My late granddad and me in the early 1980s. The conflicted love of golf in my DNA comes from him. He was a great golfer. I am not.

As someone who took the circuitous route to becoming a Leftist – I have a fatal case of adult-onset woke mind virus – my relationship with the game of golf can best be described as complicated. Which seems petty and insignificant at this dire moment in history but is reflective of the moment.

Indulge me; it’s Masters Week.

My maternal grandfather, a quiet man born to German immigrants in suburban Cleveland more than a century ago, loved golf. He gave me my first club, a cut-down putter, when I was in early elementary school. Most of my memories of him, before diabetes complications claimed him thirty years ago, are linked to golf.

I knew my Grandpa Lange only as the white-haired old man that spent his days watching golf on TV. Even in the pre-cable days, he always somehow had a golf tournament on as he sat in his recliner, with a mechanical four-button remote in hand for the giant wood-box television.. A few golf trophies sat on wooden shelves in my grandparent’s small apartment dining room that overlooked the 18th fairway at the rundown Oak Hills Country Club in hardscrabble Lorain, Ohio.

He played and won some pro-am tournaments, and he gave lessons as a teaching pro. He worked in the Oak Hills pro shop and occasionally would take me there. It looked like a down-scale version of the Bushwood Country Club pro shop in “Caddyshack,” all dark wood with displays of clubs and bags. They probably had the hat that came with a bowl of soup. It had a TV that somehow was always airing golf, too. I wish I remembered more of it.

My grandpa, who everyone knew as Larry, loved golf and I loved it when he’d take me around the course in one of the old gasoline golf carts, particularly when he’d drive us across the narrow rickety bridge built over a creek along the cart path.

These bucolic summertime memories from nearly a half-century ago are integral to my relationship with golf. The lush quilt of greens and yellows, the trees and flowers, the endless blue sky, the club’s busy swimming pool and indoor tennis courts and a Brown Derby restaurant – these sweet reveries of my childhood visits to my granddad at the golf club are good ones. I don’t really remember any golfers on the course other than as distant figures of old men not to be disturbed while I was playing outside my grandparent’s apartment. I wasn’t allowed to cross the concrete cart path because that was my Berlin Wall separating me in the apartment yard from the fairway. One side was a kid’s world, the other was a pretty place for grownups to play a game that looked all too serious.

Waves of memories, like all waves and no matter how pleasant and gentle, crash against the rocky shores of reality.

My grandpa’s long gone, the Fairway Manor apartment building where they lived until the early 1990s burned down entirely in 2002, and I never really took up golf. In fact, I was and still am pretty shitty at it. My grandpa would be disappointed – he was a very good golfer and played with the likes of Sam Snead and visiting pro athletes from the Cleveland Browns and Indians.

I cannot separate my memories of him from golf itself.

I never got lessons from him. By the time I was a teenager, we’d moved far away, and he was too old and infirm to show me how to swing a club and other nuances of the game. He did show me his grip, which I still use. I regret it wasn’t more than that. For his birthday one year, I got him the 1990 Pro Set PGA Tour trading cards, which he enjoyed reading. I was in college when he died at age 81. There was a brief family squabble at the funeral home over him being buried with a rare, valuable wooden club that he treasured – not unlike the plot of a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode (I got to share that anecdote with Larry David a few years ago, and he laughed with delight at it having really occurred).

My granddad rarely spoke. My grandma rarely was silent. He was golf, she made milkshakes and lamb cakes and the tastiest hot dogs with garlic butter buns. They were a solid working class family in the west Cleveland suburbs. My Welsh great grandmother lived with them until she died in 1982, and she was a live wire and a story for another day.

Before I knew them or even existed, my grandparents owned a bowling alley, Park Lanes, in the late Fifties and early Sixties. It’s still around in Amherst. My granddad started work there in the Forties as a manual pinsetter and eventually came to own the place. He’d been in the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps and the Army National Guard prior to World War II, and I have no idea what else he did. He golfed and bowled and quietly ensured my mom and aunt and grandma had all he could give.

In the Eighties, he took my grandmother to visit our ancestral Wales, a trip that included a side quest to Scotland where he got to visit golf’s holiest site, The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews. I can only imagine what he felt in being able to enter the gates of the game’s Eden, where golfers have been hacking away since 1552 A.D. I hope it was fulfilling for him, and regret not ever getting to ask him about it. If there’s an afterlife, he’s sitting in the St. Andrews clubhouse spinning tales of wild recovery shots from amid the heather, gorse, and pot bunkers that populate the Old Course.

The Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland, the birthplace of the game

He and golf always lurk just below the surface for me, and that forms the balance of the tension within me about the game. While I have my pleasant golf-adjacent memories, I also have an incredible distaste for the WASPy world of country club golf, the Donald Trumps and Richard Nixons and Judge Smails of the golf world. The snobbery, the wealth, the manufactured traditions, the whiff of the plantation at places like Augusta National. The racism and bigotry. The Barstool/MAGA crowd having such a cultural control of the sport. The PGA versus LIV Golf blood money bullshit. The thousand-dollar drivers and hassling teenage cart girls. Doing business deals on the putting greens. Cigars and expensive whiskey. Talk of handicaps and scoring and swing doctors. Chatter in the cart about crypto and big gaudy watches and whining about wokeness.

Ugh. Not my scene.

“I know men younger than myself who have taken a pension, put on stupid little white shirts… cutoff sleeves, alligator on the tit … and spent the rest of their days beating the hell out of a little white ball with an iron club. My God … the thought of it makes me want to puke.” – George C. Scott as Gen. Bache in “Taps” (1981).

It’s poor golf that I appreciate. Not poor as in bad at the game, but blue collar, working class golf. Not taking it that seriously. Or at least not being an insufferable asshole about it.

Think of groundskeeper Carl Spackler and the caddies in “Caddyshack.” They’re goofy, grubby poor kids. They like their weed, cheeseburgers, booze, and fucking. They like to golf, too. Some of the adult golfers in the movie are doofuses just having fun. The miserable people are those who take the game seriously. The low-score obsessives. They’re assholes and they cheat at the game. Like Trump, who has an entire book written about his golf cheating. He’s our Judge Smails but with the nuclear codes.

The movie’s tagline was “snobs versus the slobs” and clearly I am one of the slobs. That reflects the rest of my life, too, abhorring the ruling class and its arrogance, its gentility evil, its shitty fancy clothing, and it obsession with weird social rules.

“Tin Cup” is another golf movie that’s dear to me. Kevin Costner’s washed-up Roy McAvoy character is a helluva golfer but one ruled by his demons and was ignored as a washed-up driving range pro on the edge of nowhere West Texas. His disheveled antihero golfer and his crappy range tug at my heart. I understand that’s a hard life despite the romantic image of a seedy golf pro finding love and success in middle age. It’s a great movie, and it’s the sort of golf that speaks to me. It’s not Ralph Lauren and golf clubs that cost as much as a new car.

I know I’m not alone in my scorn for overly serious rich people golf, i.e. Republican golf.

Former Esquire magazine editor Terry McDonell wrote a delightful essay about his evening playing an after-hours round for money with Hunter S. Thompson and George Plimpton at the Aspen Golf Club many years ago. They were armed with scotch, tequila, beer, ice, and tabs of acid.

“Hunter took at least another two minutes lining up his putt, then struck it quickly. He missed the putt by about a foot and, charging after it, let out a howl as he winged his putter into the pond. The geese started honking and Hunter ran back to the cart, pulled the 12-gauge from his golf bag and fired over the geese, and they lifted off the pond like a sparkling cloud of gray and white feathers. It occurred to me as I watched the glitter blend into the fading sky that having a story to tell about acid golf with Hunter and George was probably good for my career.”

Hunter S. Thompson golfing in 1984, apparently unarmed.

That’s not just golf. That’s not just a sport and a pastime. That’s art. Life as art, art as life. Golf on acid and booze (maybe minus the shotgun) is not serious golf but is not altogether a fuck-around. There’s joy in experience, and it’s the area where I want not just to exist but to flourish. It’s a concept that’s also commoditized a bit.

“The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences.” – Rimbaud

There’s something metaphysical and maybe even secular-holy about the brain and muscles and skills aligning to deliver the perfect swing and shot in a game that looks deceptively simply but very much is not. The athletes and the bros and the serious hobbyists want to find and replicate The One True Perfect Swing to play better and record lower scores. They derive enjoyment from that. Me, I want to get loaded and hit balls on a gnarly old and leafy public golf course for the spiritual thrill while not giving a fuck about the score. Hopefully, it’s low but the golf I seek has so much more going on than being able to tell Bryce and Kyle at the office on Monday about shooting a 76.

Soulful golf. That’s the only realm I want to rule, the Dionysian pleasure zone where fun and nature and art and sport co-exist without worrying about par and bogeys and without fucking corporate sponsors and television cameras and lame crowds of whooping car dealership owners and rich building contractors. But getting there is a struggle for me because my natural instinct is to bash the hell out of the ball, get it down the fairway and into the cup in as few strokes as possible. Which is impossible because I suck, and frustrating because I don’t want to play that way or live my life competitively. I just want to be.

In surfing, those that get out on the water to experience the expressive and profound inner peace and thrill of riding nature’s waves instead of competing on them are called soul surfers. I am not sure golf has something formally equivalent to that, but it should. I guess Zen Golf is a thing, but aimed as Type A’s that need to chill the fuck out before competing. And there’s author and Esalen Institute founder Michael Murphy’s iconic 1972 novel “Golf In the Kingdom” and its beloved mystical teaching pro Shivas Irons in a tale about spirituality, Zen, and golf set at a fictional Scottish links.

“I have started to see golf as a mystery school for Republicans,” Murphy said in an interview about the book in the 1990s. The novel certainly is Soul Golf’s sacred Ur-text, read by millions and beloved by the game’s professionals, but how many Jeff Lebowskis, Jean-Paul Sartres, Platos, and Aldous Huxleys are on the PGA Tour? You don’t see Epicurus wandering the links.

Soul surfers reject competition and the corporatism of the sport. It’s not really a sport to them at all. It’s communion with nature, an existential experience.

I love surfing, too. Big shocker, eh? And like golf, I am terrible at it while enjoying it. In my defense, it’s hard to practice catching waves in suburban Detroit. I have no excuse for not being better at golf. The question is, do I want to be better at golf? Do I want to take it seriously? Do I want to talk shop with the bros that dress like Don Jr. or whoever is pro golf’s hot young star?

Not especially. I’d like to be better only in the same of having the mental and physical knowledge of how the basics of the game work, but I don’t even want to keep score at this point in my life. At anything.

“Ty, what did you shoot today?”

“Oh, Judge, I don’t keep score.”

“Then how do you measure yourself with other golfers?”

“By height.”

The fictional Ty Webb, screw loose or not, was a fantastic golfer. I am not. But I also am 6-foot-1, so I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice.

“I’m going to give you a little advice. There’s a force in the universe that makes things happen. And all you have to do is get in touch with it, stop thinking, let things happen, and be the ball.” – Ty Webb

I am happy to be a soulful Bohemian dilettante golfer with my low-mileage Wilson Pro Staff clubs in a genuine (but non mechanical) Al Czervik golf bag, and my uncomfortable but snazzy Puma golf shoes that look sorta like Chuck Taylors. Years ago, I woke up in bed one morning wearing nothing but those Puma soft spikes after a 120-proof winter night in downtown Detroit. No idea how that unfolded. Another night, I stood shirtless on a little beach alongside Lake Huron, wearing my arena football helmet, chugging from a milk jug filled with orange juice and vodka while driving golf balls out over the water at enormous freighters as they steamed past under a gorgeous starry summer sky. Much like fairways and greens, I missed them. I’m used to being in the sand and in the water in golf, however.

My Al Czervick “Caddyshack” golf bag. It doesn’t include a radio or bar tap, unfortunately.

I used Slazenger balls on the golf course and while trying to hit Great Lakes cargo ships. Why? Because that’s what James Bond used. It’s not more complicated nor makes any more logical sense than that. I use a brand of balls because of a fictional character’s preferences. Idiotic and so painfully American. I also just ordered a sleeve of Arby’s golf balls upon which are printed images of Beef ‘n Cheddars. Perfect.

I also carry a Ping Eye 2 Beryllium one iron in my bag. Why? Because I am a fan of Hunter Thompson, and he wrote “The Art of Hitting the One Iron” in a May 1990 essay included in “Songs of the Doomed” many years ago:

“I can hit a one iron,” I said. “I can kick the shit out of a one iron.” Which was true, for some reason. The Ping Eye 2 Beryllium One iron is my favorite club. All golfers fear and hate the One. It has no angle, no pitch, no loft … It is straight up and down, like a putter, and the chances of a normal person getting a ball up in the air with it are usually 1,000 to 1 against. … The one iron is a confidence-crusher, a Fear Trip, an almost certain guarantee of Shame, Failure, Dumbness, and Humiliation if you ever use it in public. Few PGA pros ever touch the One, and most amateurs won’t even carry it in their bags. The One is so ugly, they will tell you, so evil and wrong by nature that its mere presence in the bag poisons all the other clubs. A used One is usually the cheapest club in the ‘33 Percent Off’ barrel at any pro shop. Charles Manson once said he would rather use a wooden-shafted Frances Ouimet Two iron than a Ping Eye 2 Beryllium One.”

That’s hilarious. And it absolutely undermines golf’s absurd seriousness while indulging in its spiritual frou-frou. I wear a green Ping hat because of that paragraph.

“So it was weird when I picked up the Ping One and lashed five or six straight balls off the line like line-drive homers at 240 yards each … A deathly silence fell on the crowd at the driving range. They watched in amazement, and said nothing, as I continued to bash low-rising 240-yarders like a golf robot who couldn’t miss. Hot damn, I thought. This is wonderful. These people are frozen and stunned, like members of a vision … they have made me an object or worship, a Hero of Golf …”

My Al Czervik golf bag also includes a driving iron, which isn’t much different than the one iron. I do not carry one of those traditional drivers with a huge head that’s as big as my own fat skull. For various reasons, most of which stem from me being a brain-damaged anxious weirdo, I have a permanent case of the driver yips. My brain simply will not allow me to properly swing and make contact correctly with a normal driver. But I can with a driving iron. There are worse problems in life to have.

Oh, and of course I have a Billy Baroo putter.

“Spaulding this calls for the old Billy Baroo. … Oh, Billy, Billy, Billy …”

For a guy bitching about his relationship with golf, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, I sure own a lot of goofy golf shit. But, as always, I digress …

Every April, when The Masters hits CBS and golf seeps back into the cultural mainstream, I get the urge to head out to a course and hit some balls. I go into full Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde mode: Golf at its highest level is a game for rich assholes and fascists, but it’s also kinda fun being in nature and playing stoned at your own pace. As a Leftist, I should hate golf entirely as the exploitive pastime of the idle rich and call it out as the parasitic hobby of the ruling class whose tacky gilded country clubs should be expropriated.

“Country clubs and cemeteries are the biggest wasters of prime real estate!” – Al Czervik

I’m a bad Leftist. I mean, I think country clubs and scenes like The Masters – golf’s Bohemian Grove – are sorta gross and the land should be made into public commons for anyone to play for free. But I cannot condemn the game itself. My early golf memories are too sweet and very working class for that.

When I think of Augusta National and its contrived traditions like buck-fifty pimento cheese sandwiches and Jim Nance’s gentle on-air patter, I feel that conflict. CBS surrenders some broadcast editorial control to Augusta, which is keen to protect its carefully curated image, in return for the right to air the Masters annually at a reduced rate compared to other major tournaments. The exclusive club, which only started accepting non-white members in 1990 and women in 2012, is obviously a very elegant golf course known throughout the world. But there’s also the shadows of the antebellum South in Augusta’s pleasant foliage, and the game retains its inescapable aspects of class and privilege.

“Bushwood … a dump? Well, I’ll guarantee you’ll never be a member here!”

“A member? Are you kidding? You think I’d join this crummy snobatorium? Why, this whole place sucks!”

“Su…  su… su… su… su …”

“That’s right. It sucks! The only reason I’m here is maybe I’ll buy it.”

Today, I am on a quest to find a nine-hole public course that really just doesn’t give a fuck. A place where it’s not a problem if I am crawling half-naked in the underbrush looking for my ball and talking to the ghost of Judas Iscariot while my brain is in the depths of an acid frenzy. A course that just lets you be and isn’t worried about proper clothing and etiquette. I don’t want to have to wear a collared shirt or tie or jacket in the clubhouse. More of the world’s miseries have been caused by men in suits and ties than men in blue jeans and t-shirts.

I need a golf course for slobs, drunks, stoners, wanderers, mystics, hippies, freaks, poets, Beatniks, and radicals. Such characters and lifestyles appeal to the hedonist in me. Degenerate libertines enjoy their vices and pleasures, and that often includes sports.

Does such a place exist? Doubtful. But if it does, I’ll find it.

If I am such a militant Leftists, why am I prattling on about golf? I am the guy that just wrote about how much I cannot enjoy sports while our democracy crumbles into a Nazi Trumpian piss puddle. But we all need a release. And maybe I’ll show up at an ornate country club and let all the air out of the tires of the Caddies and Teslas in the parking lot before raiding the buffet.

(To my FBI and/or ICE-Gestapo handler that reads these dissident ramblings for my case file and future deportation: I am joking. Totally joking.)

Golf has a sinister way of hooking you, too.

Once or twice a round, I hit a shot that looks like something you’d see in the final round of a CBS broadcast of The Masters. Just a gorgeous, perfect approach shot that I somehow, purely by poetic accident and the mathematics of random chance, managed to produce. The rest of my swings would look like a drunken praying mantis having a fatal seizure. But on a crappy course, who cares?

It’s using metal sticks to hit a little ball into a hole in a grass field. That’s it. That’s the entirety of the game of golf.

The last time I was actually on a golf course was … shit, I don’t even remember. Fifteen years ago? A dozen? I think it was Normandy Oaks Golf Course in Royal Oak, Mich., which has since been turned into a nice park with paths and playscapes and ponds. It had been a scrappy little nine-hole muni course where we’d take beer and our poor skills after work. I think I mis-hit a ball so badly that it ended up in the parking lot.

Honestly, I’m just as happy playing mini-golf. Putting is my favorite. I’ll drive myself specifically to Dick’s or Golf Galaxy because they have those big putting greens inside. I act like I’m seriously considering buying a new $200 putter, but I’m just there to fuck around. I do take the putting seriously. Shortly after the 2020 pandemic lock-down began, I bought myself a nice putting mat for the family room. The cat loves it.

These Puma soft spikes look awesome but are uncomfortable as fuck, which would be a problem if I was actually any good at golf.

There’s a mini-golf just up the road from me, a run-down old putt-putt that’s randomly open in the summer most years. Some years, it’s never open. But it’s my speed. Windmills, clown heads, a pig in a white tuxedo jacket. The paint is peeling away from most of the hazard creatures, and the plastic greens carpet is hopeless, but I want to play there. I’d show up with my full bag, too. Probably a safer alternative for playing while stoned. I can walk home from there.

Bawnjorno! The white tuxedo-wearing pig at the mini-golf near me looks like Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine from “Inglourious Basterds.” Brad Putt?

I think the full traditional golf courses should have windmills and clown heads and lava rock waterfalls, too. I’d watch that on TV. I wanna see some millionaire PGA Tour golfer lose his shit because he cannot get the ball into the clown’s mouth. St. Andrews can humble the greatest golfers, and maybe a pirate-themed putt-putt can, too.

Golf takes itself way too seriously. Metals sticks. A little ball. A hole in the ground. That’s it.

“Don’t be obsessed with your desires Danny. The Zen philosopher, Basho, once wrote, ‘A flute with no holes, is not a flute. A donut with no hole, is a Danish.’ He was a funny guy.” – Ty Webb

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