Golf Is So Back

The Mitten is feeling the golf renaissance. Golf Digest just named Michigan the second best state in the country for public golf, a testament to the quality and caliber of its unique courses. Online golf groups in Michigan are growing fast, like Metro Detroit Golfers, the “largest golf community in Michigan,” boasting more than 50,000 members across its platforms. Visit any course in Michigan, and you’ll feel the energy; the game is winning so many new converts to the cult of the little white ball that you might even struggle to get a tee time.

Take Mines Golf Club, a public course 10 minutes from downtown Grand Rapids. Designed by renowned Michigan golf architect Mike DeVries, the course is built out of an old gypsum mine. Narrow fairways curve up, down, and around the forested hills, flowing with them. Elevated tee boxes and greens, fairways that rise up above you and then plummet, tall grasses and natural sand bunkers dotting every side. 

You’re not playing a game against a human; you’re playing against Michigan, its nature, and its history. The miners carved out these hills over decades, digging through the surface, carting away gypsum and dirt one truckload at a time. They still remain, forested over, filled with grass and sand, and now you get to drink beer and ploddingly drive a cart around the course, chasing a dimpled white ball. Golf is a combat sport with nature itself; a pure manifestation of civilization, of man’s will to impose order on the cosmos. It’s an eternal struggle to keep the grass trimmed, the bunkers raked, and to keep your ball from slicing.

Golfers know that in the end, golf is a metaphor for life. Your shots rarely go exactly as planned. Often, they do the opposite. An errant tee shot, a chunked fairway iron, an easy chip shot skulled over the green. Golf is a test of will. It’s not if you make each shot but about how you keep your composure and scramble to the next one. A test of how you adapt and respond to challenges, a showcase of your mental fortitude. The best golfers take on a zen-like demeanor, unafraid of the cruelty of the golf gods; the worst let themselves break, snapping clubs as tempers fly. Golf isn’t about skill, it’s about the inner workings of your mind. 

My round at The Mines went about that way—not the best I’ve ever played, not the worst. A lot of bad shots, a few good ones. One memorable par: an errant tee shot on a hilly par 4 went into the edge of the woods, sitting on a pile of sticks and dirt. Good distance, only 100 or so yards from the green, but a very tough recovery shot to get it back in play. The tree canopy hung over me, stymying any use of a wedge. Abandoning my plans, moving on instinct, I choked up a 3 iron and hit a low punch out towards the green. It bounced off the hill of a greenside bunker and trickled right on, with a solid two-putt for par. 

Those are the holes that keep you obsessed with the game. Shots go one way, then another, you adapt, and boom, you somehow get up and in for a decent score. That’s golf; that’s life. You take your shot, and then you saddle up and hit the next one. A few bad shots saved by one great shot, a few great shots ruined by a bad one. Golf addicts know it isn’t just the sport itself that keeps them on the greens all weekend but the way it centers their perspective on everything else in life. Golf is, for the true at heart, a religious experience.

For the less poetic, and on days when your game goes out the window, it’s a great excuse to drink beer outdoors and blast cigs in a polo shirt. Or a golf skirt, for the ladies—the game seems, by my account, increasingly popular among young women. My local course is filled with them, and so was The Mines in GR. My e-girl pals post photos in golf fits, videos of their swing, tales of riding the course with their boyfriend. The statistics back this up: There was a 15% increase in American women playing golf from 2020 to 2022, and more than 38% of golfers under 18 are now women. Cue the next dating hot take… get off the apps and hit the links, kings.

The appeal is easy to see. In the malaise of the digital age, disconnected from reality, golf presents a real, vitalistic opportunity for engaging with the earth. The chaos of the world condensed into a game of infinite variables, golf is the polar opposite of the systemized, algorithmic realms of the internet.

Golf has, from the onset, been a high-status sport, enjoyed mostly by the wealthy, the culturally elite. The game is far more accessible now economically, but it nonetheless still signals social status. Embracing golf shows that you exist beyond the screen, that you willingly engage with the world in all its risks and tensions, that you choose to do something difficult that forces you to master yourself. It shows, at the very least, that you like to have fun in the real world. For 2024 America, that’s as culturally elite as you can get.

Bobby Mars is an artist, alter ego, and former art professor. Follow him on X @bobby_on_mars.