The worst question you could ask a golfer when hoping to have a short conversation is, “How did you play?”
The answer is always more information than you need, and it tends to feature two consistent elements:
1. It could have been better.
2. But there was this one shot.
There is always at least one shot, the kind that brings you back, as the saying goes. Last weekend, in a tournament while working through a series of swing changes, I played predictably poorly, but even then, I could cite a handful of occasions when a breakthrough seemed imminent.
The phrase for this is “shot euphoria,” and as Greg Nathan, the executive director of the National Golf Foundation explains, it’s one of the main reasons many of us ended up as golfers.
The NGF is the body that tracks golf’s overall health—how many rounds are being played, who is playing most often, what drives golfer behavior. While the popular trope in golf is to “grow the game,” Nathan prefers to frame it as “creating golfers,” which means understanding what might turn someone who dabbles in golf into someone who wants to stick around.
The NGF’s research of experimental golfers who become regular players identified four contributing elements. The first two reflect golf culture: comfort in a golf environment and around other golfers. Another is about having enough ability to enjoy the game (which is not the same as being good).
The fourth is shot euphoria.
Although “shot euphoria” sounds less like a data point and more like a ride at Disney World, the NGF takes it seriously, and a golfer can probably understand why. So much of golf is around varying degrees of failure—mitigating mistakes, playing the percentages. Good golf depends more on missing in the right spot than it does knocking down flagsticks. But perhaps because the game is so hard, we crave intermittent reassurance.
“Having the ball travel in the air the way you imagine it in your mind or the feeling of a compressed well-struck shot, that is golf's drug,” Nathan says. “You and I spend the rest of our lives trying to get that little mini-high. If the shot called for a cut, or the shot called for a draw, you created it with your body what you imagined in your mind.”
This last part is important in understanding a golfer’s mindset. Shot euphoria is not a product of divine intervention, but something you did. “A window into your capabilities” as Nathan says. For golfers like me obsessed with getting better, those occasional perfect shots suggest buried somewhere under the pile of self-doubt and inconsistency is the real golfer trying to break free.
It's natural to want those shots every time we stand over the ball, but golf is too stingy to oblige. Yet it usually gives us just enough to want to come back.