I Really Didn’t Want to Golf. Then I found out my friends were playing without me. What’s a 40-year-old guy to do?

Excerpt: Golf, the game of kings, requires an extravagant outlay of time, space and money. I’d never considered picking up a club, just as I had never thought to play polo, mount butterflies or circumnavigate the globe in a hot-air balloon. Then I visited Reid. Reid, a surgeon, is one of my oldest friends. Like me, he is a practical, 40-year-old father of two young children. So I was surprised to discover, on a recent trip to Delaware to see him, an impressive quantity of golf paraphernalia — a mat, a net, electronics — in his sprawling back yard. Reid told me he had been playing almost every week for a couple of years. My friend picked up an eight iron and swung with power and authority: evidence, I informed him condescendingly, of the kind of predictable suburban evolution I had forsworn by becoming a writer in New York. Then I grabbed the club, flailed, and missed the ball completely: evidence I had better things to do. “You know,” Reid said, “Mike golfs, too.” So did two other old friends, I learned. Not only did they all golf, Reid told me delicately, but they all golfed together. Spread out geographically, the four convened for periodic trips to South Carolina, Colorado and Texas, where they had fun — fun without me. —— More at the source! (Gift article)