Thank God I Suck at Golf

On why people like Hugh Freeze lose their careers to this sport

Congrats to KW for winning this week’s SportsPredict.com NFL contest. I will be calling him shortly, the prize for all winners. I’d also encourage everyone to join our nightly NBA contest, which offers a $1,000 cash prize with no money risked. It’s a contest, not gambling, but speaking of addictive activities…

Subscriber Richard shares a New York Post article titled, “Hugh Freeze’s passion for golf helped get him fired at Auburn.” He says:

This is EXACTLY what Cowherd said happens to guys who get into golf. Scary accurate.

Perhaps Richard is warning me. I love going to the driving range when I have a moment. I can hit the ball hard when it’s squared up, but have no reliable expectation of accuracy. If I was actually good at golf? That would be trouble.

Cowherd posited that Tony Romo’s once lauded performance as an NFL broadcaster for CBS suffered due to all that golfing. Cowherd said, and I’m not sure how tongue in cheek his heuristic is:

I’ve used this for years when I would interview people and I was going to hire them,” Cowherd said. “If I had lunch or coffee with them, I always asked them if they loved golf. ‘Oh, I love golf. Do you love golf?’

“And if they said yes, I wouldn’t hire them. Because I always had this theory that as guys age, many of them get addicted to golf. They’re on PGATour.com, they’re putting in the backyard, they’re thinking about it at work, they’re scheduling a trip to Scotland and they lose sight of their other job.”

I’m fascinated by golf addiction because it appears to disproportionately afflict the highest functioning. For as long as I’ve been sentient, the president in office is a golf nut.

Many addictions tend to ensnare the lower functioning among us. I’m speaking in generalities here. Obviously there are high functioning people who fall prey to drugs and alcohol, but there’s a correlation between low impulse control and high addiction rate. Yet, somehow, hitting a white ball on grass manages to capture the souls of otherwise prudent achievers.

It’s hard to take this pratfall seriously when its adherents look like life’s winners. Also, in theory, the sport facilitates advantageous networking. Unlike many other hobbies, it occurs in a setting where work could conceivably happen during the course of play. I’ve long wondered how much better a reporter I would have been had I, like so many in the NBA world, been great at golf. Maybe. Though, based on certain cautionary tales, I might have just gotten myself fired faster from ESPN.

From the article on Hugh Freeze:

Freeze was given a $15.8 million buyout to leave the Auburn football program over the weekend after the Tigers’ 10-3 loss to Kentucky and they’ve gone 4-5 (1-5 in SEC play) this season. During his three seasons at Auburn, it’s been no secret that Freeze loves to golf, but it appeared that some people began to take issue with how much he prioritized golf, CBS Sports reported.

The anecdotes are bizarre to me. This is like a tale of an alcoholic licking the barroom floor for residue:

One Auburn booster told the outlet that they had seen Freeze at the golf course on a Friday before a home game and the football coach “just came out to the golf course without clubs to watch guys play golf.”

Freeze’s passion for the sport even led one booster to tell the outlet, “The only problem we didn’t foresee is that he wanted to play golf way more than coach anymore!”

Hugh Freeze reached the top of his highly competitive profession, with a chance at more glory. He’d ascended far higher as a football coach than he’d ever get to as a golfer. So how did a wholesome leisure activity derail this middle aged man’s career?

There are articles out there on just why golf is so addictive, but I can’t find many that treat the addiction as actually serious. For a treatment more in line with my fascination, I look back to a 1993 Los Angeles Times article on a golf addict’s memoir.

Either you’ve known them or maybe you are one: People who live to play golf. They spend countless dollars on it--whether they can afford to or not. Sometimes they’ll call in sick just to play a few rounds. They’ll even jeopardize close relationships for the sake of the game. They’ve been jokingly called addicts. But mental health experts now say an addiction to golf can be just as serious as addictions to alcohol, drugs, food or gambling.

Ah yes, back then, “experts” weren’t yet a term of ironic derision. And in this case, I suspect the mental health experts are onto something.

David Earl, 45, managing editor of Golf Journal, the official publication of the U.S. Golf Assn., belongs to seven clubs in the United States and Europe. On a recent binge, he played 126 holes in four days.

Earl has won the “Golf Nut of the Year” award from the Florida-based Golf Nuts Society, which gave him points for “nutty behavior which demonstrated his commitment to the game.” The society’s four-page “entrance exam” includes bonus points for a golf-related divorce. Earl has been divorced three times and thinks golf had something to do with each one.

I’ve yet to hear about the pickup basketball aficionado who ran into such problems. The only other sport I’ve seen described in anywhere close to these terms is surfing, which is less a pursuit for middle aged professionals.

But we’re still lacking a “why” here. There’s a lot out there on the multitude of components that make golf generally addictive, but less on why it’s specifically a rich man’s compulsion. There is a theory presented in the Times article, though.

Martin Kafka, a psychiatrist and former medical director of the Cognitive Behavior Therapy Unit at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., says work is usually the outlet of choice for people trying to find a sense of competence and control in their lives. Golf combines both: A sense of competence in controlling the ball.

Ah yes, that tracks. Golf is compelling for all the reasons that slot machines work on our brains, but the former is differentiated for taking us to the precipice of “control.” If you’ve conquered much, it really seems like you should be able to master a situation in which everything else is motionless. A swing takes roughly one second. You can’t figure out how to navigate one second of physical motion?

Certainly it’s not so easy, but it seems like it should be. What’s the trick? What’s the hack? What expensive merchandise must I buy? I got it. I figured it out. I’m in control. No wait, I’m not, I need to recapture it.

A college football coach has all the power, and none of the control. You’ve got your program, you’ve got your plays, but then the whistle blows and suddenly it’s a bunch of kids who determine your fate week to week. Golf promises the idea of control, or at least the tantalizing brief illusion of it. For the conquering mindset it’s such a siren song. You can finally determine your fate, but only up to a point. And, in trying to get past that point, you can lose the plot.