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Parallel Play
On a golf trip with the guys, the only sights you see are the ones you set on the distant green
By David Owen
Illustration by Ulla Puggard
My brother lives just an hour away, but we don’t see each other very often. He’s an advertising executive with a long commute, and his kids are still young enough to require two full-time chauffeurs on weekends, so one thing almost always leads to another. When we do get together, golf is usually involved. Once or twice a year we manage more than a single hurried round.
A dozen years ago we spent four full days at the Cloister, on Sea Island, Georgia, one of my favorite golf resorts anywhere—just us, no wives. Our daily schedule approximated the male ideal: huge buffet breakfast, 90-minute golf lesson, round of golf, quick lunch, second round of golf, beer, showers, dinner. One day we even man- aged a third round, between the second round and the beer. Our trip coincided with the Masters, so after dinner we watched the rebroadcast of that day’s action on the TV in our room, and as we watched we drank more beer and played more golf: wedge shots from floor to bed, bed to bed, bed to chair, chair to wastebasket. Then putting, nightcap, sleep. Repeat.
My wife plays goalie for a women’s ice- hockey team called the Hat City Beavers, and this past spring they competed in a big tournament in Montreal. She enjoyed herself, but it wasn’t really her kind of trip, in part because the schedule didn’t leave time for sightseeing—a plus, in my view. One of the things I like about the trips I take with my golf buddies, as opposed to traveling with my wife, is that we are never in danger of suddenly finding ourselves looking at art, touring the wine country, or taking a nap.
Last February two of my regular golf buddies and I spent five days at Bandon Dunes, the fabulous, recently expanded golf resort in south- western Oregon. (All three courses at Bandon—Bandon Dunes, Pacific Dunes, and Bandon Trails—are now ranked in the top 25 on Golf Digest’s list of the 100 greatest public courses in America.) On the evening we arrived, the bar in the lodge was filled with middle-aged men wearing Dockers, windshirts, golf hats, and saddle shoes, and as I looked around I thought, Other members of my species! The resort has never caught on with women, primarily because playing golf is pretty much the only possible activity, not only on the property but for miles in all directions. My friends and I played two rounds a day, in steady rain and wind, and then played setback (our favorite card game) until it was late enough to go to bed.The only sightseeing we did was occasionally remembering to look around between golf shots.
“What did you talk about?” my wife used to ask when I came home from trips like that, or from playing golf with my brother. “Our swings,” I used to answer, truthfully, and after a while she stopped asking. Men and women have different methods of exchanging emotional content. Women tend to do it directly, through words, hugs, tears, shopping, etc. Men do it through parallel play. I don’t think my brother and I have ever had a “big talk” about anything, yet after spending two days as his partner in one of our member-guest tournaments I feel fully updated and rebonded. Men affirm their feelings for each other by sinking putts that matter, or by driving it up the middle after their partners have winged one out of bounds, or by reminding each other to remember whatever it was they just learned in the golf lesson they took together. They also do it by pretending that their game is as important as the U.S. Open and then, as soon as it’s over, turning back into their regular selves.
Men aren’t really less sensitive than women; they just have their own way of expressing their sensitivity. There used to be four old guys at my golf club who played together all the time, even in the snow. Then one of them moved to Florida, and another one died. I saw the two survivors on the second hole one afternoon, playing their usual match for their usual stakes. The older one, who was in his late eighties, had hit his ball under the branches of a pine tree, and the younger one, in his early eighties, was looking for it. “Here it is,” the younger called, after surreptitiously kicking it into a better lie. There were 40 years of friendship in that kick.
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