When I became addicted to golf, back in the early nineties, I reexamined my life. I began paying attention to speed limits, made an extra effort to sit only in exit rows, and lost interest in eating raw shellfish and visiting any place more exotic than Connecticut—all with a view toward reducing my exposure to accidents that might come between me and my regular fixes. Suddenly, golf-threatening perils loomed everywhere. A regular playing partner of mine tripped on the steep back stairs in his house and broke several important bones while carrying his mother’s suitcase to her car. The moment before he fell, he was happily thinking about how much more golf he was going to be able to play now that his mother was on her way back to Florida. Instead, he had to take a leave from our club and endure months of physical therapy. His game has never really recovered. The lesson for an obsessive golfer is obvious: no more visits from relatives.
The world is filled with such potential catastrophes, and sensible golf addicts need to avoid them: lawn mowing, trick motorcycle riding, calf roping, bear hunting, and, especially, tennis, which can be brutal on the knees. Even golf can be golf-threatening. Two guys I went to high school with once drove a golf cart off a bridge and had to sit out the rest of the season. On a hot July day a couple of years ago, Mel, one of the older members of my club, began talking nonsense in the middle of the round. His playing partners rushed him back to the clubhouse, thinking he was having a stroke. Luckily, our local internist—who has examined the prostate of virtually every one of my regular golf partners—had just finished his own 18. He diagnosed hyperthermia and brought Mel back to his senses by sponging him with water from a drinking fountain.
Not everyone is as lucky as Mel. Tiger Woods was confined to his family for six months after tearing his anterior cruciate ligament and suffering two stress fractures in his left leg. His injuries didn’t prevent him from winning the 2008 U.S. Open, but they left him in visible agony during that tournament. Woods’s view of golf-threatening injuries is different from mine: His recreational activities during the past few years have included downhill skiing, bungee jumping, spearfishing, and freediving, and he drives his Cadillac Escalade about 20 miles an hour faster than I would if I were worth as much as he is and married to a Swedish former model. I once asked him if he didn’t worry about suffering a career-ending catastrophe while holding his breath a hundred feet underwater, and he said, “You can’t live your life that way.”
Well, maybe Tiger Woods can’t, but I can. If Woods had to stop playing golf, he could fall back on his impressive list of profitable side activities, including his new golf-course design business, whereas I’d probably just spend even more time playing online bridge—a frightening prospect. For the past 17 years, my only real health-related ambition has been to preserve my golf swing for as long as I possibly can, and I keep a running mental estimate of how many decent golf years I hope I have left. My role model is a member of my club who continued to play until shortly before he died, in his mid-nineties. I was with him during one of his final rounds, and actually had to give him a boost, by pressing my hand against the small of his back as he pulled his bag up a hill. That’s the way I want to go out, too, and if I can last as long as he did, I have 41 years to go.
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