Last Thursday I shot 89. Struck the ball clean all day. My irons were singing. I had this easy, smooth tempo that felt like it had always been there, like I'd finally figured something out, like the game had decided to let me in on the secret.
Saturday I shot 107 on the same course.
Same clubs. Same shoes. Same coffee order on the way. Nothing changed except everything. The swing that felt automatic on Thursday was gone, replaced by this wooden, mechanical thing I didn't recognize. I was topping it, chunking it, standing over the ball with no idea what my hands were supposed to do. The feel was just... not there.
If you play golf, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And if you're an amateur — a real one, not a "5-handicap amateur" — you know it happens constantly.
This is the central mystery of recreational golf: why can't we be the same golfer two days in a row?
The Inconsistency Nobody Warns You About
When you start playing golf, people tell you it takes time. They tell you to be patient. They tell you about lessons and range sessions and the importance of a good grip. Nobody tells you that ten years in, you'll still have weeks where you feel like you've never held a club before.
Professional golfers are inconsistent too, of course. But their bad day is a 73. Their "I had nothing today" is still a round most of us would frame on the wall. The scale is different.
For amateurs — the ones shooting in the 90s, 100s, 110s — inconsistency isn't a five-stroke swing. It's a twenty-stroke swing. It's the difference between feeling like you belong on a golf course and wondering if you should take up pickleball.
And it's not just round to round. It's hole to hole. You birdie the 5th — an actual birdie, with a real putt that went in — and then you make an 8 on the 6th. Same person. Same round. Different universe.
The Feel Is Real (And It's Temporary)
Golfers talk about "the feel" like it's a spiritual experience, and honestly, it kind of is. When you have it, everything is effortless. You're not thinking about your backswing or your weight transfer or any of the twelve checkpoints from that YouTube video. You're just... hitting the ball. Your body knows what to do and your brain is smart enough to stay out of the way.
When you don't have it, golf is the hardest game on earth. Every shot requires conscious effort. You're constructing the swing from parts, manually, like assembling IKEA furniture without the diagram. And it shows.
The cruel part is that you can't summon the feel. You can't earn it through practice, not directly. It shows up when it wants to, stays for a while, and leaves without warning. It's less like a skill and more like weather.
I've talked to golfers who've played for 30, 40 years. They all say the same thing: it never stops. The ups and downs are the game. The inconsistency isn't a bug. It's the operating system.
Why We Fight It (And Why We Shouldn't)
The natural response to inconsistency is to try to fix it. To take a lesson. Watch a video. Buy a new driver. Change your grip. Rebuild your swing from the ground up because clearly something is fundamentally broken.
Sometimes that helps. Usually it makes things worse, at least in the short term.
Because here's what's actually happening: you're a human being trying to do something extraordinarily complex with a body that changes from day to day. Your sleep was different. Your stress level was different. The temperature was different. You ate a breakfast burrito instead of oatmeal. Your brain is processing a work thing in the background. Your left hip is slightly tighter because you sat weird on the couch last night.
All of those micro-variables add up. And golf, more than almost any other sport, punishes small variations. A few millimeters at impact is the difference between the middle of the fairway and the woods. A fraction of a degree in clubface angle is the difference between a draw and a duck hook.
You're asking your body to repeat a motion to within millimeters of precision, and you're asking it to do it 80+ times in four hours, and you're asking it to do it the same way it did three days ago when your body has literally regenerated cells since then.
Of course you're inconsistent. It would be bizarre if you weren't.
The Golf Mental Game Nobody Teaches You
Every golf mental game article you'll find online is about performing better. Visualization. Pre-shot routines. Breathing techniques. How to stay focused on the back nine. How to close out a round when you're playing well.
That stuff is fine. But it skips the more fundamental question that most weekend golfers are actually asking: how do I not hate this game when I'm playing badly?
Because that's the real mental game for amateurs. Not "how do I shave two strokes" but "how do I not ruin my Saturday because I can't hit a 7-iron today."
Here's what I've learned, for what it's worth:
Accept the Bad Round Before It Starts
Not as a prediction. Not as pessimism. As preparation.
Before every round, I tell myself: "This might be a bad one. And that's fine." It sounds defeatist but it's actually the opposite. It removes the contract I used to have with the game — the one that said "I will perform well and in exchange I will have fun." That contract is a trap. It means bad golf = bad day, and you're going to have a lot of bad golf.
Accepting bad golf rounds as a possibility — a totally normal, expected possibility — means you're never ambushed by them. You're not disappointed because you didn't expect anything specific. And when the good shots come, they're a bonus instead of a baseline.
Stop Comparing Today to Last Week
This is the killer. You shot 89 last Thursday and now you're on pace for 105 and all you can think is "what happened?" You're playing against a ghost version of yourself that existed under different circumstances on a different day.
Let that ghost go. Today is today. This is the swing you have right now. This is the game that showed up. Work with it, not against the memory of something better.
Find the Shot
Even in your worst round, there's a shot. One moment where you made clean contact and the ball did what you wanted. I don't care if it was a putt, a chip, or a tee shot on a par 3. Find it. Hold onto it. Let that be the thing you remember when you think about today.
I had a round last month where I shot 112. Genuinely horrific. But on the 14th hole I hit a 6-iron from 175 yards to about 8 feet. Pure. Clean. It's the only shot I remember from that day, and it's enough.
Talk to Yourself Like a Friend
If your buddy topped a drive, would you say "what is wrong with you? You should be past this by now. You're never going to get better"? No. You'd say "tough one, you'll get the next one."
So why do you say that stuff to yourself?
The voice in your head on the golf course is, for most of us, genuinely terrible. Mean in a way we'd never be to another person. Learning to talk to yourself like you'd talk to a playing partner — with patience, humor, and the understanding that this is hard — is the most underrated mental game skill in golf.
Why the Ups and Downs Are Actually the Point
I know this sounds like cope. Like something you say because you can't actually get consistent so you pretend the inconsistency is a feature. But hear me out.
If you shot 92 every single round, would you keep playing? Think about it honestly. The same score, the same general experience, the same level of performance every time you teed it up.
It would get boring. Fast.
The ups and downs are what create the emotional texture of golf. The low rounds feel incredible because you know what the high rounds feel like. The pure shot on 14 means something because the other 80 shots were ugly. The game lives in the contrast.
And there's something deeper, too. Golf teaches you to be present. You can't live in last Thursday's round because that swing is gone. You can't plan for next Saturday's round because you don't know who'll show up. All you have is this shot, right now, with whatever swing you brought today.
That's not just a golf lesson. That's a life lesson dressed up as a game.
The Golfers Who Last
I play occasionally with a guy named Jim who's 74 years old and has been playing golf since 1972. His handicap has ranged from 8 to 28 over the decades. He's had years where he played his best golf and years where he considered quitting.
I asked him once what kept him coming back through the bad stretches. He said something I think about a lot: "I stopped asking the game to be fair. Once I did that, I could just enjoy the walk."
That's it. That's the whole thing.
Golf isn't fair. It isn't consistent. It doesn't reward effort in any predictable way. It will give you the best round of your life and then take it away the next day for no reason.
And that's exactly why it hooks you. Because every time you tee it up, you don't know what you're going to get. You might have the feel. You might not. You might birdie the first hole and triple the second. You might play terrible for 16 holes and then flush your last two tee shots so perfectly that you drive home thinking "I'm getting close."
You're not getting close. Neither am I. But we'll both be back next weekend, because what if?
What if tomorrow is the day it clicks?
Learning to Love the Scatter Plot
Your golf journey, if you plotted it on a graph, wouldn't be a line going up. It would be a scatter plot. Dots everywhere. Some high, some low, most clustered in a messy middle, with no clear trend line visible to the naked eye.
That scatter plot is your golf life. It's not a failure of consistency. It's the honest shape of what it means to be a human being trying to do something difficult and beautiful and fundamentally unreasonable.
Learn to love the scatter plot. Learn to love not knowing. Learn to love the day when nothing works and you're still out there, hitting it again, because what else would you be doing on a Saturday morning?
The ups and downs aren't obstacles to enjoying golf.
They're the whole reason it matters.