“The golf course is a place where everything—every surface, every object we touch, everything we see and hear and feel—is imbued with meaning, and as golfers, we try to master the cause-and-effect relationships between all of them.”
- Drew Millard, How Golf Can Save Your Life
In How Golf Can Save Your Life, Drew Millard chronicles his personal journey navigating the ups and downs of life and ultimately finding healing in golf—not in the swings or stats but in all the ways it helped him better cope with his mental health struggles, relationship issues and shaky sense of direction. With humour and raw honesty, he recounts how the patience, frustration and random flashes of virtuosity that are part and parcel of the sport guided him on his path back to himself.
Millard grappling with self-doubt, feeling stuck and turning to golf to work through it all felt eerily familiar. Ultimately, How Golf Can Save Your Life is about finding meaning, dealing with failure and learning to appreciate the small wins along the way. Life can sometimes be a challenging game, but the right perspective yields opportunities for growth. And that’s something we can’t help but relate to.
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Q&A with author (and music fan) Drew Millard
How’ve you been since releasing How Golf Can Save Your Life?
I’ve been chilling!
You launched Golfcore Volume 1 to promote the book. Can you tell us more about it?
So, I am not, strictly speaking, a golf writer. I’m a writer who happens to be really into golf. A lot of my writing, historically, has been about music, and as a result I’ve got a lot of musician friends who are willing to do favors for me when I have a dumb idea. All of which is to say that I decided to promote the book by putting out a compilation of tracks from a bunch of really cool artists who I asked to imagine what a genre called golfcore might sound like and then create a golfcore song.
My guy Teen Daze made a song drawing samples from the old Microsoft Golf soundtrack; Steel Tipped Dove whipped up a Manchester-style chune about golf-induced existential despair; Azar Swan and Zachary Lipez put together a gothy post-punk number that uses golf as an extended metaphor for a decaying relationship... I have no idea how effective putting together the comp was in terms of actually promoting the book, but it was fun and gave me an excuse to do something cool with some of my favorite musicians.
You write that golf’s constant evolution is player driven. Has that changed since the book came out?
First off, I should clarify that I conceptualized and wrote the book during the pandemic, and a lot of my observations about the game were informed by the experience of walking Hillendale Golf Course in Durham, North Carolina, and seeing all kinds of folks who were coming to the game—mostly millennials who, like me, were trying to eke out the last few years of their pre-boring social lives. It felt like a time for a new infusion of players and, with them, ideas and aesthetics being injected into the game.
I’d say that since the book dropped, the things I wrote about have evolved and, in some cases, professionalized in ways that have been at times surprising and sometimes predictable. Malbon sponsors a PGA player. Metalwood is at SSENSE. These are certainly things that I would not have predicted at the time I wrote the book, but if you look at the history of the way fashion movements in this example start, evolve and ultimately reach a saturation point, it kind of makes sense. In a vaguely related thing, the number of creative directors who have stopped staying out late and instead started golfing early has grown exponentially in the past few years, which has been a boon for my book’s sales.
When people ask you why you play, you tend to overshare. What’s up with that?
I don’t know. I think I was a self-described golf hipster before hipsters played golf, so I think I have always felt a need to explain myself whenever my conversation with a friend took a hard turn from Max B deep cuts or Frederic Jameson or Modern Life Is War or whatever to how I played golf fifteen times a week. So, oversharing was tantamount to overcompensation.
You write about how important it is to accept failure and imperfection. How do you think golf teaches folks to deal with setbacks on and off the course?
Golf is really fucking hard, and I think anyone who says otherwise is just lying to themselves. And while I’m certainly an advocate of lying to yourself, especially when it comes to your own, you know, shortcomings or whatever, you need to accept failure to move on or even grow. There’s something really special about golf where you can see the consequences of your actions and learn to deal with them in this incredibly low-pressure way.
What’s been your experience as a club member these past few seasons?
I live in Philadelphia now, which has this really fascinating rich history of private clubs in almost every category — professional associations, these social groups who get together and wear weird costumes every New Year’s Day called the Mummers, members-only restaurants and private golf clubs. And so when I moved here, I felt almost as if I didn’t have any other choice but to join a club. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of joining a club that was owned by a private equity firm. The phenomenon of private equity firms buying up country clubs, many of which were previously member-owned, is an under-discussed problem within the world of golf, and one that needs to be reckoned with, preferably sooner rather than later. For these companies, country clubs represent a real estate play. They buy these courses, sell off as much of their land as they can for real estate development, then jack up the rates to extract what profit they can from the clubs themselves. This is all a long-winded way of saying they hiked the membership dues so I quit.
What lessons have you had to unlearn?
In life, that waking up early is morally superior; in golf, that the bump-and-run around the green is only for old people.
What are you currently overspending on?
I’ve been reading W. David Marx’s book Ametora, which is a history of the Japanese fashion industry’s reinvention of American style, starting with the classic Ivy League aesthetic, and as a result I’ve been dropping bank on vintage Polo oxfords on eBay. If my book goes platinum after this interview, I’m only wearing custom Kamakura from here on out, though.
What’s the last thing that made an impression on you?
I recently read Gary Indiana’s true crime trilogy — Resentment (about the Menendez brothers), Three Month Fever (about Andrew Cunanan, the guy who killed Versace) and Depraved Indifference (about Sante and Kenny Kimes, a mother-and-son duo who did a lot of gnarly fraud, murder etc.). The books themselves are sort of a meditation on the larger sociopolitical conditions and inability of capitalistic societies to properly treat the impulses and disorders that drive desperate people to kill (and in some cases stoke them), as well as the ways the media feeds on and/or sensationalizes these people’s acts, shaming their readers for their interest in these incidents while simultaneously reveling in their prurience in a way that contributes to their profits. Gary Indiana would have fucking loved Luigi Mangione.
How’s your handicap doing?
After the book was finished, I had to get a job and then I got laid off and had to learn how to be a marketing consultant on top of being a writer, so I have been working a lot and have had to severely curtail my golf outings, and my handicap has drifted upward as a result. But, uh, I never said the book was about how I was good at golf.
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