July 13, 2026

The Golfer Graph: Golf's Most Valuable Asset Doesn't Exist Yet

Golf has built a $102 billion industry around courses, equipment, and media. It still doesn't know who its customer is.

July 13, 2026

Consider what happens every time a golfer plays a round. The tee time gets booked through GolfNow, which logs a name, email, home zip code, course, and time. At check-in, the club's management software records the cart rental and the two beers at the turn. Arccos-equipped golf clubs capture every shot — driver off the first, 7-iron from 162 yards, two putts on eighteen — building a shot-level record of the round in full. After the round, a score goes into GHIN for the handicap index. That evening, the golfer browses TaylorMade's website and checks the loyalty points balance from last fall's iron purchase. Later, a PGA Tour highlight package plays on the Golf Channel app, registering a favorite player and serving an advertisement for a trip to Scotland.

Six interactions. Six separate systems. Six different companies, each holding one piece of a
profile that, if connected, would describe one of the most commercially valuable consumer
identities in American sports.

Nobody connects them.

This is golf's most important structural problem — and its most important structural opportunity. The golfer graph does not exist. The entity that builds it will own the most valuable asset in the game.

The Denominator
Before making the case for what a unified golfer identity is worth, the scale of the underlying
market needs to be established — golf is consistently underestimated by investors who last
looked at the industry during the 2008–2015 contraction.

The National Golf Foundation's most recent economic impact study puts the sport's direct U.S. economic impact at $102 billion annually, and total impact — including indirect and induced effects — at $226.5 billion. The implication is clear: golf is operating at a scale that demands serious business attention. This number represents 29.1 million on-course golfers generating more than 500 million rounds in 2025, the sixth consecutive year above that threshold, achieved with roughly 2,000 fewer golf courses than the early-2000s peak. Golf travel alone generates more than $30 billion in U.S. tourism expenditures annually, with over 12 million Americans traveling specifically to play golf each year — up 49 percent from pre-pandemic levels.

The average millennial golfer between 25 and 35 spends approximately $4,557 per year on the game. The average serious golfer playing thirty or more rounds annually, traveling once or twice for golf and buying new equipment every two years plausibly generates $5,000 to $10,000 in annual spend across the ecosystem. Over a decade, that is a lifetime value figure that rivals the most coveted consumer categories in American retail.

This is the denominator. Sixty million participants. Five hundred million rounds. A hundred billion dollars in direct economic activity. The question is not whether the market is big enough to support a platform. It is whether anyone will build the infrastructure to see it whole.

The Fragmentation Problem

A single golfer's commercial identity is currently scattered across at least six disconnected systems.

GolfNow, which controls approximately 90 percent of aggregated U.S. online tee-time inventory after its acquisition of competitor EZLinks Golf, knows where and when you play. It does not know how you play, what your handicap is, what equipment you use, or what you watch. Its platform does not offer an open API, which means the courses that supply its inventory cannot connect their customer booking data to third-party vendors — and GolfNow uses the data it collects to remarket to golfers across its own platforms, including routing them to bartered tee times at competitor courses. The courses' most valuable asset — their customer relationships — has been quietly appropriated by the platform they depend on.

Arccos Golf has captured 1.5 billion golf shots across hundreds of thousands of members, building the richest on-course performance dataset in the industry. It knows your average driver distance, your strokes gained putting, which club costs you the most shots per round. The PGA Tour backed Arccos with a $20 million Series C in 2023, naming it the Official Game Tracker of the Tour. But Arccos's data is entirely siloed within its subscription platform. It does not flow into GHIN to make handicap indexing more accurate. It does not flow into GolfNow to help personalize tee-time recommendations. It does not flow to TaylorMade, which would give anything to close the loop between the equipment it sells and the performance it actually produces on-course.

The USGA's GHIN system holds handicap data on 3.35 million golfers who posted more than 77 million scores in 2024. It is the closest thing the golf industry has to a universal golfer identity — every serious player who wants a handicap is in GHIN, and the data is reliable, standardized, and stretches back decades. But GHIN is not connected to tee-time booking, shot-tracking, or equipment purchase systems. Your handicap index is an island.

Private club management software — platforms like Jonas, Clubessential, and Lightspeed that power the operations of virtually every country club in America — holds the most complete individual golfer spend records in the industry. It knows how often you play, what you eat at the halfway house, how much you spend in the pro shop, when you last attended a member event. None of that data leaves the club.

The USGA found that a single person could simultaneously be a handicap holder, a ticket purchaser, a donor, and a merchandise buyer — with no unified record connecting any of it.

What makes this fragmentation especially striking is that the industry's own governing bodies have documented it. A Deloitte case study published by the USGA describes exactly this problem: “Without a single platform, it could be challenging for USGA employees to access and reconcile information available from so many disparate sources and in different formats. A single person could simultaneously be a handicap index holder, a ticket purchaser, a USGA donor, and a merchandise buyer — with no unified record connecting these interactions.” The USGA hired Deloitte to build a unified data platform to solve this internally. The industry-wide version of that problem remains completely unaddressed.

The PGA of America had the same experience. Its customer data was, in the words of a published CapTech case study, “heavily siloed within each individual operational pillar, which limited the PGA's ability to realize shared value from its consumer data assets at an enterprise level.” Before centralization, reporting took hours or days. After building a unified data warehouse, the same reports ran in minutes. The fix, again, was an internal solution for one organization, not a solution for the ecosystem.

What Unified Identity Is Worth

The cross-industry evidence is unambiguous: the entity that owns the identity layer captures a disproportionate share of commercial value. This pattern is consistent enough across industries that it can reasonably be described as a structural law of the data economy.

Amazon Prime members spend approximately $1,400 per year on Amazon. Non-Prime members spend $600 to $700. The difference is not that Prime members have more money. It is that the identity layer — knowing who each customer is across every transaction — enables cross-sell that compounds over time. Retail, entertainment, grocery, pharmacy, and cloud services all attach to the same identity. The 2x spending premium is the direct output of knowing the customer whole. Netflix's personalization algorithm was estimated by the company's own executives in 2016 to be worth $1 billion per year in subscriber retention value when Netflix had 80 million subscribers. The company now has 325 million. Eighty percent of all content watched on Netflix is driven by personalized recommendations, not by search or browsing.

Netflix's churn rate of 2.3 to 2.4 percent per month is less than half the industry average of 5 to 7 percent. The identity layer — a real-time profile of each viewer's preferences, built from billions of interactions — is not a feature of the product. It is the product.

The sports-specific analog is Fanatics, which started as a sports merchandise company and has built a $33 billion platform by doing one thing: unifying fan identity across merchandise, collectibles, and sports betting for more than 100 million profiles across 900-plus sports properties. Its FanGraph platform, built on Snowflake, connects what a fan buys, what they bet on, and what they collect into a single identity that powers cross-sell economics across every vertical Fanatics enters. The company is now worth 33 billion dollars. It started as a Tshirt business.

The golfer is a better commercial identity than the typical sports fan. The average serious golfer spends $4,000 to $10,000 annually across the ecosystem, orders of magnitude more than a fan who buys a jersey and watches games on television. Golfers travel. They buy equipment on a regular replacement cycle. They take lessons, book tee times, subscribe to apps, and hold club memberships. By every metric that matters to a data-driven platform business, the golfer is among the most valuable consumer identities in American sports. And that identity does not currently exist in any unified form.

The Race Has Started

To be precise: the golfer graph doesn't exist yet, but the race to build it has quietly begun.

GolfNow's parent company was spun out of Comcast in January 2026 as Versant Media Group — a standalone public company with an explicit mandate to, in its own words, “Monetize The Golfer” and “Expand The Surface Area” beyond tee-time transactions. GolfPass, its subscription layer, now gives a free account to any GolfNow or TeeOff user — automatically creating a unified identity across booking and content consumption. GolfNow controls the most important piece of the golfer graph's infrastructure: the booking layer. Its challenge is that its closed-API model and history of appropriating course customer data has created a trust deficit with the operators it depends on. Building the golfer graph requires trust. GolfNow has to earn it.

Revelyst Golf Technology is the most under-covered platform play in golf. Over the past two years, Revelyst has quietly assembled a practice-to-course data stack: Foresight Sports, whose GCQuad launch monitor is the professional standard for ball-flight measurement; Bushnell Golf rangefinders with connected data capabilities; PinSeeker, a simulator competition platform; and GolfLogix, acquired in July 2025, which has 7 million downloads and the most comprehensive course-mapping database in the industry at 40,000-plus mapped courses. The strategic vision — connecting practice data from Foresight with on-course performance from GolfLogix with rangefinder data from Bushnell — would create the first hardware-to-software data loop in consumer golf. Revelyst has not yet built the consumer product that connects these pieces. But it has assembled the components. Troon launched Access in March 2026 — the first loyalty program in golf explicitly designed to aggregate golfer spend across multiple operators. It covers 200-plus courses and has stated explicitly that it intends to expand beyond.

Troon-managed properties. Two hundred courses is a fraction of the 14,000 golf facilities in the United States, but the model is architecturally correct: earn points for every dollar spent anywhere in the network, unified to a single identity.

Golf Genius has acquired Golfshot, SwingU, CoachNow, and Operation 36 in a consolidation that has made it one of the largest holders of recreational golfer performance data in the industry. The pieces are being assembled, one acquisition at a time, by multiple parties simultaneously.

The company that connects booking history, oncourse performance, equipment preference, and media consumption into a single compounding profile does not yet exist. That is the opportunity.

The Identity That Should Exist

Here is what the golfer graph would actually look like — and what it would make possible.

A golfer opens an app and sees a tee-time recommendation for a course they've never played, at a time they typically book, at a price point in their historical range. The recommendation isn't based on what everyone in the same zip code books — it's based on what this golfer specifically prefers. The system has learned from 200 rounds of Arccos data that wide fairways and forgiving rough tend to produce better scores. Before arrival, the app flags the three holes where historical strokes-gained data shows the most shots lost, and suggests a specific club for the second hole's approach. At the pro shop, the loyalty system recognizes a high-frequency player and surfaces a TaylorMade driver fitting event next month — because the Arccos data shows an opportunity to maximize distance and efficiency with new tech. The fitting specialist has already reviewed the shot data before the appointment.

Every data element in that scenario already exists in some system, held by some company. What does not exist is the connection.

The commercial value of building that connection would be enormous. Cross-sell economics compound with every new connection: a golfer whose booking data is linked to their shot data is a better target for equipment recommendations. A golfer whose equipment preferences are linked to their travel history is a better target for destination golf partnerships. A golfer whose media consumption is linked to on-course performance is a better target for instruction products. Each connection does not add value linearly — it multiplies it.

The entity that builds this is not just building a useful product. It is building the most defensible moat in golf. Identity data compounds with every round played, every trip taken, every club purchased. The golfer graph gets more valuable with every interaction. That is the definition of a platform business.

The Bet

At Old Tom Capital, the golfer graph is not a speculative thesis. It is the logical conclusion of watching a $102 billion industry operate without the basic infrastructure that every other major consumer category has built. Golf knows its courses. It knows its equipment. It knows its tournaments. It does not know its golfers — not really, not completely, not in a way that compounds value over time. The industry's own governing bodies have documented this problem in public case studies and hired consultants to solve their internal versions of it. The industry-wide solution remains wide open.

The investment thesis is simple: the golfer is worth more than golf currently charges for the privilege of knowing them. The entity that changes that — that builds the unified identity layer, connects the booking data to the performance data to the equipment data to the media data, and creates the compounding cross-sell engine those connections enable — will be valued not as a golf company, but as a platform.

In every industry where that transition has happened, the platform wins. There is no reason golf is different.

Access This Story & More

Start Free 14-Day TrialUpgrade
$150/year (regularly $175)
Limited-time launch pricing

Already a member? Log In.

Consider what happens every time a golfer plays a round. The tee time gets booked through GolfNow, which logs a name, email, home zip code, course, and time. At check-in, the club's management software records the cart rental and the two beers at the turn. Arccos-equipped golf clubs capture every shot — driver off the first, 7-iron from 162 yards, two putts on eighteen — building a shot-level record of the round in full. After the round, a score goes into GHIN for the handicap index. That evening, the golfer browses TaylorMade's website and checks the loyalty points balance from last fall's iron purchase. Later, a PGA Tour highlight package plays on the Golf Channel app, registering a favorite player and serving an advertisement for a trip to Scotland.

Six interactions. Six separate systems. Six different companies, each holding one piece of a
profile that, if connected, would describe one of the most commercially valuable consumer
identities in American sports.

Nobody connects them.

This is golf's most important structural problem — and its most important structural opportunity. The golfer graph does not exist. The entity that builds it will own the most valuable asset in the game.

The Denominator
Before making the case for what a unified golfer identity is worth, the scale of the underlying
market needs to be established — golf is consistently underestimated by investors who last
looked at the industry during the 2008–2015 contraction.

The National Golf Foundation's most recent economic impact study puts the sport's direct U.S. economic impact at $102 billion annually, and total impact — including indirect and induced effects — at $226.5 billion. The implication is clear: golf is operating at a scale that demands serious business attention. This number represents 29.1 million on-course golfers generating more than 500 million rounds in 2025, the sixth consecutive year above that threshold, achieved with roughly 2,000 fewer golf courses than the early-2000s peak. Golf travel alone generates more than $30 billion in U.S. tourism expenditures annually, with over 12 million Americans traveling specifically to play golf each year — up 49 percent from pre-pandemic levels.

The average millennial golfer between 25 and 35 spends approximately $4,557 per year on the game. The average serious golfer playing thirty or more rounds annually, traveling once or twice for golf and buying new equipment every two years plausibly generates $5,000 to $10,000 in annual spend across the ecosystem. Over a decade, that is a lifetime value figure that rivals the most coveted consumer categories in American retail.

This is the denominator. Sixty million participants. Five hundred million rounds. A hundred billion dollars in direct economic activity. The question is not whether the market is big enough to support a platform. It is whether anyone will build the infrastructure to see it whole.

The Fragmentation Problem

A single golfer's commercial identity is currently scattered across at least six disconnected systems.

GolfNow, which controls approximately 90 percent of aggregated U.S. online tee-time inventory after its acquisition of competitor EZLinks Golf, knows where and when you play. It does not know how you play, what your handicap is, what equipment you use, or what you watch. Its platform does not offer an open API, which means the courses that supply its inventory cannot connect their customer booking data to third-party vendors — and GolfNow uses the data it collects to remarket to golfers across its own platforms, including routing them to bartered tee times at competitor courses. The courses' most valuable asset — their customer relationships — has been quietly appropriated by the platform they depend on.

Arccos Golf has captured 1.5 billion golf shots across hundreds of thousands of members, building the richest on-course performance dataset in the industry. It knows your average driver distance, your strokes gained putting, which club costs you the most shots per round. The PGA Tour backed Arccos with a $20 million Series C in 2023, naming it the Official Game Tracker of the Tour. But Arccos's data is entirely siloed within its subscription platform. It does not flow into GHIN to make handicap indexing more accurate. It does not flow into GolfNow to help personalize tee-time recommendations. It does not flow to TaylorMade, which would give anything to close the loop between the equipment it sells and the performance it actually produces on-course.

The USGA's GHIN system holds handicap data on 3.35 million golfers who posted more than 77 million scores in 2024. It is the closest thing the golf industry has to a universal golfer identity — every serious player who wants a handicap is in GHIN, and the data is reliable, standardized, and stretches back decades. But GHIN is not connected to tee-time booking, shot-tracking, or equipment purchase systems. Your handicap index is an island.

Private club management software — platforms like Jonas, Clubessential, and Lightspeed that power the operations of virtually every country club in America — holds the most complete individual golfer spend records in the industry. It knows how often you play, what you eat at the halfway house, how much you spend in the pro shop, when you last attended a member event. None of that data leaves the club.

The USGA found that a single person could simultaneously be a handicap holder, a ticket purchaser, a donor, and a merchandise buyer — with no unified record connecting any of it.

What makes this fragmentation especially striking is that the industry's own governing bodies have documented it. A Deloitte case study published by the USGA describes exactly this problem: “Without a single platform, it could be challenging for USGA employees to access and reconcile information available from so many disparate sources and in different formats. A single person could simultaneously be a handicap index holder, a ticket purchaser, a USGA donor, and a merchandise buyer — with no unified record connecting these interactions.” The USGA hired Deloitte to build a unified data platform to solve this internally. The industry-wide version of that problem remains completely unaddressed.

The PGA of America had the same experience. Its customer data was, in the words of a published CapTech case study, “heavily siloed within each individual operational pillar, which limited the PGA's ability to realize shared value from its consumer data assets at an enterprise level.” Before centralization, reporting took hours or days. After building a unified data warehouse, the same reports ran in minutes. The fix, again, was an internal solution for one organization, not a solution for the ecosystem.

What Unified Identity Is Worth

The cross-industry evidence is unambiguous: the entity that owns the identity layer captures a disproportionate share of commercial value. This pattern is consistent enough across industries that it can reasonably be described as a structural law of the data economy.

Amazon Prime members spend approximately $1,400 per year on Amazon. Non-Prime members spend $600 to $700. The difference is not that Prime members have more money. It is that the identity layer — knowing who each customer is across every transaction — enables cross-sell that compounds over time. Retail, entertainment, grocery, pharmacy, and cloud services all attach to the same identity. The 2x spending premium is the direct output of knowing the customer whole. Netflix's personalization algorithm was estimated by the company's own executives in 2016 to be worth $1 billion per year in subscriber retention value when Netflix had 80 million subscribers. The company now has 325 million. Eighty percent of all content watched on Netflix is driven by personalized recommendations, not by search or browsing.

Netflix's churn rate of 2.3 to 2.4 percent per month is less than half the industry average of 5 to 7 percent. The identity layer — a real-time profile of each viewer's preferences, built from billions of interactions — is not a feature of the product. It is the product.

The sports-specific analog is Fanatics, which started as a sports merchandise company and has built a $33 billion platform by doing one thing: unifying fan identity across merchandise, collectibles, and sports betting for more than 100 million profiles across 900-plus sports properties. Its FanGraph platform, built on Snowflake, connects what a fan buys, what they bet on, and what they collect into a single identity that powers cross-sell economics across every vertical Fanatics enters. The company is now worth 33 billion dollars. It started as a Tshirt business.

The golfer is a better commercial identity than the typical sports fan. The average serious golfer spends $4,000 to $10,000 annually across the ecosystem, orders of magnitude more than a fan who buys a jersey and watches games on television. Golfers travel. They buy equipment on a regular replacement cycle. They take lessons, book tee times, subscribe to apps, and hold club memberships. By every metric that matters to a data-driven platform business, the golfer is among the most valuable consumer identities in American sports. And that identity does not currently exist in any unified form.

The Race Has Started

To be precise: the golfer graph doesn't exist yet, but the race to build it has quietly begun.

GolfNow's parent company was spun out of Comcast in January 2026 as Versant Media Group — a standalone public company with an explicit mandate to, in its own words, “Monetize The Golfer” and “Expand The Surface Area” beyond tee-time transactions. GolfPass, its subscription layer, now gives a free account to any GolfNow or TeeOff user — automatically creating a unified identity across booking and content consumption. GolfNow controls the most important piece of the golfer graph's infrastructure: the booking layer. Its challenge is that its closed-API model and history of appropriating course customer data has created a trust deficit with the operators it depends on. Building the golfer graph requires trust. GolfNow has to earn it.

Revelyst Golf Technology is the most under-covered platform play in golf. Over the past two years, Revelyst has quietly assembled a practice-to-course data stack: Foresight Sports, whose GCQuad launch monitor is the professional standard for ball-flight measurement; Bushnell Golf rangefinders with connected data capabilities; PinSeeker, a simulator competition platform; and GolfLogix, acquired in July 2025, which has 7 million downloads and the most comprehensive course-mapping database in the industry at 40,000-plus mapped courses. The strategic vision — connecting practice data from Foresight with on-course performance from GolfLogix with rangefinder data from Bushnell — would create the first hardware-to-software data loop in consumer golf. Revelyst has not yet built the consumer product that connects these pieces. But it has assembled the components. Troon launched Access in March 2026 — the first loyalty program in golf explicitly designed to aggregate golfer spend across multiple operators. It covers 200-plus courses and has stated explicitly that it intends to expand beyond.

Troon-managed properties. Two hundred courses is a fraction of the 14,000 golf facilities in the United States, but the model is architecturally correct: earn points for every dollar spent anywhere in the network, unified to a single identity.

Golf Genius has acquired Golfshot, SwingU, CoachNow, and Operation 36 in a consolidation that has made it one of the largest holders of recreational golfer performance data in the industry. The pieces are being assembled, one acquisition at a time, by multiple parties simultaneously.

The company that connects booking history, oncourse performance, equipment preference, and media consumption into a single compounding profile does not yet exist. That is the opportunity.

The Identity That Should Exist

Here is what the golfer graph would actually look like — and what it would make possible.

A golfer opens an app and sees a tee-time recommendation for a course they've never played, at a time they typically book, at a price point in their historical range. The recommendation isn't based on what everyone in the same zip code books — it's based on what this golfer specifically prefers. The system has learned from 200 rounds of Arccos data that wide fairways and forgiving rough tend to produce better scores. Before arrival, the app flags the three holes where historical strokes-gained data shows the most shots lost, and suggests a specific club for the second hole's approach. At the pro shop, the loyalty system recognizes a high-frequency player and surfaces a TaylorMade driver fitting event next month — because the Arccos data shows an opportunity to maximize distance and efficiency with new tech. The fitting specialist has already reviewed the shot data before the appointment.

Every data element in that scenario already exists in some system, held by some company. What does not exist is the connection.

The commercial value of building that connection would be enormous. Cross-sell economics compound with every new connection: a golfer whose booking data is linked to their shot data is a better target for equipment recommendations. A golfer whose equipment preferences are linked to their travel history is a better target for destination golf partnerships. A golfer whose media consumption is linked to on-course performance is a better target for instruction products. Each connection does not add value linearly — it multiplies it.

The entity that builds this is not just building a useful product. It is building the most defensible moat in golf. Identity data compounds with every round played, every trip taken, every club purchased. The golfer graph gets more valuable with every interaction. That is the definition of a platform business.

The Bet

At Old Tom Capital, the golfer graph is not a speculative thesis. It is the logical conclusion of watching a $102 billion industry operate without the basic infrastructure that every other major consumer category has built. Golf knows its courses. It knows its equipment. It knows its tournaments. It does not know its golfers — not really, not completely, not in a way that compounds value over time. The industry's own governing bodies have documented this problem in public case studies and hired consultants to solve their internal versions of it. The industry-wide solution remains wide open.

The investment thesis is simple: the golfer is worth more than golf currently charges for the privilege of knowing them. The entity that changes that — that builds the unified identity layer, connects the booking data to the performance data to the equipment data to the media data, and creates the compounding cross-sell engine those connections enable — will be valued not as a golf company, but as a platform.

In every industry where that transition has happened, the platform wins. There is no reason golf is different.

We’re All in This Together

In an age of divisiveness, golf is a great unifier

Essay originally published in The Met Golfer, Nov/Dec 2021. Special thanks to the Metropolitan Golf Association.

For the last year and a half, I’ve been working on a book with Mark Messier. In my career I’ve covered just about every sport there is (even, once, the world chess championship), but how I came to be joined at the hip – you’ll know what I mean if you’ve ever written a book with someone – with one of the greatest hockey players of all time is both odd and makes complete sense.

We came together through golf. Messier and I had a mutual friend and he invited us both to play golf one day. On the course, we got to talking and he said he’d read a book I’d once written – about golf – and he wondered if I might consider collaborating with him.

There’s an old saying: Athletes want to be rock stars and rock stars want to be athletes... but what they all really want is to just play golf. That might be one of the all-time understatements because it’s not only athletes and rock stars – it’s everybody, or so it seems.

Through golf I’ve met Pulitzer Prize winners and musicians and actors. I’ve met best-selling authors like Stephen Dubner and Harlan Coben, and what I found is that they’re actually just like me… only smarter and between them they’ve sold a few million more books than I ever will.

But golf is the great leveler.

That became most apparent to me in the early spring of 1997. The U.S. Open was to be played that June at Congressional Country Club, and I was intent on preparing a feature on the history of presidential golf. For decades, the sprawling layout just outside Washington D.C. had been a favorite of U.S. presidents.

I wrote a letter – we actually did that back then – to former President George H.W. Bush asking if he’d talk with me about golf and his time in office. “41” had a special connection to the game: both his father and grandfather had been presidents of the USGA.

I got a shocking phone call back. The woman on the other end said she was calling from the office of President Bush. “The president would be happy to speak with you,” the woman was saying, “but he was hoping you’d be willing to come to Kennebunkport (Maine) to do the interview and perhaps play golf.”.

“Uh… yeah. I think I can work that into my schedule.”.

It was the most lovely day. I shot what at the time was my best score ever – and yes of course the president signed my scorecard. Mr. Bush and his family are known for a very brisk pace of play, and we went around as a fourball in two and a half hours.

“We call it cart polo,” he told me.

I knew it was going to be a special day before I even got there, but it was quickly confirmed on the first tee when the former leader of the free world sent his opening shot whizzing left over the heads of the two guys in crew cuts with earpieces, and promptly announced he was taking a breakfast ball. In that moment I knew that however different we were, we were very much alike.

After we were done, he told me that he loved playing golf when he was in office with heads of state and political foes alike. “You don’t remember me talking today about the federal reserve, or China, or the Supreme Court, do you, Jimmy?”.

“No sir,” I said. “We mostly talked golf.”.

Because that’s what we mostly do. We can’t help ourselves. It’s one of the great things about the game.

When I was out in San Diego this year for the U.S. Open, I went to Miramar, the air base where they filmed “Top Gun” – because, of course, Marine fighter and Osprey pilots and Navy SEALS all play golf.

The list goes on and on and on. And I hope it never stops.

One of my favorite things to do is to register as a single at Montauk Downs, the state municipal course on the east end of Long Island. Getting thrown together with three complete strangers is the quickest way to come home with a good story or two. I did it this summer and met three great guys: A father and his son from Long Island who were in the toy business together, and a software engineer from Manhattan. We talked for four hours, not about their jobs or mine. I know we had a great time, I just can’t tell you exactly what we talked about… Other than golf.

Past Briefs

Special Founder Pricing*
Get your first year for only $150

Thank you for subscribing!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.