One of the funny parts about letting go of your childhood is learning the little lessons you managed to keep.
I don’t know how old I was when my father first dropped his favorite pearl of wisdom. I don’t remember why he said it. But I can still hear the phrase in my mind, spoken in the father’s playful intonation, as if to emphasize its inherent truth. I doubt I always will.
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
It took me a while to understand the meaning of those words, and even longer to understand that they were referring to ME. But the answer came when I least expected it: On a golf course he headed in the wrong direction.
I realized my perspective was changing after my rental car crashed on the highway somewhere in northern Michigan the evening after my 28th birthday. The emotion wasn’t quite melancholy or despair – but something deeper: I was facing the strangeness of aging for the first time.
At twenty-eight, I wasn’t old. More importantly, I didn’t smelt old. In fact, I felt exactly the same age as when I graduated from college in 2019—still white-eyed, green, and hungry. But then I looked at the calendar and realized that Syracuse University’s Class of 2025 had just graduated ten years upon my arrival on campus. I was as close to the class of 2025 as the class of 2013 was… which is to say: I was ancient.
I spent several minutes in a spiral, dealing with the sinking feeling that I had fallen behind. I was 28 years old and young. But my chance to achieve true significance at a young age, to become the weird kid I always imagined myself becoming, was short. If I closed my eyes, I would be 30 years old and take a bath. AND then what? Settle into life as a minimal impact writer? Become an embarrassment to the golf media? Will you continue to absorb golf? Going to the suburbs? sheet metal.
It didn’t help that I was in Michigan on a golf trip that was supposed to bring back the glory days. For months, my college friends had dreamed of this long weekend in Northern Michigan as a long-overdue reunion—a golf-boot trip across the country as a convenient excuse to rekindle our friendship. Now, instead of remembering my younger self, I was driving through the woods, afraid that he was disappearing.
The next morning we got up early. The sun was rising fast Forest Dunes Resortthe latest in a series of unseasonably cold June days that promised 15 hours of daylight. Within minutes of our arrival, we were hitting the course that I hoped would be the crown jewel of our trip: Loopa reversible Tom Doak design that plays in a different direction every day.
I’d been to The Loop once when I was younger—a wide-eyed 22-year-old living mostly on anxious energy and bravado—and remembered the experience as a gateway drug to golf addiction: insightful, perspective-expanding, and generally boring.
We played our first round and the reviews were lukewarm. Very well. Cold. Various. The highest handicaps on our ride rated the fairways at The Loop occasionally cutting 200 yards wide (it was going to be a tough weekend on the scoreboard); lower handicaps enjoyed things playing hard and fast.
But then we came back the next morning to play our second round and I watched the golf course come to life. The same mounds that had protected the green now served as posts, sending approach shots off the line that rolled back toward the flagpole. The same bunkers that magnetized a left error now punished a right error. Often, the best shot wasn’t a big drive or zippy chip, but a 4-iron arm. Everything echoed everything else, but nothing was repeated.
The sun came out as our round reached the halfway point, and while we waited for the green to hide on a devilishly deceptive par-3, we stopped for a beer. We sat on the spongy turf, sipping and laughing as we retold the stories of the long weekend. My worries melted away.
It wasn’t hard to see why. The Loop was everything I loved about golf: playful, creative and thought-provoking. The second time was even better than the first – and the goodness was only amplified by the fact that I had already seen it.
Apparently, my friends agreed.
“That was totally crazy.”
“I didn’t get it yesterday, but I get it now.”
“Okay, that was incredible.”
“The freeways were wider yesterday.”
As the glowing comments rolled in, I thought of my dad.
If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
The course, the shot variety, hell—even the mode of transportation had changed from our first round to our second—and everything about the experience got better. There was less pressure, more laughter and even more birds. The Loop had transformed from a good course to a great course … and all we had to do was walk in the opposite direction.
I wish I could say that The Loop taught me to ease my anxieties about aging—that I learned the best things in life come at the intersection of experience and wisdom. It didn’t happen.
What I learned in The Loop is that it’s okay not to know, okay if things aren’t what you thought they would be.
If you look hard enough for a new perspective, you’ll find one—and maybe that won’t be the only thing that changes.
You can contact the author at james.colgan@golf.com.
