Gut check

When’s the last time you had a serious conversation with your close friends about life? Your hopes and your fears? About what they don’t know about you that’s important to you? A talk in which you allowed yourself to travel outside your comfort zone to deal with real life issues of health, love and aging?

Heady topics for a golf course superintendent, but it’s part of the life we all live — or ought to, anyway, even if only occasionally. Which is why I come away from a recent gathering of golf friends impressed more than ever about the people I share this game with.

I’ve just returned from an annual three-day golf outing: 16 longtime friends, all of them folks I met through the golf world, when as architecture editor of Golfweek magazine I put together a national panel of volunteer course evaluators and we began taking organized, multi-day trips together for the ostensible purpose of learning how to “rate” courses for our various top-100 lists.

I thought I was building a team of course raters. In fact, I was — quite inadvertently — building a framework for lifelong bonds among fellow travelers. Golf was the immediate incentive, but it gradually became clearer that the relationships transcended a sport and became powerful ties of friendship.

Long after some of us left that magazine-sponsored ratings team, the relationships continued to blossom. Each year we renewed those bonds, deepened the friendships and broadened the scope of those ties through divorce, illness, family woes, financial hardship, retirement for some and whatever else life brings.

Still, I sensed something was missing. Guys can be funny about that. I’ve been in a men’s book group for the past 17 years of monthly gatherings. We started with a core of six, added a few as two of the original group left, and expanded out again. When one of our founders developed cancer and received treatment, we’d follow his cue of not talking about his health and simply kept to our routine. Then one meeting he didn’t show up, and we found out the next day from his wife that he had died the week before.

That’s when it dawned on me that we needed to break from our routine at each monthly meeting and take time to go around the room and let people know what was really going on with our lives; that we needed to let others know something about us that we were proud of, or had been quiet about but that was important to our own self.

At this latest gathering of golfers, out on the far end of Long Island, we set aside time one morning for a similar session. Suspicions or humoring of the occasion were quickly dissipated as soon as the first speaker started.

An hour and a half later, we were all kind of stunned and humbled with the range of emotions and feelings conveyed as we went around the room. One person detailed a family confrontation with autism. Others spoke about the lingering pain of divorce proceedings that had become public spectacles. Some talked about health scares, or the struggle to balance a commitment to work with the time required to embrace the family. Another spoke about the difficulty of ensuring a stable financial future in the family business for offspring who were severely challenged emotionally and vocationally.

Things got very heavy when an attendee talked about the wasted years of a prolonged drug and alcohol addiction — which he had finally left behind and was able to keep behind him, in no small part due to the camaraderie of the group. Another fellow, whom we all knew to be reticent to discuss his personal life, opened up about his fear of aging alone and watching friends pass on while he had effectively isolated himself in circumstances that he was now starting to rethink.

Afterward, we all embraced. Ninety minutes of joking to ward off the tears had clearly made an impact on all of us. We were soon outside, ready to play more golf. But by then the game had receded in importance, or at least it was obvious to all that our friendships had deepened significantly in the aftermath of that morning’s conversation. It was the kind of open talking that more men need to do more often. Expressing vulnerability provides a powerful moment of self-awareness and empathy with others.

In a way that is seldom discussed, golf provides occasion for guys to gather and talk about more than the game. Buddy trips need not be just about sports, drinking, carousing and playing 36 holes per day. They can also provide a setting for dealing with the tough, painful and important aspects of life.