Let me tell you about the exact moment I became a golfer.

I was standing on a tee box somewhere in suburban Miami, holding a borrowed driver that probably cost more than my first car, wearing khakis I’d ironed specifically for the occasion like some kind of eager intern on his first day. My fraternity Big Brother had handed me this gleaming Callaway Big Bertha and said — and I quote — “Just swing natural. Don’t overthink it.”

I swung natural.

The ball traveled approximately 40 yards. Sideways. Into a creek that I’m fairly certain wasn’t on the scorecard.

He handed me another ball without making eye contact. I hit that one too. Also sideways. Same creek. Different splash.

“You’re a natural,” he said, in the exact tone a doctor uses when they’re about to tell you bad news.

That was the beginning. And somehow — inexplicably, masochistically, against all available evidence that I should take up literally any other hobby — I never stopped.

Part One: The Athlete Who Had No Business Picking Up a Golf Club

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about being a former multi-sport athlete: it makes you worse at golf, not better.

I played baseball through high school. Ran distance track. Played some basketball and a little Volleyball for fun. I had the kind of athletic background that makes people at cocktail parties say “oh, you must be a natural golfer then!” and I have to smile politely and resist the urge to describe in clinical detail what my first hundred rounds looked like.

I got several baseball try-outs, 3 Colleges no scholarships. I thought I had real skills. I understood sports at a muscular, intuitive level that had nothing to do with thinking and everything to do with doing.

Golf laughed at all of that. Golf put on a little top hat, twirled a cane, and absolutely laughed at all of that.

The baseball swing — that beautiful, flat, rotational weapon I’d spent fifteen years building — turned out to be golf’s natural enemy. Every instinct I had was wrong. Every adjustment I made made it worse. I was a guy with a toolkit full of hammers trying to perform surgery.

The arm injury that ended my baseball career? That’s a whole separate story. But here’s the darkest comedy of it: baseball broke my fastball, and then I voluntarily picked up golf, which is essentially baseball’s passive-aggressive cousin who wants you to think while you swing.

The audacity. The absolute audacity.

Part Two: The Big Bertha and the Brotherhood

My fraternity Big Brother — and I’m going to protect his identity here because he might one day read this blog and will absolutely text me — introduced me to golf the way all dangerous habits get introduced: through friendship, free equipment, and a complete absence of adequate warning labels.

He was the kind of guy who made golf look easy, which should have been the first red flag. People who make golf look easy are either lying or they’ve made a deal with some kind of cosmic entity whose terms you do not want to know about.

He handed me those Callaway Big Berthas like he was passing down an heirloom. And in a way, he was. Those clubs represented something — the game’s promise that you could smash something enormous and beautiful with a stick and watch it sail into the sky, and that this was a perfectly acceptable way to spend your Saturday.

I’ve been a Callaway guy ever since. Not because I’m loyal out of habit. Because those first clubs taught me the game is supposed to feel like something when you hit it right. And occasionally — on the rarest of days, in the most fleeting of moments — I hit it right.

That’s the drug. That’s always been the drug.

Part Three: The Three Times I Almost Quit (And Why I Didn’t)

Quit Attempt #1: The Great Score Card Incident of Year Two

By year two, I had convinced myself that understanding the mechanics of the golf swing — watching videos, reading instruction books, taking one lesson from a pro who told me my grip was “unconventional” with the energy of a man trying not to scream — would translate into actual improvement on the course.

It did not.

I shot a 114 in a round I’d prepared for with genuine seriousness. A hundred and fourteen. On eighteen holes. You do the math. Triple bogeys felt like achievements. Double bogeys felt like birdie.

I stood in the parking lot after that round, clubs in hand, and had a serious internal conversation about whether this game deserved any more of my finite time on earth.

I went back the following weekend. Same result, spiritually speaking.

But here’s what kept me: the two shots in that 114-round that were genuinely, objectively, undeniably good. Two shots out of — I don’t want to do the full count — a lot of shots. And those two shots felt so good, so real, so athletic in a way my whole body recognized, that they canceled out everything else.

Golf is a psychological operation and it has never once failed to work on me.

Quit Attempt #2: The Discovery That Golf Is Expensive

I don’t need to explain this one at length. You know. You’re here. You golf.

I will say only this: there came a moment when I added up what I had spent on golf in a single calendar year and I had to go lie down for a while. Not because I was devastated. But because I was trying to figure out whether I’d crossed the line from “enthusiast” to “situation.”

I crossed the line from enthusiast to situation somewhere around year three. I’ve made peace with it.

The budget did not survive. The habit did.

Quit Attempt #3: The Revelation That Golf Has a Culture Problem

This one’s real and it still gets me.

There came a point — and it came on after years of playing, years of loving the game, years of reading about it and thinking about it and caring about it more than a grown adult probably should — when I started noticing the game’s shadows.

The exclusivity. The way certain clubs still treat certain people. The way money has been allowed to sit at the table of golf and redecorate the house. The Saudi sovereign wealth fund that decided it could buy legitimacy through a sport, slapping a brand on something old and honest and complex and calling it content.

I almost quit not because of my scores but because of my discomfort with some of what golf is, culturally and structurally.

I didn’t quit. And I’ll tell you why: because I decided the game itself was worth fighting for, not running from. The game — the actual game, the walk in the morning dew, the impossible par-3 over water, the moment a stranger in your group makes a forty-foot putt and you go completely nuts because it’s golf and that’s what you do — that game is worth more than the worst people and worst money that have attached themselves to it.

I stayed. I started writing about it instead.

Part Four: Why Triple Bogey?

People ask me this, and I love the question because the answer is very stupid and also very true.

The name “Triple Bogey” is not ironic. It is not aspirational. It is not a brand strategy. It is a description.

I triple bogey holes. Regularly. With conviction. Sometimes I follow a triple bogey with a double bogey and I think to myself: that’s growth.

I chose the name because it immediately tells you who I am and what this is. This isn’t a golf content account run by someone who shoots in the 70s and wants you to think about launch angles. This is an account run by someone who has deposited approximately forty-seven balls into the same water hazard over the course of their golfing life and has feelings about it.

The handle is honest in a space where a lot of golf content is not. Everyone performing perfection. Everyone posting their best shots. Meanwhile I’m out here celebrating surviving a round with my dignity mostly intact.

Triple bogey. That’s the whole thing.

Part Five: What This Blog Is

Here’s what I want this blog to be, now that you’ve read this far and presumably have some interest in either golf or watching someone be publicly honest about their relationship with a game that does not love them back consistently.

I want it to be funny. Real funny — not golf-newsletter-funny, which is a specific and tragic genre that has never once made anyone laugh out loud.

I want it to be honest. About the game, about the industry, about the money, about the parts of golf culture worth celebrating and the parts worth questioning loudly at family dinners.

I want it to be for the people who love golf not because it’s easy but because it isn’t. For the people who take three to get out of a bunker and still want to come back next week. For the people who’ve read every instruction tip and watched every tutorial and are still, somehow, leaving the ball twenty feet short of the green on their approach from 130 yards.

You know who you are. I am you.

Welcome to Triple Bogey ATL. I’m glad you’re here. Grab a cart, try not to hit anyone, and for the love of everything holy — mark your ball.

Follow @triplebogeyatl on Instagram for golf content, hot takes, and the ongoing documentation of a man who has not yet made par on the 18th hole at any course he’s played more than twice.