Mikaela's Tenth Life
A replacement 2-iron, a sketchy VRBO, and a wet day in a coffee shop.
There’s an article hanging on the bulletin board in my childhood bedroom titled “Mikaela Shiffrin Does Not Have Time for a Beer.” I haven’t skied since I was eight. But, back in high school, my sports psych showed me the article about an athlete literally too busy winning ski races to do much of anything else. The notion felt greater than aspirational, not so much a human feat but an idea brought to life, like some ancient-Greek human end-state.
When a club stays in my bag long enough, it feels right to name it. My junior year of high school, I put a TMB 2-iron in play. I fell in love with the look of a straight leading edge, and I don’t think I missed a fairway for months. Over the next year, my whole bag turned over, save for my putter, Lilly,[1] and the 2-iron. It was time she got a name, one that reflected how I felt stepping into the ball with her in my hands. She’s been Mikaela ever since.
I played a tournament in Orlando this week. Entry fees are expensive, and I haven’t made a dime playing golf yet, so I went on VRBO and booked the cheapest place in a fifteen-mile radius. So, on Sunday night, pulling onto my street, when I had to stop my car to let a man finish a sequence of jumping roundhouse kicks in the crosswalk, this was just the cost of doing business.
I was eager to get inside — it wasn’t the nicest part of Orlando, and I had work to do. I had an expensive yardage book, a premium weather app subscription, and a Jersey Mikes #7. It was time to pick my targets and plan my way around the course. My host told me the door would be unlocked and the keys on the table.
But the door was locked. I looked in the window: two grocery bags of clothes on the table, a Sharpie highlighter left open on the bed. No keys. I got back in my car and messaged the host that the place seemed occupied. Then, something told me I needed to leave. A car on the street had to stop to let me back out. As I drove off, I looked in my mirror and saw the car pull in the driveway.
I circled the block — maybe it was my host — and drove past the house again, slowly. A dog barked. A younger couple stood on the porch, the man putting the key in the door. The woman stared me down and said something to the man, who looked up at me. I drove off. I parked at a strip-mall smoke shop ten minutes away and booked a room at the Hyatt.
I’d been on my ninth Mikaela for a while until this week. It’s a long saga, how the first eight broke, and I don’t have space to tell it here.[2] The important thing is that last week, after three years of service, Mikaela IX finally gave in.
Here’s the problem. Beneath some force threshold, a metal will bend and spring back into place; but beyond this threshold, it’ll permanently deform. You know this if you’ve ever bent a paperclip or a hairpin. Club manufacturers have to calibrate this threshold when designing a clubface. Too thick, and it won’t spring enough, and other manufacturers’ clubs will play faster. Too thin, and it’ll deform.[3]
The equation gets more complicated when considering different players swing at different speeds. The vast majority of golfers never get close to deformation-level speeds. But the fastest golfers (~124mph+ clubhead speed) can. It’s a fraction of the market too small to cater to. So, for the fastest players, it’s a fact of life that we’ll break golf clubs.
For the last three years, I’ve played a T100s head,[4] Mikaela IX. It’s my security blanket, my emergency swing, my secret weapon, my favorite club. It’s a solid face, not even designed to bend. But, after three years of service and enough balls hit, it finally caved in. I had four days to find a replacement.
Pulling into the course on Monday morning for round one, I had to stop my car again, this time for two black cats crossing the entrance. I’m not sure it’s still considered luck if you know what’s coming, but I already knew what the omen meant. The forecast was cold and windy today, adding a steady rain for tomorrow.
Golf is a game of precision, especially at the highest levels, controlling whatever you can to the best of your ability. A few hundred RPMs of spin, a couple yards of carry, another muscle to activate, a few more grams of fats. Bad weather asks questions that seem silly by comparison, but that are vitally important. Can you make a full turn wearing this extra layer? How long can you keep this second towel dry?
The second day, as my first tee ball hit its apex, I heard a call over the radio that play was suspended. A rain delay is a sort of purgatory. You can’t do anything golf related because the facilities are flooded, but you can’t leave and get lunch, because you could go back out at any time. You just sit around in the lobby, dipping into pre-packed snack rations, and talk with competitors. Always about the same thing: no matter how tightly the ship is run, you’ll discuss how poorly the tournament director is handling weather logistics. Someone needs to be the scapegoat.
Getting back on course involves a taking of stock. I’ve eaten half my snacks, finished my coffee, and drank most of my water. These won’t get replenished. I couldn’t find a hairdryer in the locker room: the towel and rain glove are soaked and won’t dry out. The ball will come out wet and knuckling, and the club will try to escape my hands. The plan is more-or-less out the window; if you’re looking for something to rely on, it’ll have to be something deeper down.
In reality, I only had three days to find a replacement for Mikaela IX: it’d take a day for the glue to set on the reshaft job. After a fruitless search near me, I had to turn to eBay. There was a Titleist 990CB in Portland, OR. A club produced the same year I was born. It’s a solid block of 24-year-old steel, as likely to fail as a crescent wrench. I paid the same price for the club as I did to expedite shipping: $38. When I left on Sunday, Mikaela X was in my bag, still taped up as the epoxy hardened.
I reread the Mikaela Shiffrin article recently, and I think, back in the day, I missed the point. It’s not so much that she’s some preternatural demigoddess of winning. It’s that she achieves all this by working out (with mostly the usual gym gear), a devout commitment to napping, and the comfort of showing up to the race already knowing where the bathroom is should she need it. The extraordinary results come from total commitment to ordinary methods. The sauce isn’t particularly secret.
I first hit Mikaela X — the club — warming up for round one. It was different, a little harder to hit without the modern tech, and a high-toe ball off the second tee left me with a long ways into a par-4. But I started finding the slot, feeling that familiar confidence. Playing the 16th on the second day, a 565-yard par-5, I got 2-iron-2-iron to the front edge.
I had too much material this week. I don’t have space to touch on getting stuck in an elevator when a four-year-old hit the emergency stop, or on the fire alarm going off at the Outback because kids were vaping in the bathroom. It was a long week, and I played shitty again, and I got off the course on day two thinking of nothing besides a hot shower and dry clothes. But, of course, there were no towels in the locker room.
I got in my car, found a quick lunch, bought a legal pad from a pharmacy, and sat down at a coffee shop. A decaf americano and I spent two hours sorting things out, rain from my sleeve bleeding into cheap yellow paper, making some sense, figuring out what to take away. It ended up being pretty simple: stake out a smaller territory and defend it better.
Discomfort’s causes are complex and endless, but comfort’s foundations are simple: have a good plan you know you can execute and execute it. It’s not a checklist but a dance[5], not completed but performed. A small set of absolute controllables, both written on paper and known in being. No matter what comes, the best means of victory — the simplest — remain sovereign and yours. Simple, like solid steel.
[1] I wrote about Lilly for No Laying Up last year, you can read here.
[2] If you’d like a part of the story, you can find it here on No Laying Up’s message board, The Refuge.
[3] Really, there’s two things at play. In drivers, woods, and driving irons, a thinner face flexes more and delivers more spring energy back to the ball. But also, for all clubs, if you can make the face thinner, it’ll be lighter, and you can move more mass to the perimeter of the club. This makes the head more resistant to twisting, and thus more forgiving.
[4] I should note: Titleist clubs, which I play, hold up far better than clubs from OEMs. To illustrate this point: sometimes friends will have me hit their clubs on the range when they start feeling funny or they want a new one. I can usually break stuff from competitive OEMs in 6-8 balls. This is not a Titleist problem, and in fact, they’re doing far better than the competition in this regard.
[5] Shoutout to Lauren Coughlin for this one!