Golf, for most of my life, existed somewhere between parody and prejudice. It was a sport I associated with men named Charles who wore salmon-colored trousers and spoke earnestly about hedge funds and wrist angles. It felt less like a game and more like a prolonged networking event, occasionally interrupted by someone's Rolex getting in the way of their backswing. I mocked it with confidence. Golf, I declared, was a walk spoiled, a pastime for the semi-retired and the insufferable. And then, without warning, I started playing.
One day, you’re ridiculing a man for owning three different putters, the next you are googling “best beginner irons” at midnight and wondering if your grip is too weak. Golf isn’t boring. The sport, which has heard your objections and dismissed them, skips boredom entirely and lands directly on maddening.
There’s something absurd about golf. It asks a grown adult to stand in a field and attempt to strike a small, dimpled ball into a distant hole using a selection of increasingly specialized sticks. You’ll fail, repeatedly. You’ll miss by inches and sometimes by counties.
And yet, you’ll come back. This, I suspect, is the real secret behind golf’s remarkable surge in America. Last year, Americans played over 500 million rounds. That number is so large it feels fictional, like the national debt or the number of group chats you’ve muted but can’t leave. More striking, this boom’s happening with roughly 2000 fewer courses than existed in the early-2000s. Americans, who turned the self-storage unit into an industry worth $50 billion, who built a Walmart and then built a bigger Walmart directly beside it, have encountered scarcity and simply refused to acknowledge it on principle.
The old caricature of golf as a gated pastime for the wealthy no longer holds. Nearly three-quarters of American courses are public. The average round costs less than a dinner you'll regret faster. Municipal courses are where most golfers begin.
Golf performs a character assessment. It doesn’t care about your job title, politics, or carefully-curated online persona. It cares only whether you can, in this moment, perform a very simple task that proves to be anything but. In an age that rewards performance, golf insists on honesty. You can’t fake a good swing. You can fake indifference. I tried it for years. It didn’t hold.
Critics love pointing out that golf takes four to five hours, as though this were a design flaw. In a culture that devours attention in 15-second bursts, golf's refusal to hurry is subversive. It insists that you slow down, walk, think, and occasionally stand in a field doing absolutely nothing useful.
Then there’s the social alchemy. You arrive at the first tee as strangers. A middle-aged accountant, a college student, someone claiming to have "played a bit in high school." By the 18th hole, you’ve swapped small triumphs and shared humiliations. You’ve offered advice you’re unqualified to give, and received advice you’ll immediately ignore.
I’m not a great golfer. I occasionally hit the ball in the intended direction. But I can lose three hours on a Saturday and emerge restored. My fiancée can’t fathom this. Then again, I can’t work out why she finds a podcast where two people discuss their feelings about other people's feelings so captivating.
Golf is growing because people, like me, are discovering that it offers something rare: frustration and beauty in a combination that defies sense and ignores your objections. You’ll swear you are finished with it forever, usually around the seventh hole, and then book another round before the rage has technically subsided.
Try it. Not at a club with a dress code. Try a modest public course, where the greens are imperfect and the players are considerably worse. You’ll look foolish. But somewhere between a terrible drive and a decent putt, you might understand why 500 million rounds are never enough.