By Hunter Peirson
The 16th hole at Woodbridge Golf Club is a par-3.
Actually, let me clarify. The 16th hole at Woodbridge Golf Club is a tough par-3.
The scorecard distance from the blue tees is 178 yards. The green, at its deepest part, is 20 yards deep — a rarity at a course with greens that typically have a three-club difference between front and back (the “hit it to the middle of the green” strategy is useless on this course). The hole is completely surrounded by tall trees, making it impossible to get a read on the Texas wind. To top it all off, there is no bailout: a creek runs in front of the green, giving about three yards of rough and fringe from the 20-foot drop down to the creek. Miss left, right, or long, and you’re in the trees. It doesn’t just reward good golf shots. It requires them.
By now you have an image in your mind — hopefully one that is daunting. Now I want you to imagine yourself standing on this tee box, sitting at 3-under, and you’ve never broken par before. Got it? Good.
Breaking par isn’t the important part of this story.
Like many people, I grew up around the game of golf. I would go out to the course with my dad as a baby and just ride in the cart. I was four years old when Tiger hit the famous chip on the 16th at Augusta, but I have a distinct memory of watching that shot. I can remember the pure awe I had watching 16-year-old Jordan Spieth play in his (and my) hometown tournament at the Byron Nelson. I can remember the astonishment I had watching Jordan win the Masters, and the utter feeling of sadness I felt watching him dump one in Rae’s Creek. I played junior tour events every summer growing up. It was no surprise to anybody around me that, when my freshman year of high school rolled around, I dropped every other sport and went full golf. I was hooked.
The second I got my drivers license, I went to work at Woodbridge Golf Club in Wylie, Texas. I grew up playing this course. My swing coach (who would also be my boss) was at this course. I’m not exaggerating when I say this course was my second home.
When Summer 2017 arrived, I went to work full-time at the golf course, working the 6 a.m. shift. My friends could never understand how on Earth I was OK with waking up that early, but I don’t think they ever fully understood that I had it made. Summers in Texas are brutal, and the tee sheet in the summer was the same every day: busy in the morning, and then once 11 a.m. hit, it was empty. Teeing off after 11 a.m. meant you were playing in the peak Texas heat for two or three hours, which nobody in their right mind would do.
But I was a 16-year-old kid. I was most definitely not in my right mind.
Let’s be more specific. I was a 16-year-old kid with a job at a golf course that paid minimum wage. I was most definitely not in my right mind — but I was living the life. Five days a week, I would work from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., and then immediately hop on the empty golf course. It was incredible.
Golf was relaxing that summer. It didn’t matter how I played on a random Wednesday, because I was on the golf course. I was a 16-year-old kid with truly nothing to worry about.
But when a tournament came around, that relaxation disappeared. This was a common occurrence any time a competitive round of golf happened.
My senior year of high school, I began to get burned out with it. I had no plans of playing college golf, but that didn’t matter. Golf was a major part of my life, but it wasn’t high on the priority list. Yet for some reason, I got more frustrated with the game of golf than I ever had before. I struggled all year, shooting in the mid to high 80s in every tournament I played. My track record that year included numerous breakdowns (I’m talking full-on tears), numerous club throws, one broken club, and an alleged F-bomb that I mistakenly dropped in front of my mom (the jury is still out on this one). I would get home from tournaments completely exhausted mentally. Golf wasn’t fun at those moments.
I would go on to shoot 76/78 at our district tournament, where I finished 15 shots out of first, and one shot out of the top 10 (welcome to high school golf in Texas). Those were my best tournament scores ever. No, I didn’t suddenly play my best golf. No, I didn’t suddenly get a lot better. I didn’t care. Actually, let’s backtrack on that. I cared, but I realized it didn’t matter.
That next fall, I started school at Penn State. I worked part-time at the golf course when home on breaks, and I’d play with my dad when possible. It felt weird playing golf when I wasn’t working toward anything. For the first time since that summer in 2017, I was just playing golf.
In Summer 2020, I was supposed to be working an internship in Washington D.C. That internship got moved virtual, and I was stuck at home for another three months. Three more months on top of the three months I spent at home, finishing my sophomore year of college. If you’re keeping track at home, that is about five and a half more months than I was supposed to spend at home. For a kid who had moved across the country for school, this wasn’t exactly the easiest thing to handle. I needed to get out, but everything was closed.
Well, almost everything.
According to my handicap, I played 26 rounds of golf that summer.
While writing this, I am picturing that famous picture of golfers continuing to play with a wildfire happening right behind them. That is how playing golf in the summer of 2020 felt. For the first time in my life, golf felt like an escape. For four or five hours, the reality of the world was left behind, and my biggest problem became whether I could hit that shot that I knew was a stupid idea. For the first time in my life, golf became what it should have been all along: a hopeful escape.
A lot of people say that it’s the good shots that keep you coming back. I don’t agree with that. For me, it’s the bad shots. It’s that feeling after a round of, “I know I can hit that shot.” It’s that feeling of, “if I had just done this, I would have shot this.” It’s that feeling of blindness you get standing on the first tee, having no clue where that round was going to go. It’s a feeling of blind hope that maybe today is going to be the day.
As it turns out, August 2, 2020, was the day.
So there I am, standing on the 16th tee at Woodbridge Golf Club at 3-under. This was the last round of the summer with my dad, as I was moving back to school the next weekend. A week earlier, I was standing on that same tee at 2-under, and I finished that round two-over because of a shot that was extremely close to the heel (I am trying to keep this family-friendly by not using the S-word here).
You hear all the time that the best golfers have a short memory. That’s not true. The best golfers have the ability to move on. Any golfer would be lying to you if they said they couldn’t remember every shot they hit in a round they just finished. It’s not an act of forgetting the last shot; it’s an act of realizing that that shot doesn’t matter now.
At that moment, on that tee box, my memory was working real well. For 30 seconds, I sat there debating what club to hit, while also trying to block that shot from my mind.
Imagine that: in a year like 2020, my biggest concern for 30 seconds was figuring out what club I was going to hit. Was it the six or the seven?
It turned out to be the adrenaline fueled 7-iron that cleared the water by about six inches. It also turned out that the club choice didn’t matter. The world was still burning down around me — but for four hours, I couldn’t tell the difference.
August 2, 2020, was the day I broke par for the first and only time. I’d be lying if I said that I’m not constantly chasing the high that I felt that day. But August 2, 2020, was also the day I realized that I was having fun with golf again. I didn’t miraculously get better. I started having fun with it again. Golf that summer was an escape, which is what it should have been all along.
It’s easy to sit there and think that my newfound love for the game was because of that three-under score. In reality, that score was because of my newfound love for the game — I just hadn’t realized it yet. That summer, my love for golf grew to a level that I have never felt before. My friends get frustrated with how much I care about this stupid game (both playing and watching as a fan). The summer of 2020 was a dark time, but those countless hours spent on the golf course got me through it. Golf was an escape that summer, and that is what it is now. It’s an opportunity to step on a tee with pure hope, and for four hours, focus on something as minute as what club to hit on a par-3.
This is what golf should be.
Hunter Peirson is entering his senior year at Penn State, where he is pursuing a master’s degree in Architectural Engineering. He is originally from Dallas, Texas, and enjoys all things golf and national parks.
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