What Noah Kahan Taught Me About Absorbing Golf

The first and most important thing I’ve learned about golf is that I soak it up.

Don’t worry – not in any particular way. Tails would be exciting. Hooks would be rivets. At least they would give me a reason to go back to therapy.

No, I just suck. I cringe when I think about every shot. I inhale when I try to lose in the round. Suck when I’m stripped of the weight of waiting. And I inhale something very special and impressive when part of my dignity depends on not inhaling.

The thing about absorbing golf is that it gives you a lot of time to think about your state of affairs. The putt player may enjoy a brisk walk from the tee to the fairway to the green, contemplating the strategic challenge and the afternoon sun and the mowing patterns, but he will never understand what it’s like to walk helplessly from the 80 yards left after the first shot to somewhat further left after the second shot. He’ll never understand what it’s like to know your chances of scoring have dwindled from modest to almost nothing, requiring a Herculean lift—a true moment of genius. – from the depths**t only to leave himself 30 feet to avoid embarrassment. And he probably won’t know what it feels like to lift your ball from that spot five feet in front of him, then hit it furiously 50 yards. FAIR green, and the long, shy walk to the golf ball began before he, the scratcher, had even considered his approach.

He won’t know what happens in between all that running between bad shots. What happens inside your head, heart and soul as you face the gap between what you’d really like to be and what is. He won’t know how golf becomes something much more than an attempt at skill in those moments. And he will not know the act of defiance that it is choosing to enjoy yourself even after things have gone so clearly wrong.

This absorption—this endless, unceasing failure—turns out to be the miracle of golf. For the scratch player, golf is something small and manageable, like a puzzle that can be smoothed out under the right conditions. What do you think? Golf is huge, indescribably ephemeral and fundamentally absurd. It is not alone one thing. IS THING. The whole universe somehow lives inside him, like a baby’s cry or a first kiss or the first chords of a song from a past life.

It wasn’t until I read Michael Murphy’s book Golf in the Kingdom for the first time it occurred to me that my inhalation was not in vain. Murphy’s meditations on golf as medicine remain some of the most compelling words I’ve ever consumed about the sport, and they illuminated something I’d long known but never connected: Golf is a reflection of itself. Not necessarily in skill or result, but in disposition.

Recently, I was fascinated to hear the golf musings of a more contemporary philosopher: Noah Kahanpop-folk singer-songwriter whose press tour for his latest album,The Great Divide, has presented a surprising number of reflections on sport.

Kahan’s interest in the grander questions of golf’s meaning is foreign only to people who have never heard his music. In the song Foreverhe writes with a golfer’s sensitivity about continuing to play despite your imperfections. (I broke a bone in my hand that never healed; so when I hold it close, I can loosen my grip; but I’ll never let it go.) But his interest in the role of golf on those questions was a mystery until Kahan took time in several interviews to rhapsodize on the importance of golf in his life and psyche.

In a world full of opportunities and yes men, golf is a place where the most successful of us can breathe – somewhere honesty and humility arrive at ease. But it’s rare to hear a celebrity suggest, as Kahan did in several interviews, that golf was less of a weekend hobby and more of a spiritual center of gravity.

The starting point of Kahan’s latest interest was a professional crisis. As he faced the enormous burden of following up a successful album with another creative goal, Kahan faced a prolonged period of creative burnout. At one point, things got so bad that he considered quitting music temporarily to get a job completing the divots on a golf course in Vermont.

“I was just looking for something I could do for the next few years until I figured things out,” he said. “The music was just making me so unhappy that I was like,Why am I doing this??'”

Kahan had fallen into a hole familiar to generations of weekend hackers: The thing he wanted was no longer something he liked. Worse yet, he had no easy way out: Every time he opened the phone, he was greeted by dozens of notes from complete strangers expressing their love or animosity for his work, or their anticipation for what was to come next.

Kahan suggested that the external feedback had proved harmful. Some days, he would surrender his entire emotional well-being to strangers on the Internet. Other days he would completely ignore their comments, even those that might otherwise fall deeply.

Eventually, however, he found a breakthrough, and he ended up in a very unusual place: a golf lesson.

As Kahan talked about the shift in mindset that defined his latest album Jay Shetty On purpose podcast, he referred to a pacing tip that had turned out to be unexpectedly revealing.

“You want to have a bird in your hand that you’re not going to crush, but you’re not going to let go,” Kahan said.

Kahan was referring to the optimal amount of grip strength in the golf swing—but his words immediately resonated with his interviewer, Shetty, who recognized the analogy from his training with Buddhist monks.

“The Buddha always talked about the middle path,” Shetty said. “If you’re going to hold something, don’t hold it too tightly, but then you can’t hold it too loosely. So how do you hold something just … beautifully?

The so-called “middle way” exists at the heart of Buddhist teachings, explaining a view of reality that exists outside the extremes of self-indulgence and self-sacrifice. In many cases, Buddhist elders will use the analogy of the bird to explain how each of life’s extremes can be held in equal weight.

As Kahan and Shetty spoke, it struck me that they were defining something essential about golf: its imperfection. Even the best day for a scratch golfer is filled with mistakes, and even the worst round for a hacker is filled with flashes of brilliance. Mastery doesn’t arrive at the scoreboard or at the bottom of the hole—it arrives at the moment of acceptance between those scores. It is not unlike the point made by Michael Murphy’s famous antagonist Shivas Irons in Golf in the Kingdom.

“You think too much and try too hard,” says Shivas. “Leave nothing in your pictures.”

The character of Shiva is referring to the ancient art of nothingness: meditation. As it turns out, Kahan has spent some time in that arena as well.

“Meditation is so powerful, but it’s so hard,” says Kahan. “It’s like golf. It’s hard — and it takes a while.”

And sometimes you suck. But that may be exactly the point.

You can contact the author at james.colgan@golf.com.