The Bro Storm That Ate Nine Holes

One bad swing can expose more than a flawed tempo. On a Shenandoah Valley morning at Heritage Oaks, I get paired with a young, highly informed golfer who starts out striping it, then unravels the moment the first mistake shows up. What follows is a front-row look at the mental game of golf: self-talk that turns toxic, blame that spreads from club to course to fate, and the exhausting chase to “fix it” mid-round instead of accepting what just happened.

As the round unfolds, I contrast two very different reactions to imperfection, and it becomes clear that golf psychology isn’t about pretending you don’t care. It’s about learning how to respond when you do care, especially when ego, impatience, and the need to prove something start steering the swing. We talk pace of play, why solitude on the course can feel like therapy, and why a golf brain left unexamined leaves real improvement on the table.

Then the lens widens. Leaving the course, the world rushes back in, including the anxiety and uncertainty around Iran, escalation, oil markets, and the way our media ecosystem frames the same facts into opposite narratives. I dig into “Trump derangement syndrome” as a cultural shortcut that can dismiss or deflect, and I make the case for holding two ideas at once. Golf doesn’t let us argue with reality, and that honesty can be a model for better civil discourse, better listening, and better next swings.

If you care about golf mindset, emotional control, and staying human in polarized times, press play. Subscribe for more stories, share this with a golfer who needs it, and leave a review with the one thing that helps you reset after a bad shot.

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Transcript

When The Course Goes Quiet

SPEAKER_00 0:01

There's a moment on every golf course, if you're paying attention, where the world just quiets. It might be early in the morning, dew still clinging to the fairway or late in the afternoon when the shadows stretch long across the green. Birds don't care about your scorecard. The breeze doesn't care about your last three putt, and for a few seconds, maybe a few minutes, neither do you. Welcome back to Tales from the First Tee. I'm your host, Rich Easton, telling tales from beautiful Shenandoah Valley.

Meeting Kaz At Heritage Oaks

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Today's story starts with a guy named Kaz. At least that's what I called him. So I walk into the clubhouse at Heritage Oaksa. It's a fairly new golf course built in the rolling hills of Harrisonburg, Virginia, in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley. It's surrounded by three visible mountain ranges, which on a clear day is breathtaking. The pro shop said that I could go ahead and go to the first T as a single. Now, sometimes that makes me feel great. I could always work on my game. So as I arrive at the first T, no one else is there. Now I see somebody down in the fairway. Seems like a young guy, and had a pretty good drive if that was his drive, and then hits this really good approach shot. And I'm like, okay, great. I'm playing behind a single. Looks like he could play. Playing as a single golfer following groups of four or three could seem like a lifetime when you're sitting there waiting for them to clear out of the fairway or clear off the green. I mean, four times as many players, so it's gonna take them longer. But when you're playing behind a single, or even sometimes as a twosome, that gives you hope because if they play at a pretty good pace, you're gonna play at your pace. Anyway, so he hits a really good shot up to the green. And the truth is, most all golfers, you really don't care how other golfers are playing. If you're not playing for money, as long as they keep pace. You know, and the truth is that most all golfers, you really don't care how other golfers are playing unless you're betting money and they're on your team or you're playing against them. You don't care how they're playing as long as they keep pace. And if you're playing with them, as long as they don't get in your way. I start off the game the way I always like to start off. No mistakes that start this internal question and answer monologue in your head. I hit a good drive, hit a good approach shot, made two putts, par. BAM. So now I walk over to the second T, and what I was expecting is that fairly good golfer who seemed like he was playing at a good pace. I expected to see him down the fairway, maybe even hitting his second shot and moving on. That gives me the flow of leaving one hole, walking to the next, looking down the fairway, figuring out where I have to hit it, tee up the ball, and just go ahead, stay in my flow. That's the perfect thing when you're out playing by yourself. But what happens when I get up to the second T is I see he's playing from the backs, the back T's. And maybe that was his great drive on the first hole from the back T's. That would have been incredible. But the thing is, he's there. He's not down in the fairway. So as I'm walking up, I I slow my pace so I don't get in his way. And he looks up at me, he goes, Why don't you join me? And I'm like, I've got a quick second to think. And I'm like, I only had two hours to play. And I'm like, you know what? If I don't join up with him, this could take forever. I might have to leave midway on the front nine. So I say, sure, yeah, love to join you. Look down the fairway, and I see there's a foursome, and they're not in the same spot. They've got two carts. The four of them couldn't be farther apart, and they're running and they're looking for balls either in the heavy rough on the left or the woods on the right. And maybe college kids, I can't see that far too well. I can't focus, but that's what I'm thinking. Later I'll find out I'm right. But now this is gonna be a long round. So I go to the kid. Yeah, sure. Love to play with you. He introduces himself as, well, let's call him Kaz. Kaz was a young Gen Z through and through, grew up with swing videos, launch monitors, YouTube breakdowns of Tiger Swing back in 2000, 2005, and the progression to 2019. I mean, you name it. He had the information. He also had the confidence, and maybe too much of both. Kaz believed, truly believed, that he had the game figured

One Bad Swing And The Spiral

SPEAKER_00 5:27

out. And I know this when I stand up to the second T-Box because he tells me he does. And for about two holes, he did. Stripes a 300-yard drive down the middle, crisps a seven iron to 12 feet, rolls in a birdie putt like he's done it a thousand times before. Walk with this little bounce, kind of like a Rory McElroy bounce of confidence, checked his phones between shots because that's a gen Z thing. Maybe even glanced at the foresome behind us, like, hey guys, watch something here. But then it happens. One swing, one slightly off tempo, overcooked pull hook into the trees, and just like that, Kaz was gone. Not physically, he was still there. Come on, I'm not in my nineties. But mentally, emotionally gone. You could see it in his shoulders first, then the way he walked, a little bit faster, tighter, almost chasing his mistake. And the next shot wasn't a recovery, it was a reaction, and that reaction turned into another mistake, and another and another, and then a barrage of bro, you gotta be kidding me. Bro, what the fu bro? I've never done this before. This is the first time. I can't believe it. Ooh, god damn it! I'm telling you, it's the club! I just had it regripped, man. It's something's up. I thousands of bros, like a fraternity in one head. By the time he reached the next T, he wasn't playing golf anymore. He was fighting himself. You know, and that's the thing about golf, maybe the most honest thing about it, it doesn't expose your swing nearly as much as it exposes your relationship with imperfection. Kaz didn't implode because he hit a bad shot. He imploded because he thought he shouldn't hit a bad shot. This continued for a few more holes before another single golfer rode up on us after finishing the last hole and we asked him to join us, and that we was me. When we first started off, there was a foursome behind us, so the single must have been invited to pass through, or he was he was gutsy enough to ask if he could play through. Anyway, plays through, he's now joining us. And I gladly offered for him to join us in hope that having another Gen Z would affect the way that Kaz threw up on himself after every bad shot. Well, that strategy didn't work. Kaz continued his self-mutilation while this new Gen Z golfer was striping the ball like he was the captain of his high school golf team, which I learned later wasn't far from the truth. At first, when I witnessed Kaz self-destruct, I thought it was just like a generational gap between me and him. Kaz is playing with a boomer. Maybe he wanted to show how the new generation could dominate courses with these long shots. When he failed at that, I just thought it was one generation showing disappointment with another generation. But after watching this new player, let's call him Bobby Jones, another Gen Z, watching him react when even he hit some errand shots, it's not an easy course. And the guy, when he hit the bad shots, shook his head, maybe laughed, said nothing, was not self-disparaging. And I thought, well, maybe by he doing, he's going to show Kaz that this is how we handle our disappointment in ourselves. Well, Kaz wasn't having any part of it. He continued his bro fest for the rest of the round. You know, I actually try to coach him up when he got down on himself. And maybe I was doing that for myself, or maybe I just felt here's somebody that could probably use some mental reconfiguration. But as we all know, once the golf demons enter the fray in our head, there's nothing that can fix the breakage other than self-examination, which comes from hitting a lot of balls at the range and figuring how you could tweak things to make things better. Or if you're of age, having a bunch of drinks at the 19th watering hole. Neither of those applied to Kaz. So when we get to the ninth tea box, I tell the Gen Zers that it was my last hole. I'd only paid for nine, and the experience for me lasted long enough to get material for this, and short enough for me to confirm that I most enjoy either playing as a single or playing with people I enjoy being with. I don't need a stranger to validate me or to be witness to my good and bad shots. I also don't need to be an armchair shrink to them. Just to help them stay optimistic, which also helps my psyche. Playing with a Denny Downer or Kaz for that matter has a way of reminding me that a golf brain left unexamined leaves the possibility of greatness on the table.

Why Golf Feels Like Peace

SPEAKER_00 11:46

It's a place to breathe. If you ask me where I go to find peace, it's not always the beach, I love the beach, or a mountain, I'm getting to love mountains, or not even my own living room. It's a golf course at nine in the morning or five at night. Now, some of you might be thinking, nine in the morning? Why not seven or six thirty when the sun's rising over the horizon? No golfers in front of you, maybe some dew on the greens where you can see the trail marks on the green where your buddies attempted to make their first putts. It's like these visual clues. So when you get up to putt, you get to correct it. Make your butt. Well, if not for the 30 or 40 minute regimen of stretching, which is a must right now before I play, and then walking my faithful, loving golden shepherd, the start of the day. If not for those two things, I'd grab the earliest tea time available. There's something about a manicured landscape that feels intentional, fairways cut in stripes like somebody cared enough to make it beautiful, and greens that roll true. Bunkers raked like a Zen garden. It's controlled, but still alive. You hear things out there that you don't hear anywhere else. And I'm not talking about four, get out of my way. You guys, you hit into me. Nothing like that. You hear the low hum of insects in the rough, the distant crack of somebody else's driver echoing across the property. Maybe a hawk overhead or a deer crossing in the fairway ahead. Maybe just the soft thud of your own footsteps on the grass that hasn't been touched all day yet. And then every now and then you hit one. And maybe a swing that feels like it didn't even come from you. Effortless, balanced. The ball takes off on that perfect window, rising, holding, falling exactly exactly where you pictured it. And for that brief moment, everything aligns. That's the hook. Not the score, not the competition, although a lot of my buddies would argue it's not how, it's how many. Well, to me it's that feeling. And maybe if you're lucky, a couple of those consecutive swings and one or two putts that just track end over end disappearing into the cup. That's enough. That's solitude. That is peace.

Iran Anxiety And Binary Thinking

SPEAKER_00 14:49

But then you leave the golf course and the world comes rushing back in. Lately it feels complicated, almost Kafka-esque. You look at the situation with Iran, doesn't feel like something that unfolded overnight. It feels like something that's been building for decades, layers of policy, retaliation, mistrust, and unintended consequences stacking on top of each other. You start asking questions that don't have clean answers. How do we get here? Was it one decision or a thousand small ones? Something I call death by a thousand cuts. And more importantly, how do we get out? Because this isn't a missed fairway or a bad bounce in the rough. The stakes here are different. You start hearing conversations about escalation, deterrence, economic pressure. Then someone mentions oil markets, supply chains, gas prices creeping, climbing, threatening numbers that don't just affect your wallet, they affect everything downstream. And the callous response to a reporter suggesting that the president doesn't care about the effect of the war on the U.S. citizens' finances and their pocketbooks. And in the back of your mind, there's that unspoken fear. How does this end without something irreversible? Without a line being crossed that can't be uncrossed. And that's where the conversation tends to split. Because we just don't process events anymore. We sort ourselves into interpretations, into sides, which brings us to something you've probably heard before. Trump derangement syndrome or TDS, which is said quickly, tedious. Depending on who you ask, the phrase means two different things. To some, it's a dismissal. A way to say that criticism of Trump isn't rational, that it's emotional, exaggerated, disconnected from reality. To others, it's a deflection, a label used to avoid engaging with legitimate concerns about rhetoric, behavior, and leadership decisions. You know what side you're on. So what is it? Is it an observation or is it an obsession? The truth is it might be both and neither, because we've lost something in the way we talk about things. We've lost the ability to hold two ideas at the same time. I think dialectically. Not always, but often. For an example, it's possible to believe that a leader implemented policies you agree with and also behaved in ways that concern you. Example, I like the work on college athletics where the administration is working to limit how many years an athlete can compete in college sports, how many times they could enter the transfer portal, and how gender is being addressed as it pertains to like sex competition. It doesn't make me a gender phob. The story I'm telling myself is that it makes competition more fair. I like better border security that we have, but despise the heavy-handedness of ICE, particularly in Minneapolis. I like the tax cuts and the immediacy of tax returns. At the same time, I don't like the engagement with Iran as a preemptive strike with questionable intelligence. And I say questionable because I'm getting mixed messages. It's costing lives and billions of dollars with the justification that it's the only measure to assure the immediate threat of nuclear destruction is squelched. I don't like the harsh criticism by the president of those that have recently died or have been killed, like Robert Muller, Rob Michelle Reinhard, those who are outspoken about the behavior of the president. I don't like the continuous mudslinging at past administrations to deflect attention on not solving problems. I don't like the continuous bashing of Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, because he wouldn't act on Trump's behalf to lower interest rates to offset tariff-based inflation. I don't like the strategy to continually litigate against your own citizen enemies, despite the fact that the courts will continue to throw it out. I don't like the president's hold on the legislative and judicial branches of government for the purposes of influence to force agendas down their throats. I don't agree with the methods that the president's taken to build a new ballroom on the East Wing without the approval and debate in Congress. And I can't stomach the syncophans surrounding the president to secure their jobs by defending his every statement and action without independently thinking through the cause and effect of each. But what I do like is that I live in the United States and I could say these things. And I recognize that many of the political sound bites coming from the president and his cabinet are reactions to media gotcha questions. But I also reserve the judgment to recognize that our civic discourse has been eroded and has bled from the Oval Office to mainstream USA. It's okay now to say things that we couldn't say five years ago. It's okay to act in a certain way and bully people where it was thought maybe we've evolved and we shouldn't be doing that anymore. We've evolved to a nation that thrives on tension. We want clarity, certainty, aside. So we flatten things. We turn complex situations into binary choices. You're either right or you're wrong. With us or against us. Several years ago, I was working at the first tee, and a golfer was adamant that in this new world order, you had to pick a side. You can't pick issues and discuss why you support one over the other. You're either left or right. And in my life, it never used to be like that. I was listening to a podcast this past week. With Trevor Noah and Katie Couric, and they were talking about parties and people taking sides. And Trevor pointed out that being brought up in South Africa, first of all, it's a different kind of party system. But his father would always vote one way. And then if he didn't like the policies, the next election cycle, he would vote another way. So it's more of the how I vote for the situation, not who I am, not how we define ourselves. And I think the news reflects this divide. You can watch one network and see a story framed as a measured response. And then switch the channel at the same event, but now instead of a measured response, it was reckless escalation. Same facts, different narratives. You know, it's like two friends in a bar. It sounds like a joke, right? Each rooting for opposing teams. A play happens. Whistles are blown, flags are thrown, questionable referee call. Both of you saw the same play, but because of team affiliation, you saw it differently. And you argue. And even though the refs go back after instant replay, talk to New York headquarters, come out with a ruling, if it's not in your favor, you're like, that's bullshit. This thing is rigged. Sound familiar? Well, golf doesn't let you do that. It doesn't care about your narrative. You either hit the shot or you didn't. It either landed and stopped where it stopped or it didn't, unless you have the president's foot wedge. But what golf does offer, if you're paying attention, is a model for something

Self-Examination On And Off Course

SPEAKER_00 23:56

better. Because improvement and golf require a self-examination. I've had rounds, plenty of them, where I've walked off the 18th grain frustrated, replaying every little mistake like a highlight reel that I didn't ask for. And for a while, I did what Kaz did. I blame the swing, the lie, the greens, the pace of play, bro. Anything but the truth. But eventually you start asking better questions. Not why did this happen to me? But what did I bring into that moment? Was I rushing? Probably I was rushing. Was I trying to force a shot that wasn't there? Was I carrying frustration from the last hole into the next one? And the uncomfortable realization is this. The patterns on the golf course often mirror the patterns off of it. Impatience, overconfidence, fear of failure. Maybe you need to prove something. You start to see it, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. But that's where growth lives, because a life unexamined, on the course or off, is just repetition without awareness. It's cause stuck in the same loop, waiting for a perfect round that never comes. But when you start examining it, honestly, you get a choice. You can respond differently. You can step over a shot, take a breath, and accept that imperfection isn't an interruption of the game. It is the game. And maybe that carries over into life. Maybe the next time you're in a difficult conversation, you don't rush to win it. I like to ask questions to understand the root of somebody's point of view. Maybe I'm missing something, or maybe it's about values. Maybe the next time you hear a perspective that challenges yours, you don't immediately reject it. You might eventually, but at least hear them out. Maybe you pause just long enough to consider that there might be more than one truth on the table. Just like there's more than one way to play a hole. Most of us do eventually. I'm still trying. Not by eliminating bad shots. I'm trying, but they're still there. But by changing how I respond to them. And maybe that's the thread that ties all of this together. The golf course, the world, the conversations we're having or not having. It's not about controlling everything. It's about understanding how we move through it, with a little more awareness, a little more patience, and maybe just maybe a better next swing. Thanks for staying to the end. I'm your host Rich Easton, telling tales from beautiful Shenandoah Valley. Talk to you soon.