A support guide for those who have lost something precious. Namely, their dignity.
Grief is a natural human response to loss. Psychologists tell us there are five distinct stages that people move through when processing devastating experiences. A Swiss-American psychiatrist named Elisabeth Kübler-Ross developed this framework to help people cope with tragedy. (Check out the Big Brains on Wormburner Weekly 🤓, and you thought you wouldn’t learn nuthin’ here).
She clearly never played golf.
Because there exists nothing, not heartbreak, not financial ruin, not stepping on a Lego barefoot at 2 AM on the way to that leftover hoagie in the back of the fridge, that prepares you for the emotional wreckage of a truly catastrophic round. If you’ve been there you know. If you haven’t been there yet, buckle up friend. It’s coming and it’s coming like a nasty summer cold on the 3rd of July. It’s gonna wreck your next holiday and the next two weekends after just by thinking about it.
Here are the five stages of grief after a bad round, as experienced by every recreational golfer who has ever walked off the 18th green questioning why the f%@k they ever picked up a golf club.
Stage 1 – Denial
It started on the range. Your ball striking was crisp. Your swing felt grooved. You were loose, confident, ready. No breakfast balls or mulligans on this morning lads and ladies. This was going to be the day.
It was not the day.
But here’s the thing about denial, it’s remarkably durable. It survives the first three holes. It survives the first lost ball. It even survives the first triple bogey. “I’m just warming up,” you tell yourself. “I always start slow.” “A couple birdies and I’m still on track to break 80,” you tell yourself. You have never once in your life started slow and then turned it around. Not once. But denial doesn’t care about your statistics. And your Throne of Lies is tailor made to that deceiving ass of yours.
Denial finally collapses somewhere around the seventh hole when you four-putt a green you hit in regulation and quietly inform your playing partners that you “might have left your game at home today.” You did not leave your game at home. This is your game. This has always been your game.
Stage 2 – Anger
Uh Oh, here we go.
The club that didn’t perform gets the first talking to. Then the ball that had “no business going left.” Then the course designer, who clearly built this layout specifically to humiliate you. Then the wind. Always the wind. We hate the wind.
This is the stage where clubs get a stern lecture. Where tees get smashed into the ground with extreme prejudice and that spare ball gets launched into the woods as a sacrfice to the golf demons who plague you. Where you say things to your golf bag that would make your mother cry. At this point your buddies can no longer suppress their guffaws at your expense. This is also the stage where a sand wedge may or may not end up at the bottom of a nearby pond. I speak from experience. The pond welcomed my disgrace.
Anger is the most creative stage. You will invent new combinations of words that have never existed before. You may briefly consider giving the entire game up and taking up something sensible like wood carving (see my blog on wood carving, it happened, I crap you not). You will come back. You always do.
Stage 3 – Bargaining
This is a deeply spiritual stage.
You start making deals. With yourself. With the universe. With whatever golf gods are clearly watching and clearly enjoying themselves. “If I par this hole I’ll donate to charity.” “If I just make this putt I’ll never complain about the wind again.” “If I can get out of this bunker within 10 feet of the cup I’ll build a bird house for my wife tomorrow.”
You will not become a better person tomorrow. You will be back on this same course making the same promises by next weekend.
This is also the stage where you switch balls, change gloves, adjust your stance, and briefly try closing your left eye on approach shots because you read somewhere that it helps. It does not help. Nothing helps. Especially not the advice from your neighbor with the 28 handicap. One more tip from him and somebody’s going swimmin’ in that pond on 15. But bargaining feels like action and action feels like hope.
Stage 4 – Depression
The round is over. You are sitting in the cart, scorecard face down, staring into the middle distance like a man who has seen things, bad things.
This is the quiet stage. The contemplative stage. The stage where you wonder if your clubs deserve a proper funeral, a Viking sendoff down the nearest waterway, flames and all, a dignified farewell to the tools of your repeated humiliation. You mentally compose the eulogy for your 7-iron. It served you as well as you deserved, which was not very well at all.
You consider wearing a black armband to next week’s round. Out of respect for your playing partner Dave who quit golf entirely after the back nine you subjected him to last July. Dave is doing yoga now. Dave seems happy. You briefly hate Dave.
The 19th hole helps. It always helps. This is not a coincidence. This is engineering, like the gift shops you and the kids get funneled through after the rides at Disney.
Stage 5 – Acceptance
And then, somewhere between the second beer and the third retelling of that one miraculous par you made on 11, it happens.
You accept it.
You are not a good golfer. You have never been a good golfer. You will almost certainly never be a good golfer. And somehow, some way that has become completely fine. Because you will be back out there next weekend, bucket of range balls in hand, absolutely convinced that today is the day everything clicks.
It won’t be the day. But it might be. And that right there, that’s the thing.
Golf doesn’t survive on talent. It survives on hope. And nobody has more irrational, unjustifiable, beautifully misguided hope than the recreational golfer standing on the first tee on a Saturday morning.
See you out there. I’ll be the one in the black armband.
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