When I was a teenager playing at the Elks Golf Club in northeast Calgary in the late 1970s, there was a member — I think his name was Randy — who was always on the range. I have no idea if Randy, who looked about 35, worked or had family or friends. He was a skilled swinger of the club, but I don’t recall seeing him play a round. He was just always on the range, usually wearing a frustrated scowl.

Even more memorable, though, was Randy’s training aid. It was a Velcro harness type thing wrapped around his chest and right bicep to keep that arm nestled against his rib cage during his backswing and downswing, yet somehow allowed for a release in his follow-through. I imagine he suffered from MBDS (Miller Barber Derangement Syndrome, which I just invented), a debilitating neurotic fear that a flying right elbow will banish you to golf purgatory from which there is no earthly recovery. Now that I think about it, perhaps Randy wasn’t even obsessed with golf, per se; his affliction was more like being consumed with the chord change in the eighth bar of “Hey Jude” rather than with The Beatles.

Anyway, no matter the granular sub-strata of swing technique that preoccupied Randy, I don’t think he ever fully scratched that itch. I was a junior and intermediate member at Elks for five years, and he was attached to that device as much on my last day there as my first.

Being fixated with one’s swing is a path of obsession many golfers take. In fact, such avenues existed long before roads were even paved. It’s been a sport for obsessives for so long that documentation outlining as much dates to March 6, 1457.

It was on that day that King James II of Scotland used an Act of Parliament to ban golf and football since the populace was chasing balls around instead of practising archery to ward off the English. The exact words of the Act were that “ye futebawe and ye golf be uterly cryt done and not usyt.” Or, for those who don’t speak ancient Scots, “football and golf should be utterly condemned and stopped.” Incredibly, this Act remained on Scotland’s legislative rolls until 1906, at which point lawmakers probably resigned themselves to the fact that 450 years of trying to stamp out golf hadn’t worked.

The point of this historical interlude is to illustrate that even when golfers didn’t have access to launch monitors and milkshakes at the halfway house, they were still crazy about the game. So much so that kings of the day considered it a threat to national security. The Saudi Public Investment Fund aside, not many people think that now, but golf was, and remains still, a magnet for the obsessed. The question is, why?

Deborah Graham is a longtime sports psychologist based out of Boerne, Texas, whose extensive client list includes the winners of a combined 31 majors. She also works with Wil Bateman, a Korn Ferry Tour member from Edmonton. Bateman has acknowledged how Graham has helped him to see golf through a more creative lens. It has worked. After years of grinding away, Bateman led the PGA Tour Canada points list in 2022 and has several top-five Korn Ferry Tour finishes in the past two seasons. Graham knows how golfers think, so I asked her what makes the sport so obsessive.

“First off, there’s a difference between obsessive/neurotic in a functional way and an unhealthy way,” she said. “In the unhealthy one, they centre their lives on golf usually for an underlying psychological reason that they haven’t dealt with.”

She went on to add that our level of obsession is related to our personalities and how those trigger the elements of the game with which we are so familiar. Some of us like to be challenged, and because golf is impossible to master, we keep returning to the game to try and try again. Some of us like to be competitively dominant, which turns golf into an intense experience. Both traits can lead to obsession. In golf, we sometimes feel in control because it’s just us and the ball. Of course, we know that’s an illusion. Nevertheless, it’s what brings control-dominant people back to the course. “That type strives for macro-control,” says Graham. “And they’re very competitive.”

But what is obsession, anyway? The word does tend to induce certain pre-set interpretations, in that we often think of obsessives as people who tip over into the dark side. Many a film noir has featured obsessive characters doing nasty things to unsuspecting and non-obsessed people. Hannibal Lecter was obsessed with tidiness, for instance. Travis Bickle was obsessed with the criminal underworld. I would humbly suggest these are not role models through which to view a sports obsession. Being obsessive about something like golf does not necessarily mean it has to be dark or unhealthy.

Take Cam Macleod, for instance. In 2023, Macleod submitted the most rounds played to Golf Canada’s scoring centre, with 362. Yes, you read that right. He has been amongst the top 10 active players for many years running. I reached out to Macleod by email to see if he’d be willing to chat about his obvious attachment to golf. His response could not have been more on point.

“Hi Curtis,” he wrote back. “I have no problem having a chat with you, but I am usually on the course.”

Macleod did eventually find time to answer a few questions. He’s 71 years old and still carries a nine-handicap due, he says, to a focus on the short game. Playing out of Victoria’s Uplands Golf Course, Macleod told me that he obviously views golf as a major part of his life, but that it didn’t seem to interfere too much with his home life or other obligations. He’s still married, so that’s something. When the weather is nice, he and his wife will skip over to the local nine-hole track for a quick outing. “And by the way,” he said, “those 41 nine-hole rounds we played last year aren’t part of my total Golf Canada rounds.” Which means he averaged more than one game per day in 2023.

If Macleod is obsessed, he certainly isn’t the only one. We all know someone on that spectrum and might often wonder how they got there. Some have speculated it might even be related to our actual physiology. In 2007, John Paul Newport wrote a story for The Wall Street Journal entitled, “The Science of Golf Addiction.” In that piece, he noted that the social scientist B.F. Skinner discovered the power of intermittent reinforcement roughly 90 years ago. “Brain-imaging research has shown that rewards distributed intermittently trigger significantly higher releases of pleasure-inducing dopamine than the same rewards distributed on a more predictable basis,” he wrote, adding that this is precisely what happens with golf. “Since most golfers hit only two or three really excellent shots per round, and they never know when those shots are coming —maybe this time! — the surge of pleasure when they do connect is, well, addictive. (That’s what) keeps us coming back … the drive for mastery and control.”

There are those words again, mastery and control, the same ones Graham used to caution us against golf taking up too much of our life space.

It’s just so important, said Graham, to make sure, counterintuitively, that if you want to excel at golf, you don’t put it at the centre of your life. Why? Because you’ll never master it. Ever. “Golf cannot be your identity,” she said. “It’s something you do. Make sure that you’re not trying to control too much. I’m a heart-based person, and I think there is a universal energy that can flow through us. If you get obsessed, you block that flow, and you’ll struggle with the game. Most players in a control mode just think, work harder, work harder, work harder, but you have to remember, golf doesn’t work that way. It is more like an art. You have to be able to be creative.”

Graham likes to give her clients a variety of personality tests that offer insights into how they view themself in relation to golf. In one test, she’ll divide 100 per cent of a person’s life into sectors such as career, personal life, family, friends and relationships. She will then ask them to examine and record where — or if — golf fits into each of those sectors. A professional player will record golf as the main aspect of his or her career. The problems start to arise when golf bleeds into every other section. If you have only friends who golf, and all you talk about is golf, and if all your extracurricular hobbies have something to do with golf, if your free time is spent trolling the internet for deals on new clubs, if you use only one button on your television remote and it’s set to the Golf Channel, well, then you might need to rethink your relationship to the game. Or, as Graham put it, “If it gets top-heavy to the point that you’re centering your life on golf, then we need to make a correction.”

When it comes to self-examination, a little honesty never hurts. I think a lot about golf. But I also think a lot about things that have nothing to do with golf. Am I obsessive? I do sometimes think about golf lying in bed at night when I’m having trouble falling asleep, but this is only because I have found that replaying favourite rounds in my head is a bit like counting sheep. I usually don’t make it to the 18th hole before I fall back asleep. I think this is probably a good sign. I do sometimes stop and assess my flawed wrist position at the top of my swing if I find myself in front of a mirror. However, when I see in my reflection that I’m no longer flexible enough to make a full backswing, I simultaneously observe that I’m probably too old to effectively change anything in my golf game anyway. This is the literal definition of a lose/lose.  I like planning trips and outings, but I don’t overdo it. I play in tournaments and sometimes feel proud, and other times dispirited, by my results. But I don’t worry about it too much. I watch golf on television only if Rory McIlroy is playing or if it’s a major or a host course I like.

So, assessing the available evidence, I would say that I love golf but am not obsessed with it. This a good thing. Macleod admitted that some might view him as obsessed, but if he is, he said, at least it’s something with a big upside. “My family are all happy I am doing something I enjoy,” he wrote before trying to unpack those aspects of it that might be a bit unusual. “Yes, my SUV may look like a tour van, and my golf shoe budget is a little higher than most. I have become quite adroit in interpreting weather conditions and frost delay potential. And don’t get me started about golf superstitions! I will never putt when there is another ball in the hole; it will never go in. I have many golf shirts that will never see the light of day for months after a bad round. But really, playing golf every day is just what I love to do. It’s a bit like living a dream.”

Macleod, who we might label Obsessive Positive, seems to have the perspective that many lack, which is when the dream becomes more of a nightmare. “I suppose there are times when I can get a little edgy,” he shared, “but never to the extent that I would throw a club or dampen someone else’s experience. To me, even since 9/11, the world has become a different place, and people are looking for a bit of sanctuary from it all. I think golf goes a long way to providing some relief. It’s pretty hard to dwell on negative issues while surrounded by good company in a beautiful environment.”

No argument there. But when the game frustrates you, when you are disappointed regularly in yourself, when you swear and curse and throw clubs and act rudely at the course, when you spend recklessly on golf, when all these negatives are in play and yet you still cannot stop thinking about the game, and you are letting it control your life, then you are Obsessive Negative. At that point, Graham explained, you might even need to talk to someone to reshape not just your relationship with golf but with yourself, because your dysfunctional relationship with the sport is most likely the expression of something deeper.

“It’s funny,” said Graham, “I tell parents of some of the younger players we work with that even if their child doesn’t get a college scholarship or become a professional player, the lessons we’re trying to teach are actually things that will help you even more in life. If you learn competence, if you learn to manage your tension, if you learn to improve your focus, if you learn to manage your anger, these things carry over into life.”

In other words, learning these skills might turn you into a better golfer, but they’ll almost certainly make you a better and non-obsessed person. So, Randy, if you’re alive and well and reading this, please, ditch the swing gadget and hit the course. You’ll be all the better for it, I promise.