In Indonesia, golf belongs to rich men. In New Zealand, it belongs to everyone. I was ten years old when I learned the difference, and shortly after that I learned something else: that my dad had very strong opinions about what I should do with my weekends.
In Jakarta, golf courses were behind gates. They were for men in pressed collars who drove German cars and spoke at length about things nobody had asked them about. We were not those people. Golf existed on television, narrated reverently over impossibly green courses in places that seemed fictional — Augusta, Pebble Beach, St Andrews.
Then we moved to Auckland and everything changed. In New Zealand, everyone plays golf. Your plumber plays golf. The guy at the petrol station plays golf. There are public courses that cost less than a movie ticket. Golf was not aspirational here. It was just something people did, like a slightly more infuriating version of a walk.
My dad handed me a second-hand set, found the junior programme at Pupuke Golf Club on the North Shore, and told me I would probably enjoy it.
He was right.
I have not fully forgiven him.
· · ·
Pupuke is not a long course. From the blue tees it plays 5,954 yards, par 70, course rating 70.4, slope 121. It has been there since 1914 and it carries itself accordingly. One nine winds through native bush so dense the light disappears into it. The other opens to the Hauraki Gulf and Rangitoto Island sitting blue and unhurried in the distance — beautiful to look at, completely irrelevant to the business of hitting a golf ball straight.
The fairways tilt at angles that physicists would find interesting. The bush takes your ball and keeps it with the quiet efficiency of a very organised thief.
When I was eleven I lost so many balls I started arriving early to walk the rough and find ones other people had lost. I was restocking. Preparing for the inevitable. For the first year my primary skill was not golf — it was logistics.
Eventually I got better. The swing found a groove. The short game developed. I started shooting in the 70s on good days, and I understood, in the way you only understand things when you are a teenager with nothing but time, that golf rewards repetition more than talent. You put the hours in. The game gives some of them back.
Summer mornings, Dad dropped me at the course at seven. The dew still on the greens. The light coming through the gum trees sideways. I played 36 holes and he picked me up near dark, my legs used up, my score written in pencil on a card folded into my back pocket. We did not talk much on the drive home. There was not much to say. The round had said it already.
Winter was different and better in its own way. July mornings on that hilltop and the air had teeth. The dew had gone icy and crunchy underfoot. Your breath fogged. Your fingers went stiff around the grip before you had even reached the first tee. Some mornings the hail came in sideways and you played through it because you were fifteen and had not yet developed the sensible instinct to go inside. Some mornings the rain blew off the Waitematā and the grips went slick and you just made your score and kept moving. And some mornings the sky was so cold and clear it felt like the world had been pressed flat overnight, and the Gulf caught the early light in a way that stopped you mid-stride, just for a second, before you played your next shot.
You played through all of it. That was the whole point.
There were road trips too. The family in the car heading somewhere scenic, golf bag in the boot on the off chance we passed a rural course with a hand-painted sign and an honesty box nailed to the fence for the green fee. Sometimes the fairways had sheep. Sometimes, if you were less lucky, the sheep had also visited the greens and left a detailed record of their time there right on your putting line. These courses did not apologise for themselves. I respected that enormously.
There is a boy with a golf bag and a small smile. He will put the bag down one day and not pick it up for a long time. But not today. Today he just walks.
· · ·
Then university.
Then a career.
Then a marriage, a mortgage, and the general architecture of adult life assembling itself around me with impressive efficiency.
The bag went into a corner. Fifteen years passed. I am genuinely not sure where they went and I have stopped expecting a satisfying answer.
· · ·
It turns out that men in their mid-thirties take up golf. This is a demographic inevitability, like developing strong opinions about coffee or suddenly caring about sleep quality. Friends started mentioning it — casually at first, then with increasing frequency, in the way a group chat slowly becomes a cult without anyone formally announcing the transition.
I resisted. Then I resisted some more. Then I did what you do when people who play golf have decided you are coming — I gave in.
Fine. Nine holes.
I dug out the old set. Same irons from when I was a teenager, blades that had not seen a fairway in fifteen years. I grabbed half of them. There was no point bringing the full bag. I no longer knew my yardages. Did I still hit a 7-iron 160 yards? 140? I had absolutely no idea. Bringing a full set felt like showing up to an exam with a calculator you had not switched on since school. I picked the clubs that seemed most likely to be useful and threw them over my shoulder.
The others had push carts. Rangefinders. The full 18 ahead of them, approached with the quiet seriousness of men who had been doing this long enough to have opinions about shaft flex. I signed up for 9 and told them I would meet them at the bar.
Early in the round I was exactly what you would expect. Fat shots. A topped ball that skidded along the ground for twenty metres with the energy of a disappointed sigh. A swing that felt like it belonged to someone else who was also not very good.
And then, a few holes in, something came back.
A mid-iron from the fairway and the contact was just right. Clean. Low. The ball left on the exact line I intended and held it all the way to the flag. Then it happened again. Then again.
Here is the unfair thing about golf, and I say unfair because it genuinely is: muscle memory from your formative years does not leave. It sits in storage, completely unaffected by neglect, and when the conditions are right it comes back online like nothing happened. Someone who picks up golf at thirty-five builds those patterns from nothing. Someone who grew up with the sport is just retrieving them. The gap between those two things is real and it is not something you earn through mid-life dedication. You either put the years in as a kid, or you did not. I put the years in. On that ninth hole, walking off with my old irons clicking and clacking over my shoulder, I felt the full unfairness of that fact and was not remotely sorry.
The carrying helped. A push cart muffles it. With the bag on your back the clubs move against each other with every step — irons knocking, the wood settling against a wedge shaft — and that sound lives in the same part of you as the swing itself. The legs remembered the weight. The shoulders remembered how to adjust on a steep uphill lie. The body keeps things you think you have lost. It is a better archivist than you are.
I walked off after the 9th and went to get a coffee. From the clubhouse I watched the others trundle their push carts up the 10th fairway with the steady determination of middle-aged men who had fully committed to the bit. I watched them go with genuine affection.
· · ·
Modern golf is a different sport in terms of information. When I was a teenager, yardages were estimated by pacing off distances from sprinkler heads, and ball-tracking data was available only to Tour professionals. Now there are rangefinders accurate to half a yard and launch monitors you can rent by the hour that will tell you your attack angle, spin rate, and smash factor. My biomedical engineering brain finds this genuinely delightful. The equipment has also improved to a degree that constitutes applied mercy — old blade irons had the forgiveness of a Victorian schoolmaster, and modern cavity-backs have so much margin for error built in that a mishit that once went out of bounds now goes on the fringe. This is not cheating. This is physics doing its job.
I play once a month now. Sometimes less. The goal is not serious improvement. It is fresh air and small optimisations and the occasional well-struck iron that makes a sound like a clean, brief argument being won.
· · ·
My scores are back in the low 80s. About where they sat at thirteen, before the serious practice took hold. By the numbers, I have not moved at all.
But the experience is not the same.
At fifteen, a bad hole ruined the afternoon. A triple bogey was a verdict — replayed mentally for hours, its mechanics dissected and condemned and found wanting. The game carried weight, the kind that came from caring too much about what the scorecard said about you as a person.
At thirty-eight, a triple bogey is information.
Mildly annoying information.
You write it down and walk to the next tee.
The places are the same. I am the one who went somewhere.
There is a Jamiroquai song called Travelling Without Moving. It is about going somewhere while staying completely still.
That is what returning to golf feels like. The same fairways. The same native bush eating the same kinds of shots. The same honesty boxes outside rural courses where the sheep have had opinions about the greens. The same bag on the same shoulder making the same sound with every step.
But I went somewhere in the fifteen years between.
And now I am back.
And the places are the same but I am not.
Same courses.
Different person.
It turns out that is enough.