This article originally appeared in the March issue of NCGA Golf Magazine
How golf has balanced me out in anxious times
By Cameron Morfit
Lately I’ve been doing something called the morning pages, a journaling exercise in which I unload the contents of my monkey-mind onto lined paper before they muck up my day. Golf, too, quiets the noise. It’s like my morning pages, but with sunscreen. Or, if country music is more your thing, it’s that old Ray Price song “Make the World Go Away” (and get it off my shoulders).
Even just a pleasant memory of a great round can be a powerful thing. Maybe it’s those lush green spaces, good for the soul, or the challenge, which clarifies the mind. Scientists tell us the game can lower blood pressure, heighten mindfulness, and reduce cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone.
Like so many others, I intuited this early on and fell hard for the game. I took a job hand-picking the range at the Stanford Golf Course and yakked with fellow pickers Bags, a transplanted Bostonian who was always going on and on about the Celtics and “No. 33, Larry – Larry Bird!”; and Vinnie, an ancient old crank who kvetched about the price of a dozen balls and said most duffers wouldn’t be able to feel the difference between a Titleist and a beat ball. The work itself was contemplative – not so for getting pelted in the cage while driving the tractor – and it got me access to the course, where I could step into another, far superior world.
Those rounds at Stanford provided ballast amid the topsy-turvy sagas of Gunn High School, where it felt like everyone else was smarter, better looking, and getting invited to better parties (or any parties) than I was. Smashing my drive over Junipero Serra Boulevard at the par-5 first hole blessedly erased all of that. By the time I reached the par-4 12th, I’d slipped the shackles of my teenage concerns and eased into an altogether superior headspace, going from why I couldn’t find a girlfriend to whether to aim to the left or right of the famous fairway trees.
My favorite relaxation technique continued into adulthood with games at WPA-era gem Pinecrest making moot my early-career concerns at the Idaho Falls Post Register newspaper. Later, at Sports Illustrated, a bunch of us had planned to play golf at a staff tournament in Bethlehem, Pa., on 9/11. Upon listening to the grim news on the drive there, many turned around upon arrival. But some of us, having reached our loved ones and knowing we would be unable to get back to the city, did play that day, even if no one cared about some silly tournament. We were lucky; here was the game I’d always considered a port in the storm being that more than ever. (We spent the night with an editor who lived in Montclair, N.J.)
Much later, while trying to start a new golf magazine with mixed results, rounds at Essex County Country Club, a terrific course in New Jersey, took the edge off.
Sometimes, just as a mental exercise, I go back to a round at Eastward Ho! in Cape Cod, Mass., the late-afternoon sunlight glinting off the water as we stepped up to the par-3 15th hole. Just then a catamaran came about on the calm swells below, the boat being skippered by my father and one of his oldest friends. Up here on the grass, Eastward Ho’s signature hole awaited; down there it was smooth sailing. All was right with the world, and isn’t that what golf is meant to give us?
Amid far too many handwringers and fingernail chewers, and with the news cycle choked with awfulness, golf reminds us that there’s at least one way in which everything is OK. And when the light is right and the catamaran cuts through the waves and the signature hole beckons, it’s a lot better than that.
