The Evolution of a Middle-Aged Golfer

In 2005, after playing competitive golf at the junior and NCAA level, I stopped playing the game entirely for around eight years. Like many young people building a career, I moved to a city where I found golf inconvenient and, quite frankly, unaffordable. When I returned to the game, I felt like a character in a movie that has been suddenly transported to the future—everything seemed at once familiar and utterly foreign. Elite golfers were armed with new equipment and new strategies – even a new understanding of the physics underpinning the flight of the ball.
Golf had changed—and of course, I had changed, too. I’m 40 now—with a much different body and brain than when I was 20. I recently discovered a quote attributed to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, which is apt: “No man fishes the same river twice, for it is not the same river, nor is he the same man.”
Here are the main differences that I now navigate as a middle-aged golfer.
Golf is Hard
My absence from the game coincided with the rise of big data and analytics—first in finance and then eventually in everything else. For golf, the data revolution involved tracking and analyzing millions of shots hit on the PGA tour via a system called ShotLink. As far as I can tell, the main insight from all this data wrangling is that golf is really, exceptionally, excruciatingly hard, even for the best players in the world.
When I was in college, I expected to hit every iron on the green, every wedge shot to within a 10-foot radius, and hole every putt inside six feet. The stats from ShotLink show how foolhardy these expectations were, particularly for me, a bench-warmer on an Ivy League golf team. From 150 yards in the fairway, PGA tour players miss the green on one out of four attempts. From 110 yards in the fairway, they hit it outside ten feet the vast majority of the time (74.6 percent of the time, to be precise). Even the best putters in the world can expect to miss a six-footer a third of the time.
I find stats like these both dispiriting and liberating. It’s depressing to think that even highly talented athletes who dedicate their entire professional life to the game still basically suck a significant portion of the time—what hope is there for a weekend warrior such as I? The great American psychologist B.F. Skinner discovered long ago that the most addicting thing you can offer lab rats or humans is unpredictable rewards. That’s exactly what you’re guaranteed in golf. No matter how hard you practice—no matter how good you get—you will sometimes get positive reinforcement and sometimes get punched in the face. There is no way to predict when it’s going to happen. It can be incredibly infuriating—and addicting.
But now that I have internalized this —now that I’ve seen the stats and faced the cold-hard truth—I feel unshackled from unrealistic expectations and the self-punishment that follows when such expectations are violated by reality. Sure, it still hurts my ego when I dump a 150-yard approach into a front bunker, or three-putt from 40 feet, or miss the green from 90 yards. But it soothes my ego to know that even PGA pros do all of these things—and not infrequently, either. My self-talk shifts from “you suck!” to “ golf is hard.” I enjoy the game more than I ever have because I can shrug off bad shots as just part of the experience of playing golf. And when I hit a truly great shot—say, when I hit the green from outside of 230 yards—I celebrate the outcome more because I know how rare it is. Golf is essentially unconquerable. I love the game even more now that I have accepted this.
Ball Flight Laws
Throughout my junior career, I had been told that the path of the golf club at impact determines what direction the ball starts, and the face determines where it finishes. To hit a fade, the right-handed golfer should aim his clubface at the target, and then swing left. That’s totally intuitive—and totally incorrect. In fact, launch monitors have shown that the alignment of the clubface at impact mostly determines the direction that the ball starts, and the relationship between the face’s aim and the club’s path is what determines how much it curves and where it finishes. What this means in practice is that to hit a fade, your clubface needs to be closed to the target at impact (how much is determined by the path).
This may sound technical and wonky, but it is hugely important for golfers struggling to fix a recurring miss. In the past, if I was over-doing a fade, I would try to move my path more to the left, because I (incorrectly) believed that this would start the ball further left. Of course, all this was doing was making my problem worse—it caused the ball to start on the same line and just slice more. Does understanding this mean I hit fewer bad shots? I doubt it. But at least now I can figure out the root cause of those bad shots—and adjust more quickly.
I have to marvel at how the golf community got the ball flight laws so wrong for so long. This isn’t quantum physics. It’s stuff Newton could have figured out centuries ago. Yet, as is so often the case, common sense overrode science until it could no longer resist.
Just Send It
When I grew up playing golf, elite golfers fetishized a “good” golf swing. It was the Leadbetter/Faldo era when instructors felt they were closing in on the “right way” to swing. Today, I sense that elite golfers are less concerned about how their swing looks and more concerned about impact conditions—the “moment of truth” when ball and club connect. I know one competitive golfer who doesn’t even send video to his swing coach, only numbers from his launch monitor (e.g., “hey coach: 1.9 degrees up, 2.8 degrees left, face to path 1.5R, 2145 rpm. What do you think?”). I remember obsessing over my takeaway and backswing in college. For many instructors today, the club’s position in the backswing really is an afterthought. Who cares? Just make a turn and rip it.
Elite golfers today have a similar disregard for the “swing easy” ethos of my era. This is obvious off the tee, when golfers are being taught to feel as if they are explosively jumping off the ground with their front foot through impact, which leads to more clubhead speed. Even “control” players like Francesco Molinari have learned that they will get better results by swinging full bore with their driver—a strategy he used to tame Carnoustie at the Open Championship two years ago.
In my youth, long-hitters were treated derisively as meatheads—“the woods are full of long hitters,” was a common way of dismissing golfers with speed. The “smart” golfers were the “tacticians” who laid short of hazards and picked their way around the golf course. So it’s ironic—but perhaps inevitable—that it was math nerds who overturned this misconception by crunching “strokes-gained” data provided by ShotLink. And what they found was that the meatheads were the ones playing smart: with only a few exceptions, the best way to improve your score is to just send it.
No Country For Old Men
It’s difficult to describe how unnerving it is to adopt this new approach to the game. I still feel uncomfortable hitting drivers on hard holes in competition—not to mention swinging at full bore. To do so goes against everything instructors I grew up respecting and admiring taught me—including my father. I feel like an old Communist apparatchik during the Cold War who has defected to the West. I can see a better way of living all around me, I can even adopt the local customs, but I know I will always feel slightly uncomfortable—and I will never lose a conflicted fondness for the life that I have left behind.
But isn’t that true of aging, generally—that we begin to feel more and more as if we are strangers in a foreign land? Or that we no longer belong as a new generation comes through? It is misguided loyalty to the past to fight inevitable change. You may know these types at the golf course—they are the ones giving the 17-year-old high school hotshot a lecture about the “right way” to play the golf course even as the 17-year-old is setting new course records.
One of golf’s great gifts to me in recent years is that it has shown me a more graceful and enjoyable way to age. “Old men ought to be explorers,” the poet T.S. Eliot wrote, and what I think he meant is that we should never stop learning and growing and taking delight in each new step forward, even if it takes us further from what we find familiar and comfortable. Now when I step on to the tee—even on a tough par 4—I reach back and hit it as hard as I can. With my hunching shoulders, graying hair, and sagging belly, I’m sure I look a bit ungainly to the 17-year-olds I often compete against. But I don’t care. For as I watch the ball fly out into the blue abyss, in that split second of uncertainty all golfers share as they look up to see what direction their ball is headed, I feel that old sensation in the veins once more, that lightning rush of discovery and fear which is the defining feature of youth.
Great essay! At 35, I feel like I’m just transitioning into that “transition zone” to middle aged. Weird feeling.
I’m right there with you (37). I would think golfers in this age bracket, if they played as a junior, are old enough to remember the “before” with equipment, technology, and overall approach to the game. If I had the right information about ball flight laws when I was 13, I think my experience in the game could have been far different (amongst other things).
I’m 53 and totally relate. The fade thing is from Nicklaus’ Golf My Way and I tried for ages to make sense of it while hitting straight pulls. Now I fade and draw through hands/wrists on takeaway.
For almost a decade I (unsuccessfully) tried to play a fade thinking I had to keep the clubface open at impact. Now I play a draw with that same thought lol.
Loved this!
I’m 42 and have also returned to regular play, only within the last year. It’s been a year of discovery, bafflement and wonder for sure (and welcome respite from the wider world’s 2020) – but I’m loving the journey and yes, feeling in touch with my younger self too.
All great things, it’s an amazing game! Glad you enjoyed the read.
A great article of reflection and HONESTY! It would be great to see a follow-up when you reach my age (74) and someone who’s been with the game for (56) years! We ALL need to accept the stats don’t lie and yet the so called teachers of golf will never tell you your GIR will only be 33% if your lucky or your putts will be 30+ feet.
I have enjoyed the article
My golf has deteriorated by 20 shots
I could shoot 78 at bethpage black
middle tees ( playing from championship tees not allowed, roped off, always seeded)
but still 6500 yards. A good test
Now , with new technology, better swing, great short game technique
solid putter can’t sniff 90
I know the ball could bounce forward
50-75 yards in old days
Now the driver makes the ball carry
farther but not a lot of roll
The game has become too mechanical
I liked my game before the changes
no distractions, ( no trackman, range finders, not a fan.
Does it help, I’m old school. I use my
eyes to feel the distance, especially
inside 100 yards.
Hitting a fade was my bread and butter shots to any green
I simply closed the face at address
and swung down my target line alittle
out to in. Just like Ken Venturi told us to do . It worked perfectly for me for
40 years. I did not need a machine to tell me otherwise
I played and taught the game the same way I learned it. I dug it out of the dirt. Today , Players today (amateurs ) wouldn’t know what i’m talking about!.
My stories about the greats( Hogan, Snead, Jones ) get a funny look from players today, That’s too bad. They can learn a lot . But that’s nearly impossible with their thoughts tied to their I-Phones
Great article Eben, inspiring. Grip it and rip it! Oooraaah!!
I was definitely better in the era of tiny (by today’s standards) persimmon drivers and balata golf balls. GPS did not exist and a glance at a 150 marker, toss of a few blades of grass to gauge the wind was all I needed to hit the green IF I were ‘on it’. And that is, I think, why, the metrics you discuss should be adjusted. Golf is a game that is measured and generally judged on your good day, not your average days and certainly not your worst days. From the pga tour to lesser tours to state tournaments to club championships and down through to normal handicap category competitions that say I might play in, the more meaningful data would be GIR’s or greens hit from 150 or putts made from 6 feet on your BEST day? In ones category, amongst ones peers those stats would be your stats on days that you win or rank. So whilst we like to mollify ourselves with the average pga tour numbers from across the full range of good bad and ugly days for the entire field grinding day in day out and the comforting conclusion that therefore those guys are as human as you and I, the reality may be more infuriating!? In other words, to state the obvious, whilst the top flight average seems attainable on a good day (well maybe for an extremely good scratch golfer such as yourself!) , the gulf in skill is vast between each echelon. Nil desperandum! Golf does still leave us mere mortals the one shot wonders, the perfect approach that COULD NOT have been played better even by Tiger. Those and a selective memory are what keep me feeling buoyant about the game and aligns perfectly with your summary and the current science it seems, that every shot should be a balls out banzaaai!! into the blue yonder 🙂
Outstanding article. At age 51, I am playing my best golf (I have a realistic chance of being a single digit handicapper) and most of all enjoying the game no matter what I shoot (do the youngsters still say shoot🤣?).
Thanks Eben and Jon for a very thoughtful, and accurate, article on golf, aging, and accepting who we are (as golfers and otherwise). I think I became a truly happy golfer around age 60 when I finally accepted my “game” for what it is at any given moment.
My older brother told me long ago that he’d not play with me anymore if I continued to mope around the course depressed about every shot not being good enough. Golf is about the next shot and many times I (we all) still have a good chance for par, and I learned the joy in making 8 foot putts to save bogey. The devil’s card as I call it (lot’s of 6’s) is the one I work to avoid.
So now after a shot puts me in a difficult position my motto has been for years, “no worries, I have a club for that! ” And things usually turn out acceptably (oh crap another 6). Moving on with a smile anyway.
Is there is anywhere else on earth where a middle class guy like me can go out for 25 to 50 bucks on a beautiful fall day mid-week and play a round of golf with friends and maybe a new acquaintance or two? I feel VERY lucky to live in the U.S. and in a great golf town like Columbus OH.
And by the way, 40 might give one some perspective on things, but I can confidently say -Eben, you are just getting started. And it gets better as the years go by. Enjoy every minute!
Thanks for the kind words, Mike – I’m so happy people appreciated this article and I hope that Eben can contribute more like them in the future!
Actually, I am just starting at the age of 36. I think Its kind of awkward. But after reading this Blog post It will help me a lot about my future playing tactics.