One of the fun parts of letting go of your childhood is learning the little lessons you’ve managed to retain.
I don’t know how old I was when my father first dropped his favorite pearl of wisdom. I don’t remember why he said it. But I can still hear the sentence in my head, spoken in Dad’s playful intonation, as if to emphasize its inherent truth. I suspect I always will.
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
It took me a while to realize the meaning of those words, and even longer to realize that they referred to them me. But the answer came when I least expected it: on a golf course that was going the wrong way.
I realized my perspective changed when my rental car rolled down the highway somewhere in northern Michigan the evening after my 28th birthday. The emotion wasn’t really melancholy or wistfulness, but something deeper: I was confronted for the first time with the strangeness of growing older.
At twenty-eight I was not yet old. More importantly, I didn’t feeling old. In fact, I felt exactly the same age I did when I graduated in 2019 – still wide-eyed, green and hungry. But then I looked at the calendar and realized that Syracuse University’s class of 2025 had just graduated ten years after my arrival on campus. I was as close to the class of 2025 as the class of 2013 was to me…that is, I was old.
I spent a few minutes in a spiral, struggling with the sinking feeling that I had fallen behind. I was 28 and young. But my chance to achieve real relevance at a young age, to become the whiz kid I always thought I would become, was fleeting. If I blinked, I’d be 30 and washed. And Than What? Living a life as a writer with minimal influence? Become a rejected golf media curmudgeon? Do you continue to play bad golf? Moving to the suburbs? sheet metal.
It didn’t help that I was in Michigan for a golf trip that would bring back the glory days. For months, my college buddies had dreamed of this long weekend in Northern Michigan as a long overdue reunion: a golf trip through God’s country as a convenient excuse to rekindle our friendship. Instead of remembering my younger self, I now drove through the woods, afraid he would disappear.
The next morning we got up early. The sun climbed quickly over Forest Dunes Resort, the latest in a series of unusually cool June days that promised 15 hours of daylight. Within minutes of our arrival, we teed off on the course I hoped would be the crown jewel of our trip: The Loop, a reversible Tom Doak design that plays in a different direction every day.
I’d been to The Loop once as a younger myself—a wide-eyed 22-year-old who thrived mostly on anxious energy and bravado—and I remembered the experience as a gateway drug to golf addiction: mind-altering, perspective-expanding, and generally trippy.
We played our first round and the reviews were lukewarm. Pretty good. Cool. Different. The highest handicaps on our trip appreciated that The Loop’s fairways were 200 yards wide at times (it had been a tough weekend on the scorecard); the lowest handicaps enjoyed everything playing firm and fast.
But then we came back the next morning to play our second round, and I watched the golf course come to life. The same mounds that had protected the green now served as backstops, causing off-line approach shots to spin back toward the flagstick. The same bunkers that magnetized a miss to the left now punished a miss to the right. Often the best shot was not a towering drive or a quick chip, but a bunt with a 4-iron. Everything echoed everything else, but nothing repeated.
The sun rose as our round reached the halfway point, and as we waited for the green to clear on a deceptively devilish par-3, we paused for a beer. We sat on the spongy grass, sipping and laughing as we retold the stories of the long weekend. My worries disappeared.
It wasn’t hard to understand why. The Loop was everything I loved about golf: playful, creative and thought-provoking. The second time it was even better than the first – and the goodness was only enhanced by the fact that I had already seen it.
Apparently my friends agreed.
“That was completely insane.”
“I didn’t get it yesterday, but I get it now.”
“Okay, that was incredible.”
“The fairways were wider yesterday.”
As the rave reviews poured in, I thought about my father.
When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
The route, the shot variety, hell – even the method of transportation had changed from our first round to our second – and everything about the experience got better. There was less pressure, more laughter and even more birds. The Loop had transformed from a good trail to a great trail… and all we had to do was walk in the opposite direction.
I wish I could say that The Loop has taught me to ease my worries about growing older—that I’ve learned that the best things in life come at the intersection of experience and wisdom. That didn’t happen.
What I learned at The Loop is that it’s okay not to know, okay if things aren’t what you thought they would look like.
If you look hard enough for a new perspective, you’ll find one – and maybe that’s not the only thing that’s changing.
You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.
#played #played