As the tree of a man’s life grows, he needs to prune it. Young branches must be tamed; undergrowth cleared; shoots pared back. Over decades, a mature shape appears — husband, father, friend, worker. He gathers all the dreams he’s trimmed away, all the hobbies and identities he will never let sprout. Some of these he will wonder about. Maybe I should have stuck with those guitar lessons. Others will never even occur to him.
Like golf. As a 40-year-old man with a wife, two small children and a full-time job, it’s true that I fit the stereotype of a golfer. But as a Brooklynite, my hobbies tend to be more city-friendly: running, video games, gin.
Golf, the game of kings, requires an extravagant outlay of time, space and money. I’d never considered picking up a club, just as I had never thought to play polo, mount butterflies or circumnavigate the globe in a hot-air balloon.
Then I visited Reid.
Reid, a surgeon, is one of my oldest friends. Like me, he is a practical, 40-year-old father of two young children. So I was surprised to discover, on a recent trip to Delaware to see him, an impressive quantity of golf paraphernalia — a mat, a net, electronics — in his sprawling back yard. Reid told me he had been playing almost every week for a couple of years.
My friend picked up an eight iron and swung with power and authority: evidence, I informed him condescendingly, of the kind of predictable suburban evolution I had forsworn by becoming a writer in New York. Then I grabbed the club, flailed, and missed the ball completely: evidence I had better things to do.
“You know,” Reid said, “Mike golfs, too.”
So did two other old friends, I learned. Not only did they all golf, Reid told me delicately, but they all golfed together. Spread out geographically, the four convened for periodic trips to South Carolina, Colorado and Texas, where they had fun — fun without me.
I’ve known these guys since we were high school freshmen a quarter-century ago. We’ve been through all the teenage and young adult stuff together: breakups, makeups, late nights, heart-to-hearts. True, our relationship mostly plays out over group text these days, but I figured that was just a sign of how busy everyone was with their kids and jobs. Now I could practically see the empty beer cans in the back of the cart and hear the belly laughs echoing across a sun-dappled fairway. I was missing out on the real meat of the friendship, without which the group text was just life updates and inside jokes.
When I returned from Reid’s, I complained to my wife. My oldest friends were bonding — creating new memories together — and I couldn’t participate. Weren’t we living through the ravages of a male loneliness crisis? A pathetic state of affairs in which only about a quarter of American men could claim six or more close friends?
I had considered myself immune, but maybe this was how it started: cranky in Brooklyn, devolving into one of those pitiable middle-aged men who spends a lot of time alone in the basement on YouTube, developing unusual theories.
I didn’t want to be that man. My wife didn’t want me to be either. What about a golf boot camp of sorts, she suggested? Weren’t there other men in my situation, golf virgins afraid of missing out on the social benefits of the sport? I didn’t need to excel. I just needed to be able to tag along with my friends.
A kind colleague who covers golf offered to ask club pros where they would send a greenhorn hoping to achieve not even competence, but bare plausibility. The answer that came back was Jim McClean Golf School, in Coral Gables, Fla.
Trying on the Gear
Golf doesn’t make it easy on outsiders. First, it’s difficult. The fact that anyone is able to direct a ball 1.68 inches in diameter hundreds of yards, to eventually wind up in a 4.25 inch in diameter hole, with a club face the size of a juice box, is a wonder on the order of the pyramids.
Second, the sport owns an ignoble history of exclusion: Augusta National Golf Club, home to the Master’s, for instance, didn’t admit women until 2012. Third, it’s expensive. Fourth, the sport has over hundreds of years developed an unwritten social etiquette, as well as a vocabulary all its own. And then there are the clothes.
As I discovered thumbing through the racks at New York Golf Center, tucked away on an unlovely block in Midtown Manhattan, the golf polo, the sport’s mandatory workhorse, comes in a variety of alien-feeling synthetic blends that are designed to move freely with your body, wick sweat off your skin and prevent any incorporation into your non-golf wardrobe. It’s the same deal with the shorts. Golf shoes, meanwhile, look exactly like normal sneakers, except with wee rubber nubs on the bottom that say, “Only use me for golf, handsome!”
It was in one such get-up, on a sweltering morning, that I met Glen Farnsworth, lead master instructor at Jim McClean, and the Virgil in my quest to stay friends with my friends.
“Well, you look like a golf player,” said Mr. Farnsworth, smiling as he shook my hand. Mr. Farnsworth, or “Farnsy” as he sometimes calls himself, is an amiable man who gives the sense of being friends with everyone he has ever met, including former President Barack Obama and President Trump, two of his former students.
“I love them both!” he said.
Leading me into a room festooned with framed photographs of great players who had trained at the school, Mr. Farnsworth began to ask me questions about my life — so many that I was reminded of therapy. Finally he asked me what I hoped to get out of golf, and I explained my mission of friendship maintenance.
“I think that’s great,” he said, ushering me out onto the course. Here, Mr. Farnsworth handed me a 7-iron — a mid-distance club, often used to teach novices — and instructed me to hit a few balls while he set up for the day. I thwacked away miserably. After a few minutes, Mr. Farnsworth returned and watched me hit a few more balls, offering almost no instruction. He brought me back inside.
It turned out he had been filming me in secret. On a large screen I was projected in profile, beside Tiger Woods. My hips rocked back and forth; my arms launched off my body in a hideous spasm; I looked drunk. Then Mr. Farnsworth played Tiger, who demonstrated an economy of smooth, unified motion.
The implication was clear: I had a long way to go.
Mr. Farnsworth got me started with two simple drills. In the first, I crossed my arms over my torso like a mummy, and practiced turning my shoulders back and forth, all while shifting my weight from back leg to front. Then he showed me how to hold my left arm with my right, to prevent it from whipping away from my body during my backswing.
After about 30 minutes of this, we returned outside. Mr. Farnsworth teed up three balls. I swung at the first one and made good but flawed contact, the ball slicing off to the right.
“We can work with that,” Mr. Farnsworth said.
I took a practice swing and moved forward to the next ball, which I promptly laced, in a perfect arc, about 140 yards into the distance. I felt high. “That’s golf,” Mr. Farnsworth said. I could tell he was smiling.
That afternoon, I texted videos of my improvement to Reid and Mike.
“The sway disappeared,” Reid wrote.
“Get this guy a tour card,” offered Mike.
Buoyed by their encouragement, I spent an hour watching an instructional golf tape loop on my hotel room television. In the mirror I practiced Mr. Farnsworth’s drills, twisting and untwisting myself. I ignored a small blister on my right thumb, as well as a twinge of unfamiliar pain somewhere beneath my rib cage. These were the wounds I was willing to bear in the interest of friendship.
That night as I drifted off to sleep, I pictured my swing. The sport was already seeping into my subconscious, and I had improved so much in a single day. Maybe I was a natural.
Reality Check
The next day proved that I was not a natural. Inserted into a group lesson, and now hitting off the grass rather than a forgiving tee, I began to top balls — sending them racing across the ground — and then to spray them left and right.
Looking down the driving range, I jealously spied the graceful swings of bejeweled Dade County housewives and precocious children. My instructor that day, a college golfer from Oklahoma named Scarlet, demonstrated something called a “flop shot,” a high-risk, high-arcing short shot that I regarded with jaw agape, like a cave man introduced to linear algebra.
I tried it. I definitely shot a “flop.”
I began to feel like the great shot I had hit with Mr. Farnsworth the day before had happened to a different, happier person. Cooling off after the lesson with a margarita, I felt a new admiration for my friends. After all, they had faced this stage of severe indignity and persevered into competence.
I reminded myself, as many others had tried to impress on me, that no one had ever become a competent golfer in three days. Besides, my goal was loftier: Not to be a better golfer but to be a better friend. Freed from the pressure to perform, on my final day, and with Mr. Farnsworth again, I began to loosen up and notice what an excellent mood I was in. I was outside and unaware of my phone. The good shots, when they came, felt divine.
Riding around the fairways with Mr. Farnsworth, I basked in the easy camaraderie of the golf cart. We talked about fatherhood, marriage, divorce, seafood and an obese, temperamental iguana that had taken up residence on the course. He told me he was on track to meet his “30-30-30” plan. (Thirty years single, followed by 30 years of two marriages, followed by another 30 years single.)
As we parted, he gave me a hug and said I was a good man.
“Keep at it,” Mr. Farnsworth told me. “You’ll pick it up quicker than most.” The incredible thing was, I believed him.
Still, there was the matter of my friends. There was no way I had gained enough skill to keep up. Nervously, I sent them a video of my best swing of the day, one that had prompted Mr. Farnswoth to exclaim, “There it is!”
“This is a golf swing,” Reid responded. I beamed. “Now do it not at 70-year-old speed,” he added. I frowned.
“You’ll definitely be able to come on a trip and play some balls,” Mike wrote. My friends suggested locales, times of the year, special formats devised to include terrible playing partners. I was in.
I came to perhaps a very obvious realization: that the only thing holding me back from participating in my oldest friendships had been me. Before any of them had started golfing, hadn’t I turned down their invitations to join a pandemic-era fortnightly Dungeons & Dragons game? The thing separating me from my friends hadn’t been skill or logistics. It had been the simplest thing in the world: effort.
By the time I returned from the Jim McClean School, I was already making plans to hit balls on an upcoming family vacation.
Perhaps, I thought, a man’s life is less like a single tree and more like a garden in the wild, under constant threat of being reclaimed by nature. The bits we want to keep must be cared for, watered, maintained. Kind of like a golf course.
Joseph Bernstein is a Times reporter who writes feature stories for the Styles section.
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