Graham Averill is turning 50 this year and he’s crazy. Instead of buying a motorcycle or getting a tattoo, he’s decided to try to get really, really good at golf. He is a 13 handicap trying to get to zero in a year. Welcome to his midlife crisis.
I’m playing an alarming amount of golf right now. I’ll walk at least nine holes four to five days a week and temper that with a dedicated range and practice green sessions. Occasionally, I’ll pencil on a day off, but by the time lunch rolls around on that Saturday, I’m usually itching to hit the links. Deciding for an hour still counts as a break, right?
It’s the kind of dedication to the sport that produces hard tan lines and awkward dinner conversations with my wife when she asks about my day. A cynic might call this kind of cadence an “addiction,” but I like to describe it as an example of my puritanical work ethic. Don’t blame me, blame society for equating hard work with self-esteem. And frankly, with a goal of getting to zero by the time I’m 50, I can’t afford to take many days off. Time is passing.
I knew the project would require an unhealthy amount of golf, and it made me wonder from the start: Should I join a country club to make big strides in my golf game? Or can I get up to scratch while spending practice times at the local public courses?
It’s an uncomfortable question. Country club talk/public golf talk carries overtones of class and money. I am a staunch advocate for public golf. Aside from a brief stint working at a country club during high school, where I mostly focused on testing the laws of physics with gas-powered golf carts, most of what I know about country clubs comes from watching. Caddyshack. Judge Smails, ripped corpses competing for scholarships and all that.
Since I picked up the game in my late 40s, I’ve played 90 percent of my rounds on my community course. It’s a beautiful layout, designed by Donald Ross, with narrow streets and lots of inclines. But a natural disaster took out the front nine in 2024, so there are only nine holes. My town actually lost several courses in that disaster along with several driving ranges, so there has been a squeeze on public golf in the area. Practice times are high and the pace of play can be painful if the sun is out.
Early on in this project, my coach, Sam Hahn, suggested I find a club to join during our first conversation. “You need a place where you can walk a loop and drop five balls from different places on each hole.”
In other words, I need a place that offers the space and time to improve my game. I’ve taken a few strokes off my handicap over the past year playing public golf, but I don’t think I can get to the next level with the public facilities available to me. Most courses don’t even have driving ranges because flat land in the mountains is hard to find.
So I bit the bullet and joined a country club, signing the papers the same week I submitted my first story for this series. I like to say it’s a blue collar country club with more pickup trucks in the parking lot than Cybertrucks. And considering the monetary and emotional cost that comes with many midlife crises (divorce, therapy…), I suggested to my wife that we actually saving money by joining a club. She does math differently than I do and she politely disagreed.
Now that I’m a few months into this goal, I don’t think it would be possible to do the kind of work I’m doing without being a member of a club. I spend at least half of each working day on my course, working on my computer at the club and taking breaks to practice on the green or putt. During the week, I can walk the front or back nine when there is a gap in the game. Mostly, I can play alone and take my time, practicing different shots from different spots.
It’s not a perfect situation. I honestly thought I’d have the course to myself most days and be able to play whenever I wanted, but that’s not the case. Weekends are busy so I have to make some time in advance and the club hosts high school events and regular club events that block some time in the middle of the week.
But I have access to good facilities, balls with unlimited range, and no one giving me a hard time for two hours of camping on the green. It is exactly what I need to achieve this goal. I’m not saying everyone should join a country club to get better at golf, but with my situation, I can’t imagine making progress without this move.
Dig deeper into one golfer’s struggle to get better at golf in middle age and read last week’s Scratch By 50 about swinging your range on the course.
