Eight Golf Lessons from Full Swing

When I told my husband that I had binge watched the Netflix pro-golf documentary series Full Swing, he looked at me with bemusement tinged with horror, as if he just discovered me sitting on the kitchen floor surrounded by empty cans of White Claw with my face covered in Dorito dust. It just doesn’t happen. I’ve never binge watched anything in my life, but the golfers featured in Full Swing had me mesmerized.

From the analytic intensity of spreadsheet-driven Matt Fitzpatrick, to the laid back breakout star of the series Joel “Somebody’s gotta be the 70th best in the world. It might as well be me!” Dahmen, Full Swing is a master class in how to be CEO of the weirdest, most brutal, and mentally tormenting business in the world. Golf

Here are eight things I learned from Full Swing.

1. They call it the Waste Management Open because everyone who attends the tournament that opens the golf season in Phoenix manages to get totally wasted. WM is the excitement and party atmosphere that the Saudi-backed LIV golf tour aspires to, without the bone saw baggage. 

2. The choice of life partner tells you a lot about a golfer. Is the partner's role primarily ornamental or elemental? 

Here’s a thought experiment for ya. Imagine various players from the LPGA tour being featured in a Netflix series entitled One-Tenth of a Full Swing or Full Putt to reflect the massive disparity in average income between the men’s and women’s tours. Let’s say we were introduced to Jean-Paul, the husband of Brooke, a previously successful but now struggling golfer who has changed her look from golfer to platinum blonde skateboarder to try to enliven her game. Would Jean-Paul sashay around the pool in a string Speedo to try to distract Brooke from her troubles? Would he appear in a sultry Sears Portrait Studio photo with his famous hockey-player mother?

If so, you can expect to see Jean-Paul in the backseat of a diamond-encrusted LIV golf cart waving to the crowd in a tank top that shows off his ample pecs.

3. A good golf swing is the sexiest thing a man can do in public. A bad golf swing is like watching Seinfeld’s Elaine jerky dance. It’s not gonna get you a good lie.

4. For some reason Jupiter Florida is the center of the golf universe. Maybe it’s because Jupiter’s journey within the solar system is similar to that of the beginner's golf ball, taking roughly 700,000 years to reach its target destination.

5. Accepting the mega millions offered to join the LIV golf tour is about providing for my children’s, grandchildren's, and my grandchildren’s children’s futures.

NOT!

Brooks Koepka gave Netflix the stock reason why he chose to accept mountains of money to join the renegade LIV golf tour sponsored by a murderous, misogynist, gay-lashing regime. Future generations of Koepka will have the gift of waking up in the presidential suite in a Monaco luxury hotel surrounded by naked people they don’t know. The LIV tour will die, but a sense of purposelessness, isolation, and unearned specialness will live on as an inheritance.

6. Golf is a mental game with much bench pressing, medicine ball throwing, and pulley pulling. For all the talk of the mental game, I didn’t see anyone doing anything mental. Everyone knows that golf is an extremely macho sport, but would it have been so horrific to show somebody on a meditation cushion in their private jet fortifying their ability to focus?

7. For a game that’s all about winning, you sure lose a lot in golf. And if you don’t make the cut, you’ve worked for nothing.

Or have you worked?

8. “It’s the game of golf, not the work of golf.” - Mike Thomas (Justin Thomas’s father)

It’s better to think that golf, and life, is all about having fun enjoying the game while it lasts.