#8 What's in your bag?

What's in your bag?

I'm not sure I'm everyone’s idea of company for dinner. I’m certainly not after playing a round of golf that sucks. And I definitely wasn’t in a top dining mood the other day after losing misplacing my rangefinder.

But as luck would have it, I’ve now found the distance ‘zapper’ in the depths of my golf bag. Along with a 56-degree wedge clubhead, a packet of chewing gum and a mouldy, sticky substance (maybe I do need one of those banana carriers?)

It’s that moment when you discover something you thought you'd lost, only to realise you've been carrying it around the whole time.

Which got me thinking about all the other stuff we lug around. The patterns that somehow weave their way into your life, your head, your work and play. The baggage that gets you into situations without you quite understanding how you got there.

Turns out, golf is played in the Land of Hidden Depths.

This golf lesson is about the sublayers. The bits and bobs that are nothing to do with clubs, balls, bags and general golf tat. The hidden forces that influence how your round goes, how you feel, and walks the course with you whether you know it or not.

The weight of self-worth

Any golf shot can become a mind game about who you are as a person. That's a lot of pressure for a simple game where you're trying to get a small ball into a slightly larger hole. Miss a three-footer and you're questioning your being. Nail a perfect drive and you're basically Tiger Woods II.

It's totally mental that we tie our identity to a scorecard like it's a character test. A bad round doesn't just mean you played poorly – it means you are piss poor. At golf. At life. At everything, possibly, probably. You idiot.

The best players care about their score, but they don’t worry. Maybe they've figured out how to separate their swing from their sense of self. The rest of us are still working on that outer-body experience.

A lifetime’s lessons

Harvey Penick's Little Red Book is a compendium of simple wisdom that highlights the tiniest details – from "take dead aim" to "the woods are full of long drivers." No algorithms, no launch monitors, no biomechanical analysis – just timeless truths.

Yet most of us ignore a lifetime’s learning for quick fixes.

YouTube tutorials that never end. Swing gurus (the golfer’s 10x LinkedInners and Spammer Instagrammers) who promise miracles and whose content is sponsored by gadget makers of devices measuring everything except what actually matters.

Humans crave shortcuts, hacks and secret sauces which are why I worry care about over-reliance on AI.

Penick understood something most seem to have forgotten: "If I told you to take some aspirin, you wouldn't take the whole bottle." Improvement isn't about cramming every tip and technique into your brain (or your bot) all at once. It's incremental changes that encourage and build up over time. No overnight results here.

The fundamentals haven't changed, even if the technology has. The steely mindset, the painstaking process and the player on the inside. Not exactly what the instant gratification world wants to hear, but there you go – Harvey knows better.

Obsessing over numbers

Jon Rahm knows the score. He crumbled at the recent major – the PGA Championship – going from contention to also-ran in the space of three holes. A 5-5-6 finish that left him reeling and apologising to reporters for his long answers as he tried to process what had just happened. “I think it’s the first time I’ve been in position to win a major that close and haven’t done it,” he painfully recounted.

Golfers are used to being gazumped. You have a decent round, flirt with a win, when disaster strikes. A lost ball, a four-putt, a duffed chip or a sickener of a shank. Suddenly you're not just peeved – you're pissed. At the course, at your clubs, at the universe for conspiring against you. You were this close and it got snatched away.

It can be crushing, so all credit to Rahm for saying, “Am I embarrassed? Yeah. But I just need to get over it, get over myself... to them," he said of his three children, “whatever I did today, win or lose, they don't care. So that's always a good perspective.”

The score is an integer, not an identity.

The invisible gallery

Another thing making your imaginary golf bag so heavy is comparison. Or as a yoga teacher might call it, “a joy killer.” Or as a playing partner might say, “you jammy bastard.”

Feeling self-conscious makes you tense up, second-guess yourself, and focus on stuff other than what’s in front of you. But the hard truth is that no one is watching you as closely as you.

Most people are too worried about their own game to give a tiny toss about yours. That slice that didn’t seem to bother the person it nearly hit was because they were having anxiety sweats about the putt they just missed, not your ball flight.

A game of beautiful mistakes

Pete Dye, the legendary course designer, understood what a lot of us miss when he said, "Golf is not a game of perfect – it's a game of mistakes. The winner is the one who makes the fewest."

We spend so much energy trying to avoid errors that we forget they're the whole point. Life is supposed to be a series of hard knocks. Golf is supposed to be tough too. Those beautiful, fleeting moments – the pure strike, the holed bunker shot, the 100-foot putt that drops – they only mean something because of all the OK shots that came before.

Dye embraced this philosophy with designs that would punish mistakes and celebrate the challenge of managing them.

Staying power is a superpower

Golf teaches you resilience whether you want to learn it or not. Every round is a microlesson in dealing with disappointment, adjusting expectations and finding a way forward when things don't go to plan.

Not bad skills to have in your bag, when shit happens. Which it does. Frequently.

With a game built around mistakes, it’s no surprise when all your best stuff fails to show up on the same day. When you putt like a demon but can't find a fairway to save your life. It's like you’re a player with split personalities. The search for that elusive round where everything clicks for the full 18 holes becomes an addiction. You keep coming back, chasing that combo of timing, technique and luck.

The real deal: not when everything goes right, but the eternal hope that tomorrow might be the day when all the pieces slot into place.

Look who’s coming to dinner

To answer David Abbott’s soul-searching question: “Would you like to sit next to you at dinner?”

First, never ask a golfer to dinner unless another golfer is present. It would just be awkward for everyone.

Secondly, golf forces you to spend hours in your own company and often in your head. All those hidden depths – your self-worth, the stories you tell yourself, your expectations and frustrations – they’re your dinner companions. And it’s an 18-course menu.

Lastly, the more interesting question to ask a lone golfer if you discover them hiding at a dinner party isn’t “what did you score today?”, it’s “how did you play the game?”.

If you're lucky, they might tell the truth and even touch on some hidden depths. If you’re unlucky, they might tell you everything in excruciating detail.

*As well as writing this brilliant line for The Economist, David Abbott also said, “It doesn’t matter how fast shit reaches you, it’s still shit.” What a legend.