdoor hitting bay for a while, but the practice plan I’d put together for today will go mostly undone.
It’s been the subtle ways in which shedding the amateur tag and turning pro feels like I imagine those big lizards feel after molting. There’s this new-skin full-body-sunburn feeling by which everything I do gets my attention a bit more and I’m that much more aware of bumping into stuff. Not checking the weather is a total own goal, and I get the sense I’m commanding only small pockets of what I need to control, and I have a feeling this sort of thing comes with the territory until I’m able to scale things up.
Case in point: there’s a bunch of guys out on the back range hitting balls right now. The models are absolutely adamant that we’re about to get hammered by this storm, but they’ve been saying it for an hour and it hasn’t rained a drop. The veteran pros apparently know something I don’t, and that knowledge has granted them an hour’s worth more work.
I moved down here last week to chase pro golf. In four days, I’ll fly up to Detroit and drive over Chardon, Ohio to play the Korn Ferry Tour Q-School Pre-Qualifier at Sand Ridge Golf Club. There are roughly 75 of us playing; of those, roughly 35 will advance to First Stage (First Stage is actually the second stage — this has been very easy to communicate to my friends and family who just want to know what I’m up to…). Something around par will probably get through. If I can play my game this week, I think I’ll get through, and I’ll have three stages and 12 rounds of golf between me and membership on one of the PGA Tour affiliate tours.
But, in a sense, it’s simpler than all that. I’m trying to get good enough at getting the ball in the hole that people will give me money to watch me do it. There are a lot of us trying to do this, and there are only so many checks to be won. And so the margins seem to be such that a better weather forecast and an extra hour’s worth of practice once in a while could make the difference.
If there were ten thousand Tour cards, I think many of us would choose to chase something else. I’m not sure it’s about the golf, in the end. It is, of course, an immense privilege to be able to play golf for a living. But there’s an additional privilege of doing a job that asks for everything you have. If I were doing another job, I think I’d be able to produce work that’s good enough, get in a rhythm, and become something of a system quarterback. For some reason, I feel the call of something that wants me to truly plumb the depths of what I’m made of. I want to do it, but I also want to know if I can. And I’m going to fight like hell to find out.
Sept. 13, 9:03pm
T-minus 4 days, 12 hours, 37 minutes
My game feels good. I didn’t score well today. It’s one of the scarier combinations in competitive golf, in my opinion. My coach and friends agree that my game looks good, and the shots feel exceedingly doable, but the numbers aren’t adding up at the end of the day.
Today, after getting caught up with move-in stuff once again, I rolled out of the car and onto the first tee. I’d worked out in the morning, so I figured I was already loose and no worse off for not warming up. But midway through the round I realized I had been setting up closed, and I’d started compensating by swinging over the top — this is a familiar pattern for me, the tendency I’m trying to combat right now. By that point in the round, I’d made too many swings to adjust things easily on the fly, and I felt like I was fighting myself pretty much the whole way around.
I think the consistency that great pros are able to display on a day-to-day basis deserves more recognition than it gets. There’s the obvious sense that going out and playing top-level golf is impressive, but, even as a reasonably good player myself (I did break par from the tips in the wind today), I stepped on multiple bad-habit landmines that I was specifically trying to avoid. There’s a lot that goes into making consistently good passes at the golf ball.
It started raining on us pretty good during the round (for real, this time), and the worst of it started as we walked off the 18th green. But I had work to do. And, while puddles on a putting mirror used to be a reason to go inside and get the work done tomorrow, now it’s an annoyance that has to be tolerated and overcome like any other. The work had to get done. There’s a pride to be taken in it. I know people have done a lot harder work under a lot worse conditions, but there are plenty of guys who aren’t out there in the rain. It feels good to lay out my clubs in my apartment to dry and feel like I did something.
Now I’m showered, sitting at my kitchen table, looking at my apartment’s still-largely-blank walls. I’ve been enjoying the clean look of things during the day, the simplicity, and the feeling of control that comes from an uncomplicated environment. There’s a sense that I’m not being influenced, that the blank walls let me write things for myself.
But, once the sun sets, they can become a bit more of a burden, a lonely demand to populate the space with my own thoughts. The mind craves some amount of structure. In the daylight hours, the visual simplicity of the space denotes it as a sovereign space in an often chaotic world. But at night, light stops coming in the windows, the apartment becomes the whole world, and the walls start asking questions.
I’ve been rewatching the first season of True Detective while continuing my set-up chores here, and the main takeaway is that my head’s filling up with a lot of dark, uncomfortable shit, and I should watch something else. But, with all that season’s talk of superstition and stories, I find myself asking: do I have what it takes? Does my own self have what’s needed to pull this off? Cognitively, I believe it’s a bad question. Right now, it’s still up to me. I can pull it off, or I can’t. I don’t think fate or armchair analysis gets to the root of the problem.
The better question — maybe the only question — is, “What can I do to give myself the best chance?” And that begins with filling my head with something other than dark, existential TV. Still, there’s a Wile E. Coyote feeling to it all — that I know I shouldn’t look down, but, if I did, I’d start falling. And both my intrigue and my discomfort with the word “chance” have me craving an answer, making me want to take a peek. I’d better keep my eyes above the horizon.
Sept. 15, 9:01pm
T-minus 2 days, 12 hours, 39 minutes
And, just like that, I’m in Chardon, Ohio.
Going back to yesterday, my last day of practice at home before traveling, everything felt great. Golf felt easy. I had all the shots. As much as this seems wonderful, the truth is probably closer to that of the parable about the Chinese farmer: maybe. Things lined up well today. I’m glad they did. I don’t know why things went so well, and in that sense, I don’t own it. At the same time, I’m not going to try too hard to find out — in high school biology, when you dissect a frog, what you’re left with at the end is not a frog. I made careful note of how I was setting up and brought as much awareness as I could muster to how things felt, and otherwise, I just tried to enjoy it. It was a nice night with a beautiful sunset, and I was hitting spinny nippers all over the green. Life is good.
Last night, packing took several hours. I don’t like travel very much, and I usually just sleepwalk through it all and trust the transportation system to get me from point A to point B. Add to it that this trip felt more important and more foreign than most, and I was dead convinced I was going to forget something totally vital, and also decided that I needed to do laundry, and was monitoring several college football situations — and next thing I knew it was 1 am. Nerves are weird.
Flashing forward to now (and skipping the travel day I was effectively unconscious for), I just watched Patton Kizzire’s win at whatever the Safeway is called now. I’m a massive fan of his. I lived in St. Simons, GA (where I’ve just moved now) during my COVID gap year from school, and Patton always made himself available for brain-picking when I saw him. He gave me some invaluable advice when he could have just put his head down and kept working. It’s easy enough not to take the time to tell a nervous 20-year-old to believe in himself — no, really, believe in yourself — but he did. Plus, his chipping action is obscenely smooth — he makes chipping look like cornhole with spin. That win couldn’t happen to a better guy, and if you’re not already a fan, you should be.
In his post-round interview, he was asked what worked this week, and he said: “I stayed disciplined. I…I stayed extremely disciplined.” Reflecting on any time golf has gone right for me, it’s been wildly simple, and any answer worth giving is no more complicated than a single word. That “discipline” is the very thing that worked appears deeply profound.
If “discipline” is the key, then the question, for someone making their first pro start, is what exactly to be disciplined about. And, in the spirit of faking it ‘til I make it, I’m deciding that’s to be myself and nothing else. I’m going to play my brand of golf the way I know how, and I’m not going to let anything about the moment tell me differently. I’m going to do what I do, and I’m going to be who I am, and that’s going to be it.
Sept. 17th, 7:57pm
T-minus 13 hours, 43 minutes
I have to admit that I don’t think I’ve been entirely honest to this point. Up to now, I’ve felt that the truth has to include some reflection of the fact that being a new guy entering an industry with zero job stability includes some level of doubt and confusion and fear. Unfortunately, these sorts of things are interesting to read about and unpack, and they make for interesting storytelling.
With that said: I really don’t see these things as me. There’s been moments of doubt, and there’s been moments of confusion, but the times I feel the most like myself — the most true to myself — are times like right now. Right now, I can see that it’s the same game I’ve always played, and that I’m really damn good at that game, and that what I have in me has what it takes to play great golf. I hope the other stuff is interesting, but I’m not sure it’s illuminating, because it’s something other than God’s honest truth that I can do this.
In the same way that your dumbest buddy thinks he could fight a middleweight contender but would never mess with the big dude at the bar, I find myself watching Tour golf and thinking “I can do that” while being intimidated by guys on their third run through Q School while I’m making my first pro start. There’s this sense of an efficient market hypothesis in pro sports: that the guys here are wearing staff hats and paid to use someone’s towel because they’ve figured out all the things I haven’t yet. But, at the end of the day, I’ve put a lot of work in, too. We all start at even par. And I know that I can do it.
The natural question here is: if I’m so sure that all of my doubts are mere illusions, then why spend so much time writing about them? And I think the answer, beyond the fact that writing about them feels artsy and “deep”, is captured better by one of my favorite memes than I could ever hope to write:
And so, despite stubbornly hanging on to things that do not serve me, I know — deep down someplace where only the truth lies, I know — that I am good enough.
So, on the drive back from my last practice round, I asked myself: what would make me feel most free going into tomorrow? And I answered that I wanted to own my transition move and feel creative and present. So I’m going to rehearse that transition with a mini club in my hotel room, and then I’m going to finish this novel I’m reading, and then I’ll go to sleep knowing I’m going to kick ass tomorrow.
9:40am, when balls go in the air, is the start of a great thing.
Sept. 18th, 9:40am
Time T
Balls in the air.
Sept. 18th, 8:08pm
T-plus 10 hours, 28 minutes
Well, I fired a first-round 81.
If you’re looking for more detail than that, I don’t much care to give it. I played the par 3s +6. I hit it over the back of 8 greens and was chipping from bad spots all day. My distance control SUCKED. I putted defensive and scared. I fanned a two-footer, something I haven’t done in probably a year. I lost 3.5 shots around the greens (mostly from chipping from truly horrible places) and another 4+ with approach play and putting each. It all just fucking sucked.
Honestly, I felt I was swinging it solid. Commit to shots well. Just couldn’t hit a yardage to save myself. Feels like some funhouse mirror bullshit, that I show up to an event feeling solid and do reasonably well executing my gameplan and all of a sudden I’m damn near DFL.
I’ve played a lot of shit golf in my life, and I’ve gotten pretty good at spitting blood and standing back up, but for fuck’s sake it’d be nice not to get knocked down in the first place. I’ve spent a lot — a LOT — of my life waking up early, putting in the work, and keeping straight and narrow to try to get the best out of myself and specifically avoid the thing that just happened.
If you told me right now that I’d never feel like this again if I drove a railroad spike into my foot every day for a year, I’d roll out of bed every morning and put one in each foot just to make sure. I’m deathly serious about that. And if you think that’s unhealthy, then I promise you that whatever’s in me that makes me balk two-footers and swing over the top instead of slotting it — when that’s the ONLY THING I’m making sure I feel — I’d tell you that whatever that force is, I promise it’s massively carcinogenic.
Because if there’s one thing that’s most important to get across, it’s this: I desperately, desperately want to be telling a success story. I have no interest in telling the story of how some kid gave pro golf a run and had a lot of fun before going on to work some real job. If I wanted to find myself, I’d backpack around Europe: it’d be cheaper, I’d visit more interesting places, and every failure of mine wouldn’t be posted on the fucking internet. I’m doing it because I want to be great, and I’m writing because I want to capture the process of becoming great. Maybe there’s a very nice version of this whole journey that ends with some pleasant self-acceptance that I gave it my best shot but pro golf isn’t my thing, but, in no uncertain terms: FUCK THAT.
I really, truly believe I can shoot 66-66 and get myself back in this. Gun to my head, I believe it. Apparently, that’s contingent on waking up in the real world tomorrow instead of the haunted house I was in today. But I know it’s in me. I know it.
Tomorrow. I’m going to rehearse my transition move in the mirror a half-billion times tonight, I’m going to adjust some strategy, I’m going to actually turn through the ball, and I’m going to get the real version out of myself.
Sept. 19th, 8:01pm
T-plus 1 day, 10 hours, 21 minutes
It was better than yesterday. 76 today, with oil leaked towards the end. Was sort of halfway in it for a decent bit of the round. At least one step in the right direction.
Foremost in my mind, today is the two-year anniversary of losing one of my best friends to a battle with depression. It’s the kind of thing that deserves more thoughtful writing than a journal entry. She was (is) an incredibly special and important person in my life, and she fought like hell, and I’m convinced she was going to save us all if she had more time, and I’d give a lot to be able to give her a hug or a call today. She was one of the good ones, the really good ones. I wish there was a more profound way to say I miss her, a lot.
I showed up to the course today with my tail between my legs, feeling like people were wondering why I’d bother to pay the entry fee and get out here if I wasn’t going to break 80. Realistically, nobody cared or even knew who I was. But this stuff can cut deep, sometimes even when I’m specifically trying to steel myself against it.
I know that Jane would have told me to play with my whole heart today. I did my best. It’s really hard to play with my whole heart when I have no idea what the club’s doing in transition, when I feel like I’m compensating for seven different things all of a sudden and don’t know what any of them are and just feel super super stuck. It feels like I’m fighting to make contact, all of a sudden, and I have to do a lot of work with every swing just to prevent something awful from happening.
I’d say something like this to Jane, hoping, even though she didn’t play, that she’d understand what it felt like for everything to feel off. But she’d tell me that that didn’t sound like playing with my whole heart. Which, to be honest, it isn’t. And in that sense, I let her down today. I tried to fall back on professionalism and routine and discipline enough to find a rhythm and play some inspired golf, but none of those in themselves are particularly heartful things. I feel stuck. I wish I felt capable of playing the way she’d want me to.
In a sense, that’s what all of this — truly, all of it — is about. I want to be able to play inspired, passionate golf, because I want to be able to live an inspired, passionate life. And, whatever’s getting in my way, it’s my duty to kill it in a very hot fire.
If I said that if I shot 60 tomorrow I might have a chance at making it through, she’d say that sounds like I have a chance. And I’d say that it’s not that simple, and I’d go back into trying to explain myself (“the course record is 64!”), and she’d look at me like I was doing it again, doing the thing that kept me from playing free. Truth be told, I don’t know if it’s that simple or not. I wish I could go to her for help like I once could. A lot of the time I feel lost on my own. But, even in writing that sentence, I can feel a bit of her giving me that look. And I guess I’ve got nothing to do but try to make it simple tomorrow and make some magic happen.
Sept. 21st, 2:33pm
T-plus 3 days, 4 hours, 53 minutes
I’m back in Georgia now. I finished my round yesterday, showered off, got in the car, drove to Detroit, found dinner, got a little sleep in the hotel, returned the rental car, got caught up in a seven-person airport security backup over sticks of deodorant, grabbed a bottled iced coffee and protein cookie, flew to Jax, drove home, brewed some quality decaf, and now sit before you, writing.
Yesterday, I stood on my 16th tee having just doubled my second par five of the side to sit at +8. I promptly blew a tee ball well right with a fairway-finder 2i. From a jumper lie in the rough, I hit a 7i from 203yds a yard over the back and got up and down for par. I hit PW to 52’ on 17 and two-putt. On my last hole, I hit my only good tee ball of the day, a perfect 2i to 85yds, skanked a 60° to 15’ and made the putt on the low side to break 80.
This is a deeply, deeply pathetic place to mine an ounce of pride. At some point, my feelings about this week passed from disappointment into deep embarrassment. I’m ashamed of myself. I feel like I’ve let down anyone who’s ever invested in me, in golf or otherwise. I fell well short of who I intend to be as a person. There are failures, and then there are failures so bad that they must be indictments of something greater than a single performance. For most of the last few days, I’ve wanted to crawl inside some psychic trash compactor and be made very, very small.
In case anyone was wondering: nothing was lost by my taking an extra day to write this. Nothing interesting was happening in the moments walking off the course. It’s a deeply, deeply unprofound feeling to fire 81-76 in Q School and need a course record for even a snowball’s chance in hell at advancing, knowing like the sun will rise tomorrow that I do not have that course record in me, blow a 4i dead right off the first tee, airmail a flier 9i into the back fescue, lose the ball, run back to the spot in the rough as the group behind us made it to the fairway, scramble for double, then go peg it for 17 more holes.
If winning is profound and falling just short might be even more so, then filling your pants at Q School is nothing but banal. It’s as profound as going to the beach with your friends to toss a football around, airmailing your buddy on the first throw, and watching the ball get sucked out to sea in a riptide. There’s just, “well fuck, now what?”, and the answer is just to stand there like assholes with hands on hips, watching the ball slowly drift further and further out to sea with nothing to do until you all go inside.
On the drive from Ohio to the Detroit airport, listening to a playlist from an old breakup, I realized I might be experiencing the first truly unscripted moment in my life. I went through school with the expectation I’d go to college, and midway through college I decided I’d genuinely give this dream a shot and turn pro, and I circled Sept. 18th on my calendar. And now I’m here. With no predestined next step, I asked myself, no wrong answers, what came next.
I spent about a hundred miles wondering whether I truly believed I could be a great player. About when I crossed from Ohio into Michigan, I realized that yes, I really, truly do, and I know it because of the doubt. If I didn’t have the doubt, then I’d have no further questions to ask. But the doubt shows me that there’s something in me that doesn’t believe and that that’s a false self, and it’s something I need to get out of myself to let the real me do what it’s meant to.
I read Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art at least once a year, and I should read it more often than that. It’s about a force Pressfield calls The Resistance, a force we all experience that holds us back from the highest version of ourselves, and some steps we can take to defeat it. As a hardline skeptic, I tend to despise the genre, but this book is the exception — it’s been a north star for me since I first picked it up.
Not only will The Resistance keep me from being the golfer I know I can be, but it’ll keep me from being the best person I can be: the best friend, the best son, the best brother, and eventually the best husband and father. The best citizen and member of my community. It’ll kill me young, and, to paraphrase Ben Franklin, I’ll be dead long before they plant me. I can’t afford that. I can’t afford to pass my shortcomings on to my friends and family. I need to beat it.
The beauty of golf is that competitive golf scares the living hell out of me, and that’s how I know I’m doing the right thing. Doing another job, I could get by day-to-day while the fear lay dormant in me. But golf forces me to stare the monster dead in the face and find a way to beat it. To be completely dead and beaten and find some way to make two pars and birdie the last.
What does this look like in practice? I’m not sure yet. It’ll involve wearing the faces of several wedges perfectly smooth, and past that, I’m not sure. That’s, unfortunately, the point. I don’t yet have the insight to share. And it’s a disappointing ending because it’s a disappointing result and I don’t yet have the insight to share.
But what I do know: there’s a space between me and what holds me back, and, day by day, I’m going to make that gap bigger until I can rip the whole thing out.
Time to fight like hell.