Doubts on the Fairway
I’ll be honest with you — I’m having some serious doubts about my golf game lately. At 59 years old, I find myself staring down a question I’m almost afraid to answer: am I fooling myself by thinking I can actually get better at this game? Is taking lessons at my age a genuine path to improvement, or am I just throwing good money after bad and telling myself a comfortable lie?
The lessons themselves are somewhat humbling. My coach is great, don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen what he has done with my son and honestly the results are very impressive. I feel like he really knows what he is doing, but some of the drills he gives me expose my limitations. I can’t quite make the full hip and shoulder turn I need to make. My body just doesn’t cooperate the way it once might have. I’m not some flexible 20-30-year-old like my son who can contort himself into the perfect backswing position. I’ve got miles on these joints, and they let me know it. He keeps telling me, and rightly so, I need more lag, better compression at impact, and I nod along like I understand exactly what he means — and then I step up to the ball and wonder if any of it is actually clicking or can I even make my body do what I want.
There are days when something feels right. The ball jumps off the club face, flies straight and true, and for just a moment I think — yeah, this is working, I got this. And then the next shot is a duck hook or chunk or some other crappy shot and I’m back to questioning everything. That’s golf, I suppose. But at my age, the margin for “it’ll click eventually” feels a little thinner than it used to.
Here’s what I know for certain though — I wish I had done this 20 years ago. That’s not regret talking, it’s just the truth. If you’re reading this and you’re on the fence about taking lessons, stop hesitating. Get out there. Even one or two sessions with a good coach can completely change how you see the game and how much you enjoy it. Golf is hard enough without ingraining bad habits for decades like I did. Do yourself the favor I didn’t do for myself. In one lesson my coach has already seen things with my swing I would have never noticed on my own.
But even with all my doubts, I’m not quitting. Maybe I am bull-shitting myself a little — maybe the honest truth is that 59-year-old bodies have real limitations that no amount of lessons can fully overcome. But I refuse to accept that without a fight. My coach is giving me a road map: get more distance, compress the ball better, clean up the swing mechanics, and trust the process. So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to show up, put in the work, and see what happens.
Golf has a way of keeping you hooked with just enough good shots to make you forget the bad ones. Maybe that’s all this is — chasing that feeling. Or maybe, just maybe, there’s a genuinely better golfer still hiding somewhere inside me waiting to come out. I’d like to find out.
So yeah — wish me luck. I have a feeling I’m going to need every last bit of it.