Election Day at Mimosa Hills GC
Playing a mini-tour event in rural NC as the election results rolled in.
I played a GPro event this week in Morganton, NC. GPro is one of the better mini-tours in the southeast — expensive to enter, but they’re well run and pay nicely. Morganton is about an hour east of Asheville and ninety minutes northwest of Charlotte. It’s a town of 18,000 where the median household income is about 60% of the national average. Mimosa Hills Golf Club, the host site this week, was incredible shape, but had laid out extensive patches of new sod from which we were granted mandatory free relief. These, along with some deep scarring in a few fairways, were the result of a number of large trees falling during Hurricane Helene.
Going into the week, as an experiment, I told myself I wouldn’t eat at any chain restaurants. I’ve always admired people who find the great local delis and coffee shops in any given town. I’ve long been one for chains, for knowing what I’m getting, but this has started feeling both like a missed opportunity and a sort of complacency. It dilutes the experience of traveling someplace new and says something about me, paying a premium for a lesser product for the sake of comfort. I found a deli online that was well-reviewed, and I stopped by to get an egg sandwich before my practice round.
I expect to see certain things when I walk into a deli: bags of chips on a shelf, a menu above the counter, people preparing food in the kitchen. This deli had none of these. Aside from a single bare shelf and a long-vacant kitchen, the deli was empty save for four rectangular tables, occupied by about a dozen people, North Carolinians from central casting, trucker hats and denim shirts and jeans held up by suspenders, all of whom had turned to look at me. I walked my athletic-fit-hoodie wearing- and rope-hatted-self over to the counter to confirm what I knew, that nobody was working. The eyes at the tables followed me. They kept watching as I went back to the door and left. I got a breakfast sandwich from Starbucks.
After Q School, I took about six weeks to evaluate the state of my game, get a plan together, and make some real strides without a competition on the horizon. As such, this was my first event since Q School, and I felt it. From Hogan, “golf and tournament golf are as different as tennis and ice hockey.” Even after six weeks of working on my move and learning my feels, nothing felt right during the practice round, or during my warmup for the first round. On the first tee, I took a deep breath and decided just to make an 80% swing to see if that would help. I hit a perfect ball, wedged it to 18’, and made the putt for birdie. Golf is a funny game.
On the second tee, in the course of tournament small talk, I asked my playing partner about College Golf Fellowship, whose logo adorned his towel, hat, and a sticker on his bag. CGF is a religious organization that “exists to make disciples by investing relationally with the Gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the world of golf.” I’d been introduced by a former Princeton player who now works for the organization. He’d visited us during Ivy League Championships my senior year, and we’d talked about my role as the sixth man, how I could help my team without playing, how to take care of myself. I’m not Christian, but the perspective was one I needed, and it meant a lot to hear someone say they knew it was difficult for me and mean it.
I asked my playing partner how long he’d been associated with CGF, and he responded since his freshman year of college. He asked if I was Christian. I said I wasn’t, that I grew up agnostic and was most spiritually familiar with Buddhism. He asked what I thought of Christianity. As a non-practicioner, I struggled to find an answer that didn’t sound anthropological. I said that I was generally a fan. I had experienced some people who used their interpretations as justification for being unkind to some people, which he said he was sorry to hear. But my primary feeling was that it brought people together around good values, and that creating community on the basis of love and respect and faith and support was a fundamental good. He was glad I felt that way.
We talked about other things: golf, hometowns, life generally. He’d just gotten married this summer. He’d transferred to Clemson from Anderson University, and he lost thirty credits in the process — he’d had to do a lot of extra school. Most notably, every time we both hit the green, he’d walk over to me, give me a fist bump, and say, “let’s drain these.”
Walking down the tenth fairway, he asked what I thought about the Gospel. I said I wasn’t much familiar. I told him that Buddhism suggests that all beings have karmic predispositions to be more receptive to some forms of insight over others, and, in that sense, at this moment in time, Buddhism spoke to me and my predispositions more than Christianity. But also that Buddhism emphasizes impermanence and constant change, and that I wasn’t ruling out feeling differently in the future. That I could only be true to myself in any given present moment and see where it took me.
He asked if he could tell me about his own faith, and I said yes. He began by telling me that “Gospel” translates to “Good News.” And that this Good News was that God had sent down his Son to die a sinner’s death, and that this action saved all of humanity. And that there was nothing we had to do in return besides accepting His sacrifice into our hearts. There’s immense comfort to be found in the fact that we did nothing to deserve that sacrifice, that it happened anyways.
We kept talking for a bit. I said that I had written a piece on Scottie Scheffler, how he’s spoken about his faith, that his skill as a golfer seems to flow from his skill personhood. He agreed and asked that I send him the article. We talked some more about faith, comfort and confidence to be found in faith, and golf’s ability to act as a vehicle for greater things. He kept coming to me to bump my fist when I had a look at birdie.
He mentioned that CGF held Bible study dinners the night before tournaments. Admittedly, while I’ve heard of Bible studies, I didn’t know what exactly they entailed, and I asked him. He said that someone would pick a verse, they’d talk about it, and they’d discuss how it applied to their lives. He said that there weren’t many places for men to talk about “real stuff,” and that Bible studies were a space for people to come together and discuss what matters. I said that sounded great, mentioning that it seemed there weren’t many places for us to have those sorts of conversations these days. He said that I should come to the next dinner before a GPro event, that I was more than welcome any time.
I think modern Americans have gotten really good at sniffing out insincerity, that we’ve developed robust immune systems against ulterior motivations. And, at first, I wasn’t sure what to make of my playing partner’s questions about faith. CGF’s mission statement, after all, is one of conversion, “disciple making.”
But a place of familiarity helps bridge the gap. And I could tell that anyone who makes an effort to walk across the green and give a fist bump before you hit a birdie putt is someone who wants the best for you, and for all of us. My playing partner wanted nothing more than for things to go well. I try my best to want the same. And, with a familiar playing field helping bridge the divide, two young men who’d never met before were able to have a great conversation about faith and the things that matter. I hope he came away from the experience with as good a feeling as I did.
I’m not a political scientist, or even politically savvy, but I think a lot of people in America today feel left behind. A party just capitalized on this feeling to win an election, and now those on the other side feel abandoned. In either case, a “polarized” America — a term that keeps being used without any sign of going away — means a lot of finger-pointing, each at the other side, making the same accusations: they don’t care, they aren’t working for us, they left us behind.
In response, I’ll leave any personal leanings aside to say nothing more specific than this. This week, I played golf in an unfamiliar part of the country, and I was paired with someone who, on paper, wasn’t much like me. But golf helped us realize we had more in common than we thought. We want the same things: to be happy, and for those around us to be happy. All the rest, to some degree, might just be semantics and noise designed to keep people on their side of the fence.
I realize this position is a privileged one. For a lot of people, these goings on are gravely important matters. But, if I can make an assumption about the Refuge, we’re all golfers. And so we all have golf. Playing golf won’t solve everything. Nor will having conversations with our playing partners. But, if enough conversations are had in enough public places with enough people we thought were different from us but really are pretty similar — maybe, with enough of this, we’ll be in a better place by 2028. Maybe the number of people feeling left behind falls by a bit, and maybe that bit is enough to make campaigns shift tack. Maybe they’ll start running on similarities rather than differences, on how good it feels to be brought together and understand we’re all in this together. Maybe they won’t. But the first step, at least, feels like a start — a first step we can all take now.