What Noah Kahan taught me about sucking at golf

The first and most important thing I’ve learned about golf is that I suck at it.

Don’t worry — not in any special kind of way. The shanks would be exciting. The hooks would be riveting. The yips would at least give me a reason to go back to therapy.

Nope, I just suck. I suck when I’m thinking about every shot. I suck when I try to get lost in the round. I suck when I’m unburdened by the weight of expectation. And I suck something very special and impressive when some portion of my dignity depends upon not sucking.

The thing about sucking at golf is that it gives you a lot of time to think about your state of affairs. The scratch player might enjoy a brisk walk from tee to fairway to green, pondering the strategic challenge and the afternoon sun and the mowing patterns, but he will never understand how it feels to walk helplessly from 80 yards left after your first shot to somehow-further-left after your second. He will never understand what it is like to know your odds of par have dwindled from modest to almost nothing, requiring a Herculean heave — a true moment of genius — from the deep-s**t just to leave yourself 30 feet to stave off embarrassment. And he will certainly not know how it feels after you’ve topped your ball from that location to five feet in front of it, then punched in a fury to 50 yards right of the green, and begun the long, shameful walk to the golf ball before he, the scratch, has even contemplated his approach.

He will not know what happens in between all that running around between bad shots. What occurs within your head and your heart and your soul as you confront the chasm between what you would very much like to be and what is. He won’t know the way that golf becomes something much more than an endeavor at mastery in those moments. And he won’t know the act of defiance that is choosing to enjoy yourself even after things have gone so obviously wrong.

This sucking — this interminable, unceasing failure — turns out to be the miracle of golf. To the scratch player, golf is something small and manageable, like a jigsaw puzzle that can be tamed under the right conditions. But to the sucker? Golf is unfathomably enormous, unspeakably ephemeral, and inherently absurd. It is not just a thing. It is the thing. The whole universe somehow lives within it, like a baby’s cry or a first kiss or the first chords of a song from a past life.

It was not until I read Michael Murphy’s Golf in the Kingdom for the first time that it occurred to me my sucking wasn’t in vain. Murphy’s meditations on golf as a panacea remain some of the most compelling words I’ve ever consumed on the sport, and they illuminated for me something I had long known but never connected: Golf is a reflection of self. Not necessarily in skill or score, but in disposition.

Recently, I was fascinated to hear the golf meditations of a more contemporary philosopher: Noah Kahan, the pop-folk singer-songwriter whose press tour for his most recent album,The Great Divide, has featured a startling number of reflections on the sport.

Kahan’s interest in golf’s grander questions of meaning are foreign only to people who have never heard his music. In the song Forever, he writes with a golfer’s sensibility about continuing to show up despite your imperfections. (I broke a bone that never healed in my hand; so when I hold her close, I might loosen my grip; but I won’t ever let her go.) But his interest in golf’s role in those questions was a mystery until the blitz to promote his latest album, when Kahan took time in several interviews to rhapsodize about the importance of golf in his life and his psyche.

In a world full of enablers and yes men, golf is a place where the most successful among us can suck — somewhere honesty and humility arrive with equanimity. But it’s rare to hear a celebrity suggest, as Kahan did in several interviews, that golf was less of a weekend hobby and more of a center of spiritual gravity.

The launching off point of Kahan’s recent interest was a professional crisis. As he grappled with the enormity of following up a smash-hit album with another creatively fulfilling pursuit, Kahan ran into a period of prolonged creative burnout. At one point, things got so bad that he considered quitting music temporarily to take a job filling divots at a local golf course in Vermont.

“I was just looking for something I could do for the next few years until I figured things out,” he said. “Music was just making me so unhappy that I was like, ‘Why am I doing this?’”

Kahan had fallen down a hole familiar to generations of weekend hackers: The thing he loved was no longer something he liked. Worse yet, he had no easy exit: Every time he opened his phone, he was greeted by dozens of notes from total strangers expressing their affection or animus for his work, or their anticipation of what was to come next.

Kahan suggested the external feedback had proved damaging. Some days, he’d surrender the entirety of his emotional wellbeing to strangers on the internet. Other days he’d ignore their comments completely, even the ones that might otherwise land profoundly.

Eventually, though, he found a breakthrough, and it arrived in a most unusual place: a golf lesson.

As Kahan talked about the mindset shift that defined his latest album on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast, he referenced a piece of swing advice that had proved unexpectedly revealing.

“You want to have a bird in your hand that you’re not going to crush, but you won’t let get away,” Kahan said.

Kahan was referring to the optimal amount of grip strength in the golf swing — but his words resonated immediately with his interviewer, Shetty, who recognized the analogy from his training with Buddhist monks.

“The Buddha always talked about the middle path,” Shetty said. “If you’re going to hold something, don’t hold it too tight, but then you can’t hold it too loosely. So it’s like, how do you hold something just … beautifully?

The so-called “middle way” exists at the center of Buddhist teachings, explaining a view of reality that exists outside the extremes of self-indulgence and self-sacrifice. In many instances, Buddhist elders will use the analogy of the bird to explain how each of life’s extremes can be held in equal weight.

As Kahan and Shetty spoke, it struck me that they were defining something essential about golf: its imperfection. Even the best day for a scratch golfer is filled with mistakes, and even the worst round for a hacker is filled with flashes of brilliance. Mastery does not arrive on the scorecard or in the bottom of the hole — it arrives in the moment of acceptance between those outcomes. It’s not unlike the point made by Michael Murphy’s famed antagonist character, Shivas Irons, in Golf in the Kingdom.

“You think too hard and try too much,” Shivas says. “Let the nothingness into your shots.”

Shivas’ character is referencing the ancient art of nothingness: meditation. As it turns out, Kahan has spent some time in that arena, too.

“Meditation is so powerful, but it’s so difficult,” Kahan says. “It’s like golf. It’s hard — and it takes a while.”

And sometimes you suck. But that might be precisely the point.

You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.