Goosed, The Feeling
May this be a reminder that above all golf offers a chance for the chaos of life to give way to full presence in a game, the people around us, the fresh air we breathe.
TAKING SOME TIME OFF
The world of professional golf is fractured. The clown show at the top of the game doesn’t interrupt my life, I’m not one to spend weekends piled on the couch anyway. It’s something else that’s bothering me.
Maybe I am like the rest of us, disappointed by the meaningless disruption and wondering why we’re talking purse sizes not competition and great champions. Is it that I’m sick of national powers using sports leagues as an asset? Am I exhausted by the barstool or beta mindset?
Then it hits me. I don’t care. Life happened, I became an entrepreneur & golf faded into a when-I-can activity with my buddies. One look through Instagram during my early 20s and you’d see crispy white pants and cringy driving range sessions. So there’s some gravity to the thought: over the last few years I had distanced myself from golf completely.
MAKE IT MAKE SENSE AGAIN
I built my career in lifestyle brand marketing for outdoor passion pursuits and extreme sports. It changed me. I was thrown into the worlds of the most intense, risky, challenging, jaw-dropping feats that humans do. I quickly forgot about country clubs, champion dinners & beer showers at the Waste Management, I wanted to be like these people. They get outside to understand life as a role intertwined with everything around us, not stamped on top. They see it as a challenge- send themselves off cliffs, take on huge rolling waves, rip down mountains no matter the season or machinery, locked in a dance with Earth.
Skiing, biking, hunting, adventuring. It was my childhood, so wasn’t hard to replace golf with a different set of passions at the center of my identity.
And there was one I loved most: racing. All kinds. From the extreme terrains of the the Baja 1000 off-road race to the Indy 500, I was hooked. It doesn't always fit the bill of an 'outdoor sport', but there's something about the pursuit of mastering a path cut beneath you, and nothing beats going fast.
I’ll never forget it: the very first conversation I had with a real racing driver. At the time I was working on a campaign for a brand in that space, so I asked her what the feeling is like during a race, about the sensations of speed and danger, and tried to imagine what it would be like to fill her shoes. What she said next changed my life.
“Everyone thinks we’re adrenaline junkies, that it’s pure thrill and chaos. Really, I’m no different than a golfer.”
As she began to expand, it already made sense. With that one statement she had made it perfectly clear what I and so many people are really chasing. I also knew why I had distanced myself from the game of golf, and why that was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.
Racing to her wasn’t pure thrill, it was about getting into a state of absolute focus on a strategy; placing the car precisely; finding the right moment to pass; staying locked in while situations outside of your control come firing in a blink, and having the mind to react and execute.
She creates a plan like a golfer before a round, she approaches each corner like the next shot: know the inputs, commit, and accept the outcome. Our minds focus only on the task at hand, thrive on steadiness, and we accept we play a game of failure- a constant pursuit of something we’ll never actually perfect.
The feeling that results isn’t chaos, it isn’t even really the sensation of g-forces and speed. It’s a state of mind that can only be reached when an activity requires every fiber of your being. The flow-state. The world melting away and for just a moment- nothing else matters beside what you’re doing.
Lifeblood.
GOOSED, THE FEELING.
Racing, skiing, biking, hiking, fishing, music. It doesn’t matter the pursuit, all we’re after is that feeling. But golf does it for me the best. The realization of my irrational mistake gloomed: in the pursuit of that feeling of flow, I left the one sport where I find it most.
The cultures of these other activities and communities had captured my heart. That feeling and connection to the world was a shared goal, central to the activity and something worth celebrating.
I didn’t see golf that way. The culture stains over that mission. The perception of the game has long been controlled by elites and the establishment. It's stiff; pays little mind to Earth and its resources used; the obsession with rules, etiquette & pace of play does what it's supposed to do: turns people away. But golf is no game of royalty. Take one look across courses and you’ll see: this game is for the goose. The ones humble enough to tap into it for what it really is.
And so I began to plan. How to view golf differently. How to play golf differently. How to present it to the world differently.
‘Goosed, The Feeling’, which we’ll just call Goosed, is a project that places golf back in the frame it should be: as a flow sport. As an outdoor pursuit. Yet another masterclass given by the land and terrain to endlessly challenge players to hone their mind & body, and to teach what we can and cannot control.
Golf is about that feeling.