Learning Day: And Then God Created Golf 🌭 (Patreon)

Have you ever seen a book and thought that if everyone who owned it were Thanos-snapped out of existence all at once, the world would be a significantly better place? Friends, I now present to you … And Then God Created Golf, a book that made me change my opinion on book burning. I don’t agree with this lifestyle, and maybe destroying it at the cost of human decency and personal freedom is actually kind of cool.

Let us pray, for a better golf swing, amiright boooooys. This book promises inspiration to improve your game and your life, but I don’t see how that can be true unless you’re picturing Judas’s ding dang face on the ball so you can hit it extra far. I’ll try not to be too skeptical, though, as we explore this book together with an open heart and a wide stance.

The book begins with an intro by professional golfer Tom Lehman, who, a quick Google search tells me, is very passionate about golf books. He wrote The Golf Quick Book, Golf’s Sacred Journey, and A Passion For The Game, which I’m pretty sure is also the title of a book where two hockey players kiss. In the intro, Tom says that it “examines the many aspects of the game of golf as pictures of our spiritual lives as we give ourselves to the greatest of teaching pros, God’s own Son. Jesus Christ.”

He really flipped that chair around, sat down backward, and said, “You know who else was probably pretty good at golf? Jesus Christ.” Is this true, though? I feel like The Lord has made his thoughts about golf pretty clear considering it’s the sport with the leading number of lightning strike deaths.

Each chapter in the book begins with a tasteful black and white close up of a golf ball and a topic that will be covered, like short game, recovery, and hazards. Then there’s an overdramatic quote about how difficult and frustrating golf is. I have to wonder if your sport is really that hard if you had to incorporate little electric vehicles in it because most of the players are too old to safely walk long distances. It’s the only sport where you get to drive around the court slowly, drinking while you play, but sure, it’s hard, I guess. Not a lot of people are getting actively drunk while they play football or basketball. The players don’t get a snack cart in baseball, but go off.

Imagine how much a Field Of Dreams For Golf would suck. In 2022, there was a 68-year-old man who won a major professional tournament. Watching all of these ancient golfers hobble out of the corn, you’re really going to question if sports necromancy is ethical or if you should have let these old men rest in peace.

When the quotes aren’t super over dramatic they’re Statler and Waldorf jokes the Muppets would reject. But I can’t be too mad about those; golf has a long history with corny jokes. It’s like being mad about their grand tradition of ugly outfits. I’m not going to insult their culture even if it's objectively terrible.

But this isn’t just about golf, right? It’s about The Lord, our God. The meat of the book is fun facts about golf followed by reflections about how golf relates to the lessons you can learn from the Bible; lessons like women suuuuck. It says that in the bible, right?

Hilarious. I’m just kidding. The lessons we can take from our relationship with golf to our relationship with God aren't as concrete as "women suck." They sound a lot more like this:

And that is how your relationship with God is like your short game in golf. Any questions? A Lot? One of them is: what about the environmental and financial ethics of using huge swaths of land to make pretty places for God’s least favorite game? Sorry, we’re not taking any questions.

I also think it’s weird to assume God loves golf when he supposedly hates horny people and this game cares way too much about holes. Everything is holes, balls, strokes, handling your equipment. God hates when you handle your equipment, but this book is constantly talking about it. Explain that! The final chapter in the book is called the nineteenth hole, friendship and fellowship, and that's the title of a classic '90s golf porno; I'm not going to look it up, I just know it.

I also think the black and white ball photography evokes a tasteful nude hanging in an art gallery. All of the pictures in the book are black and white, and many of them are reused several times, which makes me think the black and white is less a stylistic choice and more to keep printing costs down. God isn't made of money, you know. And golf is a famously affordable sport for the everyman.

They do a decent job of hiding the photo reuse on everything except a single pair of golf shoes that seem to pop up everywhere. Page 55: golf shoes. Page 61, clearly the exact same shoes from a slightly different angle. Page 91: same shoes, same angle. I just saw the shoes thirty pages ago; do I really need more shoes right now? Apparently yes, because on page 115 it’s the same shoes again and on paige 121, hey, what’s that? The exact same shoes. Radical. That is not even half the times the shoes appear in this book. What I have mistaken for a book might actually be a stealth marketing shoe catalog for exactly one pair of shoes.

Let us pray it is a shoe catalog, and we’ll pray about it in the same way the prayers in this book are written, a way that ties into the overall narrative of what we’re praying about as abstractly as possible. It’s like they’re trying to hide a little bit of golf in the prayer so God will accidentally grant their golf wishes without noticing. Sure, treat God like a toddler who needs you to sneak some cut-up broccoli into His mac and cheese so He doesn’t get scurvy. I say He for God because the men submitting the prayer from this book are absolutely praying to a boy God:

“Thank you, boy God, who is definitely a boy and also had a son because making more boys is the most boy thing you can do. Please prepare me for any hazards I might face today, be they spiritual hazards or a big sand pit construct in the middle of a field for some reason. I don’t know why that might happen, God, but if it did, maybe, You know, still help a guy out, wink. In the name of the boy Father, boy Son, and the Holy Ghost, which is also a boy, amen.”

"Lord, please help me to not make a blowjob joke here. Lord, I think that sort of counts, You blew it, amen."

Now that you’ve learned this one cool trick rich men use to fool God, you can sneak pretty much anything past him. Seven deadly sins, you say? More like five and some suggestions, as long as you know how to word things right, amen.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Ken Paisley, who prayed for the strength and wisdom to improve his golf game. God gave him the strength to carry his clubs to Goodwill and the wisdom to leave them there. Hahaha! That's golf, baby!

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