I don’t golf. I haven’t so much as hit a bucket of balls in two decades. I’m certainly not qualified in any way to be writing about it. Like <insert random vice>, I never developed a taste, and it’s too expensive for something I don’t enjoy. 

When it comes to golf, I certainly had every opportunity to get into it as a kid. My pops was a golfing enthusiast and keen to share his passion for the activity. For much of my life, he was the first one teeing off in the morning – off the course by the time the crowds were showing up. Not long before he died, he was still out walking the course even when he didn’t have the energy. Packing fewer options for clubs, sure. But still out there doing his thing on his own two feet, fighting through his treatments. 

I also don’t have a lot of memories of being a kid, certainly not compared to a lot of folks I know, but golfing features prominently in one of my favourites. I have this very fond recollection of going with my dad for volunteer maintenance days with other members of the local golf club. Picking up detritus off the course and watching folks go up in the cherry-picker on the back of the borrowed BC Tel truck to trim tree branches. 

It’s not that the local course didn’t have some paid maintenance staff, but much like the volunteer work parties put on by every local mountain bike trail association, there was a strong element of no dig, no golf. It wasn’t just pay-to-play.

Crash Test Kevin, my brother, is now a regular golfer and it was something he said on a recent ride that originally sent me journeying on this MEATengines tangent. He was talking about the fact that he regularly sees golfers drop another ball – accept a penalty – if their shot strays too far from the cart path rather than go into the trees to take another wack at it. CTK, like my pops, and I feel most golfers of yore, would hike to Mordor to play a ball if they knew where it was sitting, and often hunt for it if they didn’t, and it occurs to me that this was the way. As an admitted outsider, playing hard shots from shitty situations is a lot of the charm of the activity.

Fast forward to a couple weeks ago and I’m finishing a ride with some friends and we’re exiting part of the local trail network in a way I nearly never do – maybe 2-3 times ever – that runs along one of the cart paths of a local golf course. We stop for a minute to regroup and there is a pod of golfers in the middle of offboarding to take turns hitting their balls and then onboarding to drive their electric carts to their next shot. 

And I find myself wondering for just a moment how it was decided that the only part of golf that makes golf, golf is swinging the club at the ball and putting the ball into the hole when in fact for most of the activity’s history the overwhelming majority of a golfer’s time and effort was actually spent lugging a heavy bag full of clubs, under their own steam, from wherever they’d last hit the ball to wherever they were going to hit it next. 

And then, completely and totally unrelated, I go back to thinking about mountain biking because *shrugs* meh, golf.