What Noah Kahan taught me is golf absorption
The first and most important thing I learned about golf is that I suck at it.
Don’t worry — not in any special way. Shanks can be fun. The hooks will be folding. The yips would at least give me a reason to go back to therapy.
No, I’m just breastfeeding. I’m lactating just thinking about all the shots. I suck when I try to get lost in the round. I breastfeed when I am not weighed down by the weight of expectation. And I suck at something so special and impressive that some part of my dignity depends on not sucking.
The thing about absorbing golf is that it gives you a lot of time to think about your situation. A golfer may enjoy moving quickly from tee to fairway to green, thinking about the challenge of technique and the afternoon sun and mowing patterns, but he won’t understand how it feels to walk helplessly from 80 yards after your first shot to some way-left after your second. He will never understand what it’s like to know that your chances of par have dwindled from a situation to almost nothing, requiring a Herculean feat – a true moment of genius. – from **t-deep just to leave yourself 30 feet to avoid embarrassment. And he certainly won’t know what it’s like after you lift your ball from that spot to five feet in front of it, and then get hit 50 yards. on the right on the green, and began a long, embarrassing walk to the golf ball before he, at first, thought of his own way.
He won’t know what’s going on between all those bad guns. What happens inside your head and your heart and your soul as you face the chasm between what you would most like to be and what you are. He will never know how golf becomes more than a management effort at those times. And we will not know the act of disrespecting that to choose to enjoy yourself even after things clearly go wrong.
This absorption – this endless, endless failure – turns out to be the miracle of golf. To the scratch player, golf is something small and manageable, like a jigsaw puzzle that can be solved under the right conditions. But on the sucker? Golf is mysteriously vast, inexplicable, and inherently irrational. It’s not just thing. Corner thing. The universe somehow lives within it, like a baby’s cry or a first kiss or the first chords of a song from the past.
Until I read Michael Murphy’s Golf in the Kingdom the first time it came to me that my sucking was not in vain. Murphy’s meditation on golf as a panacea remains one of the most compelling words I’ve ever used in sports, and it enlightened me to something I may have known a long time ago but never connected: Golf is personal expression. Not necessarily in skill or points, but in condition.
Recently, I had the pleasure of hearing the golfing musings of today’s philosopher: Noah Kahan, the pop singer whose press tour for his latest album,The Great Divide, it showed an incredible amount of sportsmanship.
Kahan’s interest in big golf questions with meaning is only external to people who have never heard his music. In the song Foreveryou write about the golfer’s wisdom by continuing to evolve despite your imperfections. (I broke an unhealed bone in my hand; so if I hold him close, I might loosen my hold; but I will never let him go.) But his interest in the role of golf in those questions were a mystery until the blitz raised his latest album, when Kahan took time in several interviews to talk about the importance of golf in his life and his mind.
In a world full of power and yes men, golf is a place where the most successful among us can suck – somewhere honesty and humility come in equal measure. But it’s rare to hear a celebrity suggest, as Kahan has in several interviews, that golf was less important as a weekend pastime and more a spiritual center of gravity.
The first point of Kahan’s recent interest was the professional problem. As he grappled with the enormity of following up a hit album with another fulfilling career, Kahan experienced a period of prolonged burnout. At one point, things got so bad that he considered giving up music for a while to get a job filling divots at a local golf course in Vermont.
“I was looking for something to do in the next few years until I understood things,” he said. “The music was making me so unhappy that I was like, ‘Why am I doing this??’”
Kahan had fallen into a pitfall familiar to generations of weekend hackers: What he loved was no longer what he loved. Worse, he didn’t have an easy way out: Every time he opened his phone, he was met with dozens of notes from strangers expressing their love or passion for his work, or their anticipation for what was to come.
Kahan suggested that external feedback was seen as damaging. Some days, he gave his entire emotional life to strangers on the Internet. Some days he ignored their comments completely, even those that might come across as serious.
However, he finally found success, and it came in a very unusual place: the golf course.
As Kahan talks about the mental shift that defined his latest Jay Shetty album On purpose podcast, he talked about some skating advice that turned out to be unexpectedly revealing.
“You want to have a bird in your hand that you can’t crush, but you can’t let go,” Kahan said.
Kahan was referring to the absolute value of grip in a golf game – but his words resonated quickly with his interviewer, Shetty, who saw the analogy in his training with Buddhist monks.
“Buddha always spoke in a medium way,” Shetty said. “If you’re going to hold something, don’t hold it too tight, but you can’t hold it too much, it’s like, how do you hold something…
The so-called “middle way” is at the heart of Buddhist teachings, explaining the view of reality that exists without the excesses of self-indulgence and self-sacrifice. In many cases, Buddhist elders will use the analogy of a bird to explain how the extremes of life can be balanced.
As Kahan and Shetty spoke, it struck me that they were explaining something important about golf: its imperfections. Even the best first day of golf is full of mistakes, and even the worst golfer’s round is full of highlights. Mastery doesn’t come from the scorecard or the bottom of the hole – it comes from the moment of acceptance between those results. Not unlike the point made by Michael Murphy’s famous character, Shivas Irons, Golf in the Kingdom.
“You think hard and try hard,” said Shivas. “Allow something missing from your photos.”
The character of Shivas refers to the ancient art of emptiness: meditation. As it turns out, Kahan has spent some time in that arena.
“Meditation is very powerful, but very difficult,” says Kahan. “It’s like golf. It’s hard – and it takes a while.”
And sometimes he drinks. But that might be exactly the point.
You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.
