In Defense of Golf

By Jacob Weindling | May 28, 2025 | 4:09pm

Photo by Jacob Weindling

Sports golf

I understand I am making few friends on the left with this take, which is why I am opening it from a defensive posture. Golf is far from a harmless activity, as its deleterious effects on the environment are myriad. Plus, in a world where there is nowhere near enough housing making the rent too damn high and leading to the weakest housing market in 30 years, water-guzzling golf courses existing in dense cities during a climate crisis will live on as part of this generation’s legacy of utterly missing the point. Given **gestures everywhere**, golf is very bad for the world in a lot of impactful ways.

But if you afford me the hackish writers’ crutch of a perfect world, I think there is a net benefit to golf even amidst its unavoidable drawbacks. Golf purists assert the only links courses in the world reside in Scotland where golf was born, and all the other “links” courses that schmucks like me play are just crude imitations of the real thing. In the 15th century, the sand dunes next to Scotland’s beaches were unusable for farmers, and so some budding masochists carved out 11 links holes from the dunes, and invented one of man’s great maddening games. Golf in our modern age of increasing scarcity should mirror the utilitarianism of its origins.

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We just need to get it out of dense cities that need housing (so, all of them), abolish the very concept of a private golf club, make it a $10 trillion fine to use pesticides and water en masse to try make your local golf course look like Augusta National and instead let nature shape it in more sustainable ways, all while confining the vast majority of courses to unproductive or unused land owned and operated by the local government. I used this photo I took on Memorial Day in Breckenridge in the Colorado mountains partially because its picture-esque location beyond city centers makes it a course I’d like to keep around after the socialist revolution enacts the fire your boss agenda.

Now that I have built the base of this perfect-ish world, I can argue what makes golf such a net benefit for our known one: the modern crisis of masculinity has a lot of factors to it, and golf addresses many of its core problems, all related to dealing with your own bullshit in constructive ways. Golf is a true universal sport, as I have played rounds with nice old women who couldn’t hit it more than 100 yards that went faster than rounds I’ve played with young guys taking themselves far too seriously and dragging around the course. Golf can help anyone for the reasons I argue below, but I’ve become convinced that it can really help a lot of young men these days.

Most of our human interaction is not the kind our brains are wired for. Many older folks lament how most people don’t talk to our own neighbors anymore, and our worlds are now largely isolated to what is in our homes and on the screens in front of our faces. Our age of loneliness and atomization makes it very difficult to meet new people, let alone talk to them, and that is warping society in increasingly unhealthy ways. While the “male loneliness epidemic” is a common media trope these days, women actually experience loneliness at similar rates. The difference is more women say they are likely to reach out to a broader network for support than men do.

Unless you bring three friends along with you, golf forces you to spend anywhere between two and five hours with complete strangers and make small talk, and the culture of golf is such that everyone hates this sadistic sport and we’re all rooting for each other to kick its ass. Despite the snooty exclusionary country club atmosphere around golf, go to any public course in your area and you’ll see four welcoming folks all rooting hard for each other to succeed. Think about how many young guys out there would be different if they were outside learning to deal with their own bullshit alongside strangers supporting them instead of hanging out alone and watching Andrew Tate videos.

And golf forces you to deal with your own bullshit because of how difficult it is and how it demands your best both mentally and physically. People like the president have no problem lying to themselves about their score in golf because people like him always lie about themselves as a matter of course. A lot of other people get sucked into that bullshit because they think it’s cool right up until they’re left holding the bill, and if a lot of these folks had learned that lesson earlier in life, maybe we all wouldn’t be in this mess right now. Golf forces you to be explicit with yourself about whether you are an honest broker or a liar.

If you, like me and many other weekend hackers, develop terminal golf brain, lying about your score is far more difficult than it may sound to the layperson. The feeling that terminal golf brain imbues you with is one of power, as the scraps of good golf you salvage in between hacking around the course poison your dopamine receptors with delusions of grandeur. These delusions can actually be productive in the sense that they motivate you to get your shit together and play better golf because you know those scraps of goodness exist inside you somewhere and you just need to stay patient, focused and stack them on top of each other. There is something to be said about proving to yourself that you can overcome yourself that ripples throughout the parts of your life that aren’t golf.

It’s cliché but like many, it’s a cliché for a reason, as golf does build character. Anything that’s difficult builds character because it demands discipline from those who want to overcome it. Golf will kick your ass and humble everyone except for people like president deals, and dealing with adversity in a game is helpful low-stakes practice for the real world. Existential questions we navigate through life like “can you handle pressure?” and “can you respond to failure?” produce evidence of themselves on the golf course, and having witnesses around to see it has a way of affirming one’s personal growth as very real, even if it’s just focused on getting a little ball in a cup right now.

The peace golf can bring has helped me deal with my bullshit, and I know it has helped many others too as the sport has exploded in popularity since the early pandemic. Spending four and a half hours walking across a golf course and thinking through how to play a round has a zen-like quality to it that refreshes me when I go back out into the dreck of the real world, and I have met many interesting people along the way. Everyone needs a reprieve from the stresses in their life in some way, and I firmly believe that a lot of young guys who feel aimless could really use 18 holes of golf every weekend. If we lefties are ever to achieve the dream of gay space communism, I simply ask that we keep some unneeded land to let me and my buddies hack away with some strangers we just met who we’d like to see succeed.