What Golfers Talk About When We Aren’t Talking About Golf 

I was in Myrtle Beach last week for a get-together with nine of my high-school friends. We’ve been meeting there every October for about the last 30 years. The ostensible purpose is to play golf. The true purpose is conversation. And the purpose of our conversations is to maintain those ties that bind.

Apart from reminiscing about bygone days, the topics have been mostly about our families and our careers.

In the first decade, when we were in our 30s, we talked a good deal about how we fell into our careers, what they required of us, and whether we believed we had made the right choices. We also talked about the challenges of being good husbands and good dads.

In our 40s, the career conversations were about the extra hours, the effort to be recognized, the doubts, disappointments, and triumphs that were teaching us lessons we wished we’d learned earlier. Family conversations were mostly about the disappointments and triumphs of our teenage children.

In our 50s, well along in our careers, we talked less about the work we did and more about what we did when we weren’t working – vacations, hobbies, books and movies, etc. Our children were now in their late teens or early 20s, Occasionally, we talked about the future of our relationships with our wives.

During our 60s, we talked about our prospects for retirement and what those of us who had retired were doing with their non-working hours. I was especially interested in these conversations because, by that time, I had retired and then had gone back to work three times. I was sure there were retirement lifestyles that would be right for me, but I’d never found one.

Now we are in our mid-70s and, statistically speaking, likely to be in the final 10 years of our lives. We continue to talk about our kids (and grandkids), but an increasingly large percentage of our time is taken up with recounting stories of the good ol’ days.

We also talk about our bodies…

All of us were athletes during our high school years. Some of us played sports in college. For the first 20 years, I remember a lot of talk about the sprained ankles, knee and shoulder surgeries, and occasional broken ribs we had incurred.

That changed as we moved into our 50s. Golf trip after golf trip, we were admitting to health “issues” we had never even imagined earlier on. Admissions about getting up at night to pee (benign prostate enlargement), pain in almost every joint (arthritis), and even, occasionally, the diminishment of our formerly impressive performances in the bedroom. Less embarrassing topics included gaining weight, losing strength, and the increasing difficulty of just about every physical activity.

In our early Myrtle Beach days, it wasn’t unusual for some of us to golf twice a day. For most of us, that part of our get-togethers tailed off fairly quickly. And sometime around my 69th birthday, I retired from the game (almost) entirely.

I enjoyed golf when I played it. No, that’s not true. I liked golf in theory but I hated playing it because 90% of the time when I was playing, I hated myself. (If you golf, you understand this. If not, I recommend watching the bit by Robin Williams in today’s “Postscript,” below.)

I’m often asked by active golfers what I miss about it. The range of proper answers includes statements about the beauty of nature and the healthful benefits of spending a half-day outdoors.

I can’t claim to miss those things, and it’s not because I don’t value them. But for me, golf offered very little in terms of being in the great outdoors because most of the time I was looking at the golf ball beneath my feet or trying to avoid the hazards that were put in place to thwart me – the streams and lakes and tall grasses and clusters of trees. (The conventional wisdom for how to avoid them is “Don’t even look at them,” which I heeded.)

I do, however, enjoy the camaraderie of male bonding, and that is the reason I come to Myrtle Beach every year. But I find that the best of that is had in conversations at dinner or in the evenings, sitting on the porch, drinking tequila, and smoking cigars.