how and why did you start playing golf?

im sure this thread is out here somewere, but I just wanted to see what you guys say. no one in my family ever golfed, I don't think. were greek so its not really our sport. (planning a trip to stay at my aunts their this summer, wanted to golf right by the beach, but theres like 4 courses in the whole country) but anyway, I played baseball since teeball (sophomore in highschool know) and honestly, always joked about golf, like it not being a sport, boring blah blah blah. but one day my dad came home from a garage sale with a couple clubs he got for like a dollar. the driver was a titleist howitzer and I have never gone to the driving range before and so the next day we went. and it was weird, I immedietly fell in love with it, and a week later bought a nicer driver (callaway diablo) and a few weeks later bought some irons and wedges but since then ive bought and sold many clubs. (only golfed for maybe 8 or 9 months and finally got a set im going to stick with hopefully...) I was guess I was naturally good, I played countless rounds at the ol $5 play all day par 3 and then the nicer par 3, and when I started getting seriously into it, I shot I believe a 95 the first time at a real course. so know when im not golfing or practicing, I just watch golf or mark crossfield, gorilla james, harry flower, lockey magic lol etc. but if you've never watched them, you should. but anyway, lets hear your story!

i was a multi sport athlete growing up, played basketball and football fairly competitively, played soccer most of my youth. I would be lost without doing something....I took up golf because i had some friends who played, and i wanted something i could do on my own.

Took it up at about 22-23, went to the range a bunch, played as a single for a few years...eventually joined a club and made golf friends

I'm the only golfer in my family too. The only one who was interested in sports really. I always felt sort of compelled from the time I first saw golf. I thought it was pretty awesome, the way a shot just soared, I was really impressed. I didn't start playing until I was out of school. A buddy at work got me hooked mostly out of basic competition, but I liked it from the start and that feeling turned to love after I accidentally hit a few good shots here and there.

I still remember a time when I was about 15 when I could have started playing, gone to a clinic or two, or taken lessons. Whatever the reason I chose not to. I often wonder where the road might have gone had I gotten involved much earlier. Not as in playing professionally or anything, just how the road might have been different had I had something I really loved. Makes me want to make sure I get my daughter involved in anything she takes a liking to. Hopefully golf, but you know, whatever she wants.

An Army buddy brought me to Weisbaden GC, enjoyed it. Bought a set of clubs, played for a year, really enjoyed it. Bought a house, didn't play for 12 years, picked it back up two years ago. Really dove in last year.

I am a public school teacher. Masochistic tendencies are in my blood. Apparently. All kidding aside, I also used to be an athlete and need the challenge.

Company tourney 15 years ago,hooked.now club hoe,golf geek,club member.the greatest people you will ever meet play this game.

How? My father introduced me to golf when I was 3. He plays, my mom plays and my younger brother played for a while. Used to go out as a family four-ball every Sunday. Why I keep playing? The competitive aspect, I love competitive golf. I love it so much that playing socially is starting to bore me. I love the game but nothing compares to competing.

I started a new job and my boss talked about golf all the time. During down time he would talk to another co worker about the game and his latest round and finally I felt like i needed to give it a try. So i joked with him that I would beat him. He had been playing for 6-7 years when this was talked about. It was also march up here in new england so we couldn't go to a regular course, so he brought me to a virtual golf place nearby. I rented a set of clubs there and shot like 120 something but did get one par on a par 4 which is the one that i think got me hooked. I went out and bought a bunch of used clubs and a few weeks later we went to a 9 hole course and played pretty bad there too minus absolutely crushing a 3 wood on a shorter par 4 and coming 10-15 yards from the green, which i still double bogeyed. Now we are coming up on almost one year since and I have gotten down to shooting close to 80 but never breaking it. I hope to break through this season

I wanted to be with my Dad, so I started paying with him when I was 10. I am 47 now , still enjoy playing with him, and now my 2 sons join us for a great 4some

Multi sport athlete growing up, however soccer was my first love. After tearing my acl playing soccer, I was never quite the same. Had to give up soccer and all other contact sport. I was interested in golf, but didn't know how to get started. Luckily, my boss at the time was an avid golfer so he took me to the range and that was that.

My parents forced me into it; never wanted to play the game. I thought it was boring and dumb, after all it was just one repetitive motion.


I'm glad they got me into it.

My dad trys to play, but honestly, its almost embarrassing, but hes still my dad and really fun to play a round with.

I started playing at age 13. I'd go with my friends and we had some great times. We were pretty bad and we laughed at each other to the point of tears all the way around the course? A few of us got hooked on it, and now, 44 years later, we still laugh at each other all the way around the course. Although one of the guys is still so bad, we can't laugh too much at him or he'll sulk.

My dad somehow got started.... not sure how considering he's a landscape architect that works 70+ hours during the entire golfing season, but he did. Not long after he started, he took me out to get a set of clubs. It was a Macgregor junior box set. I think I was 13 or so. We just played on occasion, usually trying to squeeze in as many holes as possible before it was too dark in a course in a park where deer would swarm the fairways at dusk. We both were terrible but had fun together. Just good to hang out.

Actually, it may have been a scramble that got him going. I remember my first scramble.... probably a few months after I started playing. Played with dad, my uncle, and one of my dad's employees. We were all terrible and actually turned in a card with a score of 89. Yep, 17 over in a scramble. We had no clue. We won trophies for last place and each got a certificate for a group golf lesson at Carl's Golfland. Classic.

In 25 words or less .... My redneck buddy drug me out to a goat track. I'm a lefty, I played righty. I was hooked. Looked for clubs next day.

I played all contact sports up until I was in middle school. I had knee problems since I was 8-9 and I was told to give it a rest and picked up tennis in 7th grade. Since that was a spring sport I wanted to do something that would replace football in the fall and there I wanted to give golf a try. My dad got me my first set for my birthday that year and I tried out for the team in 8th grade and loved that game since. I played all throughout high school and I fell off for a couple years due to tournament paintball but recently picked it back up and love it even more now that I'm older.

For myself, I worked in a golf shop my senior year in high school. Mostly hit balls into our practice net. Finally got around to affording a set, from that day on it has been a journey with my game. Off and on. Played a year of collegiate golf, now I play every other week with some buddies.

Too many sports injuries over the years to really do anything else. A few friends of mine took me out about a year ago, and I was addicted from the get-go. I play way more golf than can be considered healthy.

I got into it last June after having elbow surgery from being a pitcher in college baseball and could not throw over the summer. I ended up getting addicted to it and played multiple times a week over the summer and kept playing once school started back up last fall. Being in my senior year of baseball I have one more semester next fall and will be playing collegiate golf. I have to say I am more excited about that anything. Now only if baseball would end and golf would get here.

Dad played. When I was about 9-10 years old I was watching him make the turn from the swimming pool and I decided I wanted to give it a try.

$135 dollars later I had a full set of Johnny Miller Crest Jr Irons and a 1,3 & 5 wood.

Pops could play. I didn't beat him until I was 17.

I have always had an interest in the game since I was 8 years old or so when my dad would take me to the range with him and as i got older we built a starter set of clubs and I would play maybe 3-4 times a year with him. I never had a strong passion for the game until about 4.5 years ago when my dad, sister, brother in law and I played over a holiday weekend and I realized I had potential to be pretty good and I was hooked from then on. I would like to get into more competitive play this year. I have always enjoyed the competitive aspect and I love when I get the chance to beat my dad or other buddies out on the golf course. My dad finally came to grips last year that I have surpassed him on the golf course, but I think he gets more satisfaction seeing the fruits of what happens when you really work at something you are passionate about. Now if I could just find a career path that I am as enthused about as golf and I'd be set!

Driving range one day with a friend. Alway thought golf was lame. Instantly hooked after a couple of swings.

Baseball was my game, and football. But I lived near a golf course, and found a few balls. I eventually bought a cheap 3,5,7, 9 iron, driver and putter that looked like the kind at the putt-putts. I would hit the golf balls around the yard into some little holes I made, where I mowed the lawn down too low, which turned brown (I was not born to be a greens keeper). I think my Mom felt sorry for me, and at age 14 she drove a friend of mine and I to the course to play our first golf round. What happened next I posted on my recent topic "Your Golf Satisfaction Moment", page 2.

I hurt my knee playing tennis and I needed to do some other sports, I was 30 years old. It so happened I lived close to a golf course with a lighted driving range, my brother in law gave me a forged 4 iron blade and a 9 iron and the addiction has been constant for the last 26 years now.

I was 12 ... the rusty 7-iron I found buried in the garden was probably 15.

I batted rocks and acorns and tennis balls around the back yard for weeks until my Dad got me some plastic whiffle type golf balls.

One day I pured one of those little plastic balls right through a pane of glass on the back of the house.

That weekend my Dad had to replace the window.

I think it was maybe next weekend when he took me to the driving range to hit real balls.

It was love from that day forward

T'was the summer of 93' and I was going into the 7th grade. I played organized team/club sports year round and I was in between baseball and football. My aunt, who was an educator in the public schools, read about a weekly junior golf clinic (on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I believe) at one of the local muni courses. I had absolutely no desire to play as none of my close friends or family played the game. Well, my dad let me use a set of his slick gripped/rusted Northwestern blade irons and some actual persimmon woods. I went to the first clinic and I was hooked. It was cool because I found out that some of my classmates played the game and a few of them were really solid. One of my peers, a friend to this day, was a low single digit handicap at 13 and could hit the ball a country mile back then. It's crazy looking back on time.

I grew up playing basketball, then baseball, then football. High school came and I wanted to do a spring sport (either tennis or golf) even though I had not played either. I chose tennis at the time, and our program was small enough where my athleticism was enough to make the last spot on the tennis team and ended up playing 3 years. Looking back I never would have made the golf team had I tried out. I would still watch golf on tv and vividly remember watching the 2005 Masters shot that Tiger made on 16. That made me want to pick up the game from that point on. I even dug a hole in the backyard the size of a tennis ball and would use a baseball bat as a club and try to hit the tennis ball into the hole.

Fast forward a few years to college and my dad, brother, sister and I all finally got a chance to pick up clubs and play in Cancun. Since then I've been hooked.

Besides basketball, golf has been the only other sport where I can't stop thinking about it during work or around the house and mentally playing shots in my mind, doing practice swings in elevators, bathrooms, etc. (you guys know exactly what I'm talking about). I love this game!

My company sponsors an LPGA Pro-am every year and we have a foursome. I had never played before. Began going to a small driving range and became addicted to trying to hit targets with range balls. A little over 10 years later still totally addicted.

I got a maintenance job at a golf course. The super told me I should learn to play so I knew what I was doing out there, and why things were done a certain way.

I said, "Do I have to?"

That was in 1978.

First member in my family to play golf. Basically I thought of it as lifetime skill, necessary in all types of business enterprise. Ended up becoming a junkie. No regrets!

As I stated elsewhere, my Grandmother raised me through my first 14 years. She was a middle school principal and also a five-time State Women's Amateur Champion, so I remember following her around the course a lot and she never said a word to me about playing until I asked her if I could have a club to swing at age 7. She had one of her Staff Dynapowers 9i's cut down and regripped and told me to swing that for a year, and if at that time, I was still interested, she would give me another club to swing(she ended up giving me two, lol, a 7i & a putter, an 8802). Well, I was and she did.

Fast forward to age 14, she passed away, I moved back with my Rents, and while I had also played football since the age of 7yo, most of my new friends played ball, so while I still golfed quite a bit, as my parents belonged to a club, golf fell behind football, which I played through college. As I went to school in W Va, where golf is a spring sport, I was able to play both HS football and golf. I was a sectional champ, setting the HS scoring record at the Spiedel Course in Wheeling, then proceeded to choke my way through states, lol.

Well, the next five years(I took a redshirt) consisted of playing football, then getting ready to play football, lol.

It was like my first job, lol.

Though I played golf in the summers and was a 4-7 cap, my attention and efforts were elsewhere.

I never realized how much that football had become like a drug, and how "addicted" I was, untill I had played my last game.

I don't believe that it was the actual game itself, though being able to do things on a field that would get me arrested on the street was definitely nice, lol, however, it was more the comraderie, competitiveness and the emotional highs that victory, and yes, the gut wrenching lows of defeat that drove me.

So I looked to golf to fill that void, and it did, for a long time.

Untill about 3 years ago, when the first of a string of events occurred in my life that made me stop and realize what an @sshole I had been.

And it had nothing to do with how I treated others.

I had learned my lessons well from both my grandmother and Mother(her daughter), and I've always treated others respectfully.

I had basically screwed myself.

I never "enjoyed" the game, much like I never really enjoyed football.

And don't get me wrong-

I absolutely loved football, however, after 9th grade, except for the brief high after a victory or well played game, it was like I started over and my @ss was on the line with the next game.

As though my self worth was on the line every time that I took the field.

Golf had become the same, LMAO, and I was'nt even getting paid to play it, unlike football(both HS & college scholarships).

Talk about an @sshole, LMAO.

Well, not anymore.

Though I can't play right now, my mindset is totally different.

I guess l'll find out how different when I lay my first 6i open and drop it in the right green side bunker, or block my first drive into the right treeline, lol.

But I've always been pretty good about doin what I set my mind to, so I'm confident that I'm going to enjoy the game as it should be experienced.

As Ben said, enjoy the walk, cuz you only get to walk these fairways once.

I figured that I just left the shack and got the back nine to go

Nice thread!

Thanks for reading


Fairways & Greens My Friends,
Richard