Golf Sucks.

It takes too long. It costs too much. It humbles you in front of strangers and embarrasses you in front of friends. It demands everything — your focus, your patience, your honesty — and repays you, on most days, with almost nothing.

Yet it’s easy to love.

Here's what nobody tells you when you're standing on a first tee for the very first time, optimistic and foolish: golf is not a game against other people. Forget the scorecards. Forget the handicaps and the Saturday morning bets.

Golf is just you and the earth.

That's it. That's the whole sport.

Think about where you play this game.

You play it on cliffs above the Pacific where the wind comes off the water with opinions of its own. On desert courses where saguaros stand along the fairways like old men who have seen everything. On Georgia fairways tunneled beneath tall pines so old and straight they make you feel like you wandered into a cathedral that never had a roof.

The game insists you go outside. It insists you look up.

Other sports give you walls. A basketball court is contained. A baseball diamond is a known universe. The arena protects you. Your teammates can catch you when you fall.

But step onto a golf course and you are, quite suddenly, very small.

The sky is enormous. The rough doesn't care about your feelings. The wind plays for itself. And the landscape has been at this a lot longer than you have.

It's one versus one. You against the earth.

A long walk with your conscience.

The earth is not trying to beat you. It simply is what it is. And you have to figure out how to move through it. Four hours out there, and the game will strip you to your soul. No title. No reputation. No armor. Just the person you actually are, standing in the open, accountable to nothing but the shot in front of you.

That's the question golf asks across a lifetime of rounds.

Who are you when the landscape doesn't cooperate?

Golf strips away the professional. The provider. The person who has it together. Out there, on that course, you're just a human being with a stick, trying to solve a puzzle the earth laid out before you arrived.

I've played beside men who run companies. Who carry the weight of other people's livelihoods in their briefcases Monday through Friday. And I have watched every single one of them stop talking about business entirely. Stop checking their phones. Look up.

They've learned what the game keeps trying to teach.

You are not here to conquer this place. You are here to be in it.

Walk through it honestly. Hit your shot. Look around every now and then. Remember that you are a person standing in an enormous, extraordinary world, and someone has cut a path through it, and you get to follow it for four hours on a Saturday.

Not everyone gets that.

Yes, golf will take your money and your afternoons and your ego. It will send a perfect drive screaming into the woods on a hole you've played a hundred times. It will never be fair.

But it will put you in the middle of something larger than yourself. It will force you to stand still, in all that silence and all that beauty, with nothing but the wind and all that green, open, indifferent, magnificent earth staring back at you.

And somehow, against every reasonable instinct you have, you'll want to come back tomorrow and do it again.

Golf sucks.