Mad at the Wind
What Golf Can Teach Us About Control and Responsibility
There's a particular type of golfer you'll encounter on every course, in every foursome, at every skill level. You know the one. Their ball slices into the water, and immediately they're examining their club as if it's defective. They leave a shot in the bunker and mutter about the uneven lie. They three-putt from twelve feet and blame the greenskeeper for where they cut the hole that day. They are perpetually mad at everything except the one thing actually responsible for their struggles: themselves.
Golf has a way of exposing our relationship with control, or, more accurately, our desperate illusion of it. Unlike virtually every other sport, golf strips away the convenient excuses we use to deflect responsibility. There's no opposing team making great plays, no referee making questionable calls, no teammate having an off night. It's just you, an indifferent white ball, and 18 holes of grass, sand, and water that couldn't care less about your ego.
Yet golfers manage to harness their inner creativity when it comes to finding external culprits for their internal struggles. The wind seems to have a personal vendetta against certain players—always gusting at precisely the wrong moment. The sand in bunkers is perpetually wrong: too much, too little, too firm, too wet, never just right. Tee boxes become the subject of geological surveys, with players discovering slopes and imperfections that somehow explain why their drive went thirty yards right. And don't even get them started on the maintenance crew's apparent conspiracy to ruin their round. The crew always cuts the rough too thick, makes the greens too fast (or slow), and points the tee markers in a direction that magically causes tee shots to start offline.
This elaborate theater of blame serves a deeper psychological need.
In our daily lives, we're surrounded by variables we can't control. We aren’t immune to playing the blame game in regular life either. Were you really late for that meeting because you got stuck behind a slow driver, or could you have left your house earlier? But, oftentimes, there are extenuating circumstances that can derail the best-laid plans.
Golf strips all that away and presents us with the most terrifying proposition imaginable: your results are entirely up to you.
Up-and-coming professional golfer Connor Belcastro wrote about this in his recent essay Why I Played Golf Today. He starts by reflecting on how lucky he is to be pursuing pro golf, and how failing at it—so far—has produced feelings of shame because he’s not taking advantage of an opportunity thousands of less-fortunate kids only dream of having. He goes on to say:
"If you try to fight back against any of these feelings, you quickly realize that: every single thing that happens on a golf course is completely and unequivocally your fault. The golf course is defenseless; it's a bunch of grass and trees and sand that's just laid out there in front of you. Nothing is stopping you. You don't have a teammate to have a bad game or an opponent to shoot 48% from the field. If a putt dives across the front of the hole, then you misread it. If it hits a spike mark, then you didn't fix it. If the wind changes, then you can go ahead and get mad at the weather if you'd like, but that's pretty silly, and you probably should've just hit a better shot. Whatever happens out there, it's a reflection of the game you brought and nothing else. If you're upset with the result, well, you should've played better."
The wind excuse is particularly telling because it reveals how we think about control versus influence. Yes, wind affects ball flight. This is physics, not psychology. But better golfers account for the wind. They adjust their club selection, aim, the trajectory and spin rate of the ball. They don't hit into a 20-mph headwind and then act shocked when the ball doesn't carry its normal distance. They know that a 10-mph headwind tends to take off 10% of the yardage, while only affecting the ball by 5% when it’s downwind. The wind isn't random and vindictive; it's simply another factor to consider, like the slope of the fairway or the firmness of the greens.
The same logic applies to every other convenient scapegoat. Uneven lies? Good players practice them. Tough pin placement? Good players adjust their strategy accordingly. Bunkers guarding the front green? Good players take a bit more club to take them out of play. Golf course architects have tricks to get into players’ heads, like strategically placed hazards, greens set at particular angles, fairways that cant along the sides of ridges, bumps that obscure part of a green, and myriad other design elements. But at the end of the day, they all simply make up the same playing field that everyone else is dealing with.
What makes the excuse-making particularly galling is its selectivity. Notice how golfers never blame external factors when they hole a lucky putt or get a favorable bounce. The ball that hits a tree and bounces back into play isn't credited to arboreal intervention. It’s just a good break that they'll take without complaint. But the ball that hits the same tree and bounces into trouble? Clearly, the course designer had a personal grudge.
This selective attribution reveals the deeper truth: the excuses aren't really about the external factors at all. They're about protecting our ego from the harsh reality that we're not as good as we think we are, or as good as we want to be. Golf has a way of humbling the most accomplished people. CEOs who control billion-dollar companies find themselves powerless against a two-foot putt to win a $5 match with their friend. Athletes who dominate in other sports discover that their normally elite hand-eye coordination means nothing when faced with a 40-yard pitch shot over water.
The tragedy is that this excuse-making actually prevents improvement. When you blame the wind, you miss the opportunity to learn how to play in windy conditions. When you blame the course setup, you avoid developing the skills needed to handle challenging lies and pin positions. When you blame everything except your swing, your course management, and your mental approach, you ensure that you'll keep facing the same problems round after round.
The golfers who improve their scores—and create a healthier relationship with the game—are the ones who embrace the terrifying truth that Belcastro articulates so clearly. They understand that golf is not a game of control, but a game of responsibility1. You can't control whether the wind blows, but you can control how you respond to it. You can't control the exact condition of every lie, but you can control how well you practice and learn about different types of lies. You can't control the green speeds, but you can control how much break you play and how hard you hit your putt.
This lack of complete control is what makes golf both maddening and profound. In a world where we're constantly encouraged to blame external circumstances for our failures, golf presents us with an uncomfortable mirror. Every shot is a choice. Every result is feedback. Every excuse is a missed opportunity to get better.
The next time you find yourself getting mad at the wind, pause and consider what you're really angry about. It's probably not the weather at all.
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I would be remiss not to mention my wife, Allison McKeany’s, recent piece Relax, nothing is under control since her experience, and that wonderful phrase we learned together at a retreat earlier this year, played a large role in making this piece possible.
"Arboreal intervention" Love it! Now as to taking responsibility, golf was developed by Scottish Presbyterians, who believe that every wee thing is ordained by God.
Now I am going to slice the ball deliberately and go off in an unexpected direction. There are other kinds of intervention than those by trees. Warning: non-Presbyterian theology ahead. Human intervention can be good or bad or even random, or divine, which is always for our good.
Evil intervention comes from elsewhere. I don't want to shock anybody, but evil doesn't come from God. It can be horribly tragic, like tsunamis and earthquakes, or murder or war. It comes from natural events bigger than us or from human actions. He allows it for reasons that we don't understand, and the grief can be overwhelming. But God didn't cause it, and he will help us with our grief and anger if we let him.
This is a huge topic and very difficult to address in a Substack comment. I don't want to hijack the comments on Lyle's post, which is beautifully written and thoughtful. Thank you, Lyle. If you do want to engage me about my argument you can DM me.
I loved this read so much (and I'm not a golfer) -- big cheeky grin the whole reading it. Reminds me of my roommate when I lived and worked at Vail Ski Resort (epic, powdery snow with beautiful blue skies), who grew up skiing in Vermont (terrifying sheets of ice)...she would say about her early days on the East Coast, "you gotta ski the shit to be the shit." Instead of being the victim to the environment, let it teach you.