I have golf depression, and I'm not handling it well

Last summer, on a magical day at a course here in Durham, NC, I shot a personal best 74 and ascended to the heavens on a white cloud, surrounded a choir of glowing angels. It may sound strange, but if you play golf, you know exactly what I mean. I was truly happy.

I had no expectations after that round. I'd been around this game long enough to know better, and in case I forgot, about 30% of the people I told immediately let me know how awful my next round would be. Still, I could never have expected how bad things would get. The round of my life was in early June. Now it's 14 months later, and I haven't even picked up a club since early spring.

Folks, I am truly sad.

The story of how I got here is boring, so I'll give you the short version: My game tanked, and while that was discouraging (read: hated my life on the course), the real problem started this winter and spring when my right elbow began to hurt. Or maybe "hurt" is the wrong word—it would lock up, where I couldn't fully extend the arm without massaging the joint. It was like something got in the way that I had to smooth out, and if I extended at the wrong moment, I entered a world of pain. I made an appointment to get it checked out—weeks passed, the medical world moving at its usual glacial pace—and I had tennis elbow, which I'd had before, but the bigger problem was a healthy dose of arthritis.

Here's what I hate about going to the doctor: 90% of the time, you don't get a definitive solution. My doctor was great, but the plan of action was a choose-your-own-adventure. The blockage was likely from tiny floating bone fragments called osteophytes, and it was possible that it could only be cleared up by arthroscopic surgery, but also I could just rest and try again, or I could also just keep playing because I wouldn't do permanent damage, and who knows, maybe the arthritis wouldn't get worse?

Faced with a tough decision, I decided to be indecisive. I took the path of least resistance and stopped playing. The pain in my elbow stopped almost instantly. In theory, life is fine. But in practice, even though I've always thought I was good at moving on in life, golf is different. I write about it every day. I watch it every weekend. I'm on text chains with friends who talk about their own rounds in great detail. It's in the air that I breathe, and if I had to describe this feeling in extremely melodramatic terms, I would say it's like my wife left me, and I can't get over it. And maybe it's worse—if the situation were reversed and my wife left me, at least I'd still have golf.

(If my wife is reading this, please don't leave me...at least until I'm playing again.)

My project for this fall is to kill the no golf blues by, yes, getting back out on the course. Right now the biggest impediment for me is fear that the elbow will act up again, at which point I'm back to square one and probably looking at an expensive elective surgery, but as the wise men say, you can't get back to square one if you never leave square one in the first place. But I'd compare the feeling to what it feels like to procrastinate—you're watching your lawn becoming overgrown, and it feels terrible, but at a certain point the devil called inertia takes over and it gets harder and harder to roll that mower out of the shed.

I guess this is the downside of being addicted to golf. When we're playing, we spend a lot of time agonizing over our poor play, and bad breaks, and the difficulty of improving. But man, what I wouldn't give to be back in the throes of all those agonies! It reminds me of the Woody Allen bit comparing life to the two old women who complain about the terrible food at their Catskills resort. "Yeah," says one, "and such small portions!"

I don't want to end this on a corny "enjoy it while you got it!" note, but it does occur to me that even the downsides of golf I experienced after my 74—the disappearance of any semblance of skill, the ensuing anger, the feeling of just wanting to hang it up—sure beat what I'm experiencing now, which is golf death. Turns out, the most frustrating part about golf comes when they take it away. I miss it in a way that picks at my psyche, and I'm willing to do just about anything to get back out there, including changing the scoopy swing that probably led to my elbow issues in the first place.

A rhetorical question for those of you who have experienced the same thing: What did you do when golf came to a temporary or permanent end? (Or, if you'd prefer to make it non-rhetorical, drop me an email at shane.spr8@gmail.com.)

As for me, I'll get back out there soon, probably when the weather cools down a little. I'm going to absolutely stink for at least a few months, if not longer, but what else is golf beyond rolling the dice, accepting the pain, and hoping there's another choir of angels waiting, specifically, for me?