Stranger on the Trip

Our gate’s departure board claimed that the next flight was headed for Southwest Oregon Regional Airport, but it could just as well have listed the destination as Mecca. For any passerby, the scene must have earned a double take: airline desk agents and flight attendants in their identical uniforms, and we passengers in ours. We were all assembled in our snapbacks, quarter-zips and sensible shoes—true believers on our pilgrimage to Bandon Dunes. 

My polo and performance pants granted me a place in the flock. But while I may have looked like an insider, I felt very much on the outside. I was a new convert to golf—though, as with most in that category, a zealous one—and this was my first group trip. The abundant bucket-list logos and conversations about pre-Preserve-era visits to the resort made it seem that nearly everybody else was a repeat customer. 

Along with their country club camouflage, the passengers had something else in common: Every person in each small faction seemed to know one another. Fraternity brothers huddled in this corner, while the conversation in another suggested work friends. The graying group ahead of me must have been on its 30th annual destination golf trip. The only passenger I knew was Dave, our trip’s nucleus. 

Dave bears a lot of responsibility for getting me into the game in my mid-30s, five years after we’d met at the office. He was patient, never offering gratuitous advice or making me feel like I didn’t have what it took. When he’d spot my drive hiding under a leaf along the tree line, he’d always return my gratitude with the same humble deflection: “I’ve had a lot of practice looking.” Years later, after I had enough rounds under my embroidered belt to realize what a burden I must have been, Dave offered one of the kinder compliments I’ve received in golf: “You knew when to pick up.” 

At the airport bar during our San Francisco layover, I shook hands for the first time with Dave’s college buddies and childhood playmates. They were all sticks; I was the eighth wheel. 

Anxious as I was, accepting Dave’s invitation felt like evidence of my own growth—a graduation trip after my self-conscious rookie seasons. 

A couple of years prior, I’d checked in at a suburban Maryland muni and discovered that my name was the only one in that tee time. The starter did his job and tried to fold me in with the three singles ahead. I looked at them the way a new student surveys the cool kids’ cafeteria table. 

Seconds after sharing first names, they were already negotiating stakes. I was barely keeping score at that point, rendering an unsolicited skins game a spectacle both mortifying and fiscally irresponsible. As if I were doing this trio of new friends a favor, I mumbled a lame excuse to the starter: “I don’t want to interrupt what they’ve got going on.” 

He lifted his eyes from the packed tee sheet for the express purpose of rolling them, unmoved by my magnanimity. “You’re not going to play alone,” he scoffed. 

Didn’t he know that’s all I wanted? Around the same time, I’d waved off my wife’s effort to set me up on a golf date with her work husband, a good hang but—at that time a mark against him in my mind—a good player. Lofting weak slices and chunking wedges in front of strangers was intimidating enough, but failing in front of someone I even kind of knew was a nonstarter. 

On the practice green at Pacific Dunes, I passed around my contribution to the potluck: custom scorecards for the week. With eight golfers playing seven rounds, the group decided to rotate pairings for a series of best-ball matches. My individualized cards listed everyone’s partners, opponents and tee times alongside spaces to record holes won and to keep track of our birdies side bet. 

I was encouraged that my golf started promisingly, with three pars right off the plane, and that the scorecards seemed to be received as a helpful touch, not a try-hard gesture. That impression would have to wait until the next morning. 

Breakfast sandwich in hand, I walked out of the Bandon Trails clubhouse to greet Adam, Dave’s roommate from undergrad and my partner for the day’s first 18. He looked me up and down like I was trying to make “fetch” happen. I thought my powder-blue pants, matching hat, and jacket with contrasting sleeves of the same shade counted as color coordination. Adam thought it was comical. “You playing for the Ryder Cup today?” he smirked.

By the turn, as we got to know each other better, I understood Adam’s dig as the puckish hazing he intended it to be. I thought back to the mass of matching moisture-wicking gear on yesterday’s flight and wondered if the purpose of the amateur’s uniform wasn’t so much about fitting in as not standing out. 

My outfit scripting wasn’t the day’s lone embarrassment. I hit only a couple of Trails’ fairways while dealing with a three-way miss: way left, way right, and topping it into the tee box ahead. By the time we started the afternoon round at Sheep Ranch, my frustrations had traveled down the bag to its irons—specifically, to their hosels. 

A Bandon caddie’s job is an easy one on the resort’s westernmost holes, like Sheep Ranch’s par-3 16th. He doesn’t need to remind you not to miss left, because it couldn’t be clearer: The continent ends rather abruptly. Tug it, and the nearest point of relief might be on the Japanese archipelago. I shanked my tee shot so sharply right that the ball made a beeline for Boise. 

These were exactly the kind of public failures I’d dreaded. But my new companions assured me, without a single comforting or coddling word, that they’d been there. They simply ignored it, asking instead about family and work and where I might travel next. If they felt impatience or pity, I never detected it. 

Leo Tolstoy once observed that there are only two kinds of tales: a person going on a journey, or a stranger coming to town. The plots worth retelling disrupt the regular order of things, forcing characters to react to unfamiliar people, places and practices.

Golf, I was learning, is both stories at once. We relish new landscapes, whether we’re finally walking a play-before-you-die course or we’re taking another loop at a home track reshaped by conditions as mercurial as our swing feels. Meanwhile, every established tribe—the regular game, the lifelong foursome, the moveable reunion—decides whether a stranger’s acceptance will be gifted or earned. Some days you’re the member, some days you’re the guest, and every day is a battle to belong. 

By the time I accepted another invitation to travel with someone else’s crew, I’d learned to worry less about the occasional off-center strike as well as what I wore while avoiding it. 

As with the previous summer’s Oregon trip, Vern’s gracious invitation to Wisconsin was easy to accept. The main difference was that instead of rolling up as the eighth wheel, this time I’d be the 10th. 

I’d played some weekend rounds with Vern and a couple of the other attendees, so this trip started with a few more good-to-see-yous than Bandon’s nice-to-meet-yous. Still, I’d never met any of their wives, didn’t know what anyone did for a living and hadn’t clinked anyone’s glasses anywhere but a 19th hole. I also was the only white player in a group of Black golfers who’d been traveling together for years.

I reprised my role as the scorecard guy, mapping the formats and wagers with Vern and distributing the printouts at the first night’s dinner. When I got back to the hotel room, though, Vern had put my customization game to shame. 

What awaited me was a tidy box containing a personalized leather scorecard holder in Masters green and gold, an engraved bag tag, yardage books for our favorite courses back home, coffee-table books featuring stunning photography of Whistling Straits and Erin Hills, and a collection of short stories about golf written a century ago by the British humorist P.G. Wodehouse. It turns out that this was Vern’s tradition for anyone making their maiden voyage with his group.

The pièce de résistance was a QR code that linked to a video in which Vern thanked me for coming, as if I was doing him a favor. He then walked me through the thought behind each gift he’d carefully curated, connecting them not only to my golf game but to conversations we’d had about family and art.

“Slash notations in jazz sheet music are instructions for the musician to improvise,” Vern explained on camera, pointing to the dozen Pro V1s he’d added to the box after having Titleist stamp them with that symbol and my initials. “You have instructors, you know what you need to do—but how to do it, it’s up to you. I think that’s a great metaphor for golf in general, and particularly this week, when we’re going to be making up a lot of stuff.” 

To paraphrase W.C. Fields, everyone should believe in something, and I believe everyone should go on a golf trip with Vern at least once in their lives.

Throughout the week, each member of the group embraced me in his own way as we engaged in combat with Pete Dye above the eerily silent shores of Lake Michigan and luxuriated in Blackwolf Run’s lushness. 

After profiting from Vern’s beneficence, it was only slightly uncomfortable when he and I faced off in the trip’s final match to determine the top spot in the 10-man bracket. And, having had a hand in the tournament design, I felt more than a little awkward when Vern’s 4-footer on Erin Hills’ 18th green refused to fall, sending me home with a stack of new friends’ money and their playful accusations of hustling. The golf gods’ sense of irony remains undefeated. 

There was no buddies trip on the calendar this summer. Last week, our new neighbors and their newborn joined us for dinner in our backyard. While my toddler hacked his plastic ball out of our rough, the other dad offered a swing observation that outed him as a golfer. Within minutes, and knowing little more than his first name—also David, like my first patron—I asked if we should find a tee time that weekend. 

He responded enthusiastically but apologetically. “You need to know that I’m not very good,” David said, nodding to his baby. “I haven’t played much lately.” 

I assured him that skill wasn’t a condition of the invitation. Maybe we’d hit up the local muni, where, earlier in my journey, I’d duffed my attempt to go out as a single. For years, I’d remembered the starter’s reality check as a rebuke: “You’re not going to play alone.” Now, I heard it as a promise.