Separate Ways

Smoke was billowing on the fifth fairway of the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass. Not Kiradech Aphibarnrat–level plumes, but enough for my playing partners to be impressed. I was puffing on a massive cigar and making it look good.

It was around 2005, and cigars were having something of a moment. Celebrities were lighting them up on magazine covers. Cigar bars were popping up in town. Several of my friends started smoking them. So did this girl I had a crush on. Jack Nicholson, Charlie Sifford and Hannibal from The A-Team always looked cool as hell when chomping on one. I decided to join the crowd. 

Just one problem: I had never smoked a cigarette before, let alone a cigar.

On the par-3 eighth, I started feeling lightheaded. Just part of the process of looking badass, I thought. On 11 fairway, I remember things began to brown out. After the 13th, I don’t remember anything.

Turns out that combining thick northeast Florida heat, several beers and a weapons-grade infusion of a substance your body has never processed before is not the best idea! Thankfully, my friends were able to get me through the round and home safely. One of them even bought me another for our next tee time.

But before we teed off the next weekend, I had to make a big-boy decision: Did I want to look the part or enjoy the round? Coolness be damned—the cigar was out.

Recently, I had to make a similar decision upon checking in to play.

“Hey, Travis. Walk or ride today?”

“I’m riding.”

There are times and places to walk, and I still enjoy them immensely. You don’t ride at Pine Valley or Riviera or St. Andrews. But we can and do at my home club. And I’ve come to the realization that I love it.

Does this run counter to the fact that I have approved and edited, for this very magazine, roughly 3 million stories about the benefits and beauty of walking? Perhaps! But growing up—and being a happy person—is about recognizing what works for you, even if it would never play on Instagram and is flagrantly in opposition to headlines like “Golf Carts Are Parked, Walking Is In and, Yes, It’s Exercise” from the The New York Times and “The Two-Person Golf Cart Needs to Die” from mygolfspy.com.

According to the USGA’s aggregated handicap data, the average male player is around a 14. By that metric, I am slightly above average. Most of my regular playing partners are in a similar range. And that sounds fine when you’re looking at a chart or the GHIN app. But functionally this means we still spray balls all over the freaking place. The odds of any foursome landing all four drives in a fairway are exceedingly low. My knucklehead buddies and I are somewhere south of that. So, if we are walking, when we leave the tee we have to go our separate ways. On par 5s, we’re looking at 400-plus yards of mostly walking alone. On trips with caddies, pray that you vibe with your looper—oftentimes you’re paying big money to spend more time on the course with a complete stranger than the ones you came with.

This assumes my friends and I can even get our lives together enough to play. We’ve all got full-time jobs and kids of varying ages with consistently mind-boggling schedules of activities. U.S. Navy logistics officers readying an aircraft carrier for deployment to the Middle East don’t have a damn thing on me and my buddies trying to get a weekend foursome on the books. And now we’re willingly spending large chunks of this precious time without each other? Because somebody read somewhere that walking is cool? (Am I recognizing my role in all of this? Possibly!)

No longer. I want to climb into the cart with my buddy and get right down to one of life’s most important conversations: choosing the playlist that will carry us to career lows. I want to cruise over to his crappy drive, bust his balls for it, bet that he can’t clear the bunker, then celebrate like we won the Super Bowl when he does. Guess what happens in this situation when we’re walking? Not one of those fun things. I have to be alone, over by my crappy drive, and hope he hears me holler “Great shot!” from across the fairway.

I also would argue that carts are superior for any kind of team competition, as they morph into little team rooms on wheels. At the next member-guest, watch how you and your partner make your cart a home—half an energy bar saved for the perfect time, a tucked-away sweater you both somehow end up using, a pile of some cool tees he insists you use now because you smashed one yesterday on No. 4. The little things that decorate your shared experience.

But, but, but what about the traditions of the game? Old Tom Morris and Bobby Jones would never. Spare me. Should we still play basketball with peach baskets because that’s how the game started? Golf carts did not exist in a functional way on golf courses until the 1950s. Old Tom and those boys never had a choice. And by the way, how much did those wool suits weigh when the Scottish rain soaked them? You can’t tell me that James Braid wouldn’t have broken down on some slog of a day at Brora and taken a ride. Jones retired from the game early in 1930, then came back to play in exhibitions around the Masters from 1934 to 1948. Throughout those years, he suffered from syringomyelia, a rare, degenerative disease of the spinal cord. He hung up the spikes for good when he could no longer bear the pain of walking to play. Historians will likely inform you that the prideful Georgian would have declined using a cart anyway. I’m telling you that man deserved one round in a cart at East Lake with a cool breeze in his face and Frank Ocean on the Bluetooth.

Those precious traditions also don’t mean much at your local muni. Next time you’re at any course where you have an option to walk or ride, ask the folks running the place which they prefer. That extra $25 or more for the cart fee often adds up to meaningful maintenance. “I hate to admit this,” a friend of mine who runs a public track told me, “but I need riders.”

And since we’re in a safe place where we’re all being honest with each other, nobody walks while they play for the exercise, right? Some of golf’s governing bodies love to tout that golf is exercise, and yes, the calories burned during a round are a little bonus. But come on. We play golf to play golf. The “exercise” in golf has always felt like the “antioxidants” in red wine—it’s nice that they’re there, but it’s not what we came for.

I came to enjoy myself. To be with my people. Going forward, when it’s possible, I’ll be in a cart. On a recent visit, my mom and I played nine holes. She loves the game and is an avid walker. This time, I asked her to ride with me. I made her a playlist with all her faves and we bopped along, not keeping score and chatting away. As we cruised up the ninth fairway, she stretched her arms out, leaned back and said, “You know, this is really nice.” I’ve never been happier to be uncool.