Yesterday, I got invited to play Sultan’s Run in Jasper, Indiana, with a group of friends.

It is a beautiful course. It is also a difficult course. And for me, yesterday, it was a very expensive crime scene.

I have been struggling on the golf course this summer. After winning Most Improved in league last year, my handicap has already climbed back from 22 to 25 this season. That regression showed up loudly at Sultan’s Run. Not in subtle little whispers, either. It kicked the door open, sat down at the table, and started eating my lunch.

I shot a 115.

I three-putted after three-putted. I flirted with double-digit penalty strokes between water hazards and out of bounds. I lost a good chunk of golf balls, including most of my custom Asgard Athletica balls, which felt less like losing equipment and more like sending tiny branded Viking funerals into the woods and water.

It was brutal.

I paid $135 to take 115 hacks, and somewhere around 80 or 90 of them had me questioning many of my life choices. Somewhere around the back nine, I had the realization that golf may be sadomasochism for the milquetoast crowd. It is a socially acceptable way for middle-aged men to torture themselves in polo shirts and pretend it is recreation.

There are worse golfers than me on our home course. But I am not sure any of them spend the amount of time out there I do. That is the part that sticks in my craw. I play a lot. I think about golf a lot. I try to get better. I watch videos. I practice. I buy golf balls with my gym logo on them, then promptly donate them to the wilderness.

And still, I suck.

That is not false humility. That is not me fishing for encouragement. That is just the current scorecard of reality, written in triple bogeys and soggy Mizunos.

So after the round, I found myself asking the obvious question.

Why do I play golf?

I pondered this for a while. Not in some deep, meditative, philosopher-under-a-tree way. More in a sweaty, irritated, “what the hell am I doing with my time and money?” way.

Eventually, I came up with the answer.

For me, it is the guys.

It is the socializing. It is the cart conversations. It is the jokes. It is the shared suffering. It is the good shots that keep you coming back and the bad shots that give everybody material for the rest of the day.

I am a social creature. I recharge my battery by being around people. Which is funny, because my actual life is set up in a way that keeps me at home most of the time. I work from home. I work out at home. I spend a lot of hours alone with a laptop, a barbell, a notebook, or whatever latest rabbit hole my brain has decided to live in.

For about nine months of the year, my secondary job with the newspaper becomes my social outlet. I get to go to games, talk to coaches, joke with fans, visit with parents, and be around the little moving circus that is high school sports. Of course, that also means coming home and spending more hours in the office sorting pictures and typing stories. But for a few hours each night, I get paid to be around people.

Golf is different.

Golf is an expensive way to stay in touch with the outside world.

And most days, I gladly pay it.

Yesterday was not one of those days.

But I still had a good time with the fellas.

That is the ridiculous part. The golf was awful. The company was good. And somehow, the company wins.

Yesterday was the kind of round where every par 4 felt like a government audit. Every green looked like it had been designed by someone with a grudge. Every wedge shot carried the threat of comedy. By the end, I was less a golfer and more a man walking through a field with clubs, searching for meaning and occasionally a ball.

Will I do it again?

Yes.

Not at that course anytime soon, because I am not made of money or emotional Kevlar. But I will do it again somewhere, sometime. I will stand over another wedge shot, blade it across the green, chip the next one short, and then three-putt my way to another snowman. I will ask the same life questions. I will mutter the same words under my breath. I will invent a couple new ones. I will wonder why I keep coming back.

And then I will look around at the guys in the carts, laughing about something dumb, telling the same old stories, making new ones, and I will remember.

That is why.