I hate golf | Adrian Chiles

I hate golf. A good walk spoiled? The whole day spoiled, more like. As with many cases of hate, it has its roots in love. You see, I just love the feeling of hitting the ball sweetly. If you feel the same way, then you’re into golf; if you don’t, then you’re not. But I am, and from the moment I struck a ball sweetly for the first time, I was hooked. It happened playing my first proper round of golf, off the third tee at the Gower Golf Club. Woomph. Making hardly a sound and barely seeming to make an impact as club hit ball, off it went. And that was me.My logic ran that if I could play like that as an absolute beginner, imagine what I could do with a bit of practice. I strode up to my ball on the fairway and, swinging with great confidence, played an air shot. Missed it completely. Pretending this was but my practice swing, I tried again, and this time made contact with the ball, but mostly with the ground, causing lasting damage to the fairway. The ball advanced all of six inches. Welcome to golf.That a complete novice can hit a proper shot is both the best thing about golf and the worst. It draws you in, giving you great encouragement. But it also drives you nuts when, unaccountably, you suddenly can’t do it. Other skills aren’t like this. Take the piano. To play even just the slow opening bit of Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata would take years of practice. Nobody ever sat at a piano, with no experience, and on day one played anything resembling Beethoven. Yet in golf, it is kind of possible. And it’s equally possible, moments later, to find yourself quite incapable of doing anything of the sort.Imagine being able to knock out some Beethoven, yet a minute later finding yourself unable to give a recital of Chopsticks. That’s golf. Consider being skilled enough in the kitchen to cook from scratch a starter of butter-poached scallop, followed by beef wellington for the main course. And then finding yourself unable to serve up a scoop of ice-cream out of a tub for pudding. That’s golf.I started playing too late, in my early 30s, so in golfing parlance I was always playing three off the tee. If you don’t get that, don’t worry – you’re not missing much. The point is: you need to start young, hardwiring the sense of what it takes to strike a ball. Any clown, as I found, could hit it sweetly now and then. Repeating the feat, not so much.Naively enough, I set about addressing this by practising and playing and practising and playing for hours and days on end. In most other pursuits, the hours I put in would have seen me reach some level of reliable competence. In piano, I might not have been playing with the London Philharmonic, but I would have got north of grade 5 and been able to hold my own for 15 minutes on one of those uprights they leave lying around in train stations. But that’s not how golf works. At least for me it wasn’t. Any discernible improvement was so haphazard that it only ever felt like a different iteration of failure. While the good shots got slightly better and more numerous, the improvement in the bad shots lagged behind.It didn’t help that I pinned too much on the whole enterprise. I kept telling myself that I took it up because it was the only sport at which I could hope to improve as I got older. So, in my mind, it became nothing less than an exercise in defying the passage of time. I played so much – whatever the weather, on my own, with friends, with strangers – every round demoralising and encouraging me in equal measure. After a bad round it was not unknown for me to go to the driving range and hit hundreds of balls in a futile rage of desperation to put things right.I had hundreds of lessons, which would invariably conclude with me reliably swinging and striking like a champ and fair salivating at the prospect of my next round, which went as pear-shaped as all the others. Overthinking anything is rarely helpful; with the technical aspects of the golf swing, it’s disastrous. Speed, grip, stance, wrist, elbows, hips, shoulders, head and a dozen other things all demand consideration, and that’s just during the backswing.I once played in a pro-am with those legends of football and golf Kenny Dalglish and Laura Davies. On the first tee, the announcements of their names were rapturously received. Mine less so, but I didn’t care. My only worry was for the safety of the spectators lining the tee. Miraculously, my first tee shot wasn’t terrible. One hand might even have clapped. After that I played like a drain. I bombarded poor Laura with technical questions until her patience snapped and she told me to just shut up and hit the effing thing.The end came one Saturday in Pitlochry. Nine holes on the morning of a friend’s wedding. After eight holes of tragicomic ineptitude, I decided that I was done with golf for ever. I then played the ninth like a master, but I wasn’t to be fooled. By the time I got to the charity shop to dump my clubs, it had closed for the afternoon, so they survived the cull. But in the 20 years since, I’ve played only a dozen times, which is about as much as my shattered self-esteem can take. Playing with no expectation of my game makes it more tolerable, but only a little. In general, it’s nothing less than triggering.I played on Sunday, at the idyllic Langland Bay course on Gower, with three of my closest, most easygoing friends. This is just fun, it’s great to be here, what’s not to love? This is what I said to myself, like a mantra. It worked for a while, until I found that the bad shots appalled me still and, to the bafflement of my friends, the good shots darkened my mood even more. “But you’re playing well!” they protested. Yes, that’s the problem. I fear being drawn back in. And I allow myself no joy at a good shot because I know that it’ll only make the inevitable subsequent crap shot feel so much worse. Nice course, lovely people but, sorry, there’s no going back. I hate golf. Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist