Is golf funny?

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Daisy Alioto in conversation with Drew Millard, author of How Golf Can Save Your Life (Abrams Press).

I can’t say I have ever spent much time thinking about golf. That is, until two years ago, when my husband I were almost sideswiped by an 18-wheeler while I was wearing a novelty sweatshirt that said Mr. Golf. After swerving out of the way in a maneuver I can’t claim to have consciously conducted, we drove in stunned silence for a couple of minutes before I said, “Mr. Golf take the wheel.”

Well, there is a new Mr. Golf in town and his name is Drew Millard. His book, How Golf Can Save Your Life, which comes out May 9th, is both an excellent primer on the sport and Drew’s brain. He gamely answered my questions about the book and the sport below.

Daisy Alioto: Which section of the bookstore do you think this will be stocked in?

Drew Millard: Uhhhh, sports I think? Maybe self-help? I should check the book itself because the answer’s definitely printed on the jacket somewhere, but alas, I cannot, as I’m typing the answer to this question on the golf course in between holes.

But I think that really what you’re asking is, “What kind of book is this book?” And in that case, what I’d say is that How Golf Can Save Your Life uses golf as a frame to talk about mental health, history, class, economics, digital media, the internet, friendship, and that part of your late 20s/early 30s when you wake up one day are are like, “Oh shit I’m actually an adult now.” It’s also kind of a memoir of my obsession over, and frequent failure at, this one specific thing, which I feel like is a thing people will be able to relate to. Also, I am in no way above claiming that this is a work of “golf autofiction” if I happen to be at certain kinds of parties.

DA: How tempting was it to use the phrase “touch grass” at some place in the text?

DM: I wrote the majority of the book over 2021, at a time when I was blissfully unaware that this was a phrase that people used. I’d been living in Durham, North Carolina for five years and was kind of out of the loop. My main priorities for, like, two years straight were playing golf and doing the Wednesday midnight shift at my old college radio station, and I kind of treated my job (for the folks who don’t know, which is probably most people: I used to be the features editor at this website called The Outline) as this separate thing.

Anyways, the summer when I was writing the book, my partner and I spent a month in Brooklyn and I found out that NYC hipsters were kind of fascists now. Then I went to this one party and Christian Lorentzen was there and it was supposed to be a big deal. Then two days later I ran into my old boss from The Outline who had started running New Gawker (RIP) and told me I should freelance for them, which I ended up doing. That summer really got me back in the loop, and I found out about “touching grass” through sheer force of Discourse Inertia.

DA: Is golf funny?

DM: Golf is definitely funny, especially from, like, a “dudes rock” standpoint. The pro golfer Patrick Reed, who is a shameless cheater as well as a brazen operator of dummy Twitter accounts he uses to defend himself, would have my vote for funniest pro athlete, especially because he looks like this. But it's also sort of inherently funny. For example, there are specific rules about how to deal with a piece of shit on the golf course. There’s also a clarification in the rules that says if your ball’s right next to a cactus and you’d have to get poked by the cactus in order to hit it, you can wrap a towel around your body to protect yourself (????), but cannot place a towel on the cactus itself. The amount of money I have spent on golf, however, is not funny and is in fact alarming.

DA: How many clubs do you own now?

DM: Three drivers, five fairway woods, three hybrids, three sets of irons, eight wedges, ten putters. We moved to Philly a little over a year ago and I had to downsize.

DA: You talk about golf as the anti-hustle sport. Do you think the next generation of golfers can truly escape the creed of self-optimization?

DM: Eh, probably not. The cool thing about everything that’s happening with golf right now is that since the pandemic, there’s been a lot of bottom-up reshaping of golf’s “vibes,” as understood by your average joe. There’s this huge non-traditional golf scene right now, especially in LA, where people kind of treat the clubs they carry as an extension of Fashion Mindset, where everything you carry has to be a unique-ish vintage piece, a bespoke persimmon driver hand-crafted by some guy on Instagram, or some shit from a super expensive Japanese brand that nobody’s ever heard of. And while the focus on vintage is definitely good because it makes golf more accessible — my current setup cost me about $300 total to put together, while a new driver alone might cost $700 — it also probably fosters an indie/hipster/recreational golf culture that optimizes for aesthetics the same way that pro golfers try to optimize for performance. The only way to escape this, I have come to believe, is to buy my book.

DA: Do you have the storage-gobbling golf rules app on your phone?

DM: Yeah, dude! That’s how I looked up the thing about poop.

DA: I liked when you talked about golf as the act of “interpreting” the course. Can you expand on that a bit and explain why it’s the opposite of being Extremely Online?

DM: I recently went bowling with someone who’s as into bowling as I’m into golf, who told me about how they put oils on all the lanes that affect the sidespin of the ball, and that in order to get a bunch of strikes, you’ve got to figure out the oil pattern through trial and error and then roll the ball in a way that the sidespin really kicks in once you’ve rolled through the oil. It sounded really logical when he explained it to me but I still rolled a bunch of gutter balls.

A golf course is sort of like this in macro: Each hole is a different length, is shaped in a distinct way, and their fairways and greens have varying slopes that affect how the ball rolls on them. And that’s not to mention the pods, bushes, trees, creeks, sand traps, and more that exist only to fuck you up. So it’s not enough to hit a bunch of technically perfect golf shots; you’ve got to hit shots that take into account how the ball will bounce once it touches down, or where it’ll land if you don’t hit it perfectly, etc. You’ve got to approach every hole with a plan, and if you study the course closely, you can tell what it “wants” you to do (and if it’s leading you into a trap).You’re really working in collaboration with the environment in a way that causes you to be fully present and to appreciate being in a real place that is decidedly not a computer. That’s one side of it.

On the other side, the internet’s just bad. Even so-called Premium Content™ is basically reactive, and by that I mean it’s literally just people reacting to stuff, in volumes that can and will drive you to madness. It’s not a sustainable model for human communication. (Except for Dirt. Dirt is tight.)

On one hand you’ve got this super-reactive mode of online existence, where stuff’s just flying at your face and you’re struggling to even register if it’s relevant or not, and if you’re in online media you often have a financial imperative to form an opinion about it. So golf kind of represents this slower way of being where you’re in active collaboration with the environment around you, rather than simply tuning it out in favor of a screen.

DA: You write there are only two good golf movies. Who should direct the next one and how would you cast it?

DM: Currently, there appear to be two high-ish-profile golf movies in production: One has Will Ferrell in it and is supposed to be kinda like Talladega Nights but about a LIV Golf-style breakaway league, and then Jonah Hill is going to do a John Daly biopic? That one makes sense I guess, because John Daly is just Jonah’s Wolf of Wall Street character but with a Southern accent. Point is: Golf is back.

The ideal golf movie would be a spiritual sequel to Hype Williams’s Belly, directed by Williams himself, except it stars Rick Ross and DJ Khaled and it’s just about them playing golf together.

DA: More of a comment than a question. I loved the section about socialist golfer Robert Hunter, could have read a lot more on him. Perhaps your next project will be a biography?

DM: Digging into Hunter’s life was really inspiring, because I’ve always felt a little guilty about having the politics that I do and still being obsessed with golf. That dude was just like “Fuck that, I’m going to attend the Communist International convention then come back to America and win some random tournament at Pinehurst.” But nah, I’m trying to sell out with my next thing.

 🌱 JOIN THE DIRTYVERSE

• Join our Discord and talk Dirt-y with us. It’s free to join! Paid subscribers have access to all channels.

• Follow @dirtyverse on Twitter for the latest news and Spotify for monthly curated playlists.

• Shop for some in-demand Dirt merch.  🍄