This time I mean it.
The first time Mike and I ever played golf together, we had a bet on the line. I was in Florida for school, he was in Wisconsin, and we were planning to meet in Chicago for the weekend. We wagered a plane ticket on the round — loser had to pay for my flight. I won. And eighteen years later that round of golf is still one of the core memories of my life, the kind that lives in your body and not just your head. The kind you can still feel when you close your eyes.
Golf gave me Mike. It gave me my career. It gave me my best friends. And then somewhere along the way it stopped being mine and started being my job, and I walked away from it — not in one dramatic moment but slowly, quietly, in the way you lose things when you’re too tired to hold onto them.
I wrote about all of that this week. About the six shoulder surgeries. About a decade in championship golf. About five years of scrolling past Masters coverage because it still felt too complicated to watch. About sitting on the couch with Mike last Sunday and finally, finally letting myself love it again.
So this weekend I’m going back to the range. And I have a lot of feelings about it.
Here is what I’m nervous about, and I’m just going to say all of it because that’s what we do here.
I’m nervous about my shoulder. It has been through six surgeries and things that most people will never understand and I genuinely do not know how it’s going to respond to swinging a club after this much time. That’s the one I can’t control and so it’s the one that sits the heaviest.
I’m nervous I’m going to look like a fraud. My bag has my name on it — which I realize sounds like the most unrelatable thing I could possibly say, but the context is that it was a gift from a time when golf was my entire professional world. And the thing about having your name on a bag is that people assume you can play. And I used to be able to play. And I genuinely do not know right now if that’s still true or if five years of rust has taken something I can’t get back.
I’m nervous about my outfit. I have not bought golf clothes in over five years and I have zero idea if anything still fits the way it should. So I’m doing what any reasonable almost-40-year-old woman on a mission to feel good in her clothes would do — I’m wearing leggings and a tee. It’s a public range. Nobody is issuing a dress code. And I’ve spent enough of my life dressing for other people that I’m not about to start doing it on a golf course.
I’m also nervous about myself. About doing the thing I always do, which is diving in so hard and so fast that I burn out before the season even starts. I am the queen of all-in, which is a great quality and also occasionally my downfall. So I’m trying to go into this with what I’m calling a no-plan plan. No expectations about how far I hit it or how consistent my swing is or how many buckets I should go through. Just me and a club and a bucket of balls and a new playlist I’m building specifically for this — something that makes me want to just stand there and pound balls until my brain goes quiet.
Because that’s what I miss most, if I’m being honest. Not the competition, not the score, not the performance. The quiet. The rhythm of getting into a groove on the range and just hitting ball after ball until your swing becomes automatic and your mind stops running. I used to have a whole routine — balls, then chipping, then putting, one to three hours depending on how many buckets I was going through. There was something almost meditative about it. I didn’t have a word for that when I was living it. I have one now.
Mike is off today and I’m hoping we can do this together. It’s been so long since we’ve golfed together — just the two of us, no kids, no agenda, tooling around laughing and competing the way we used to. The way we did on that very first round eighteen years ago when a plane ticket was on the line and I won and the rest is, as they say, history.
I just want to be good again. That’s the most honest thing I can tell you. I hope I’m still good. I think something is still in there — the muscle memory, the feel for it, the part of me that grew up on a course and spent a decade making her career in this sport. I think it’s still there. I’m about to find out.
I’ll report back. Wish me luck — and wish my shoulder luck too.