‘No one is unscathed by the difficulty of golf.’ So, why keep playing?

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One detail you notice on the driving range at Toronto’s Oakdale Golf and Country Club on the practice days leading up to this weekend’s Canadian Open is the pattern of balls that have been struck.

The pros are hitting on the right side of the range; on the left are the men and women who have paid $6,500 to play with their idols in this Wednesday afternoon’s pro-am tourney.

The balls the pros have hit form three tight circles of white, each no more than 20 yards wide, at 75 and 150 and 250 yards out on the calming green of the practice fairway. The pros themselves are a set of giant identical metronomes, beautiful to watch.

On the amateur side, there are balls everywhere. The fairway is a green Milky Way. The range of swing styles is vast: many resemble Labradors twitching back and forth before their owners throw a stick. The amateurs are whanging balls with such abandon that Oakdale is using a robotic ball retriever to retrieve them. No human can safely venture into the battle zone.

I am watching the pros practise because I am trying to “rebuild my swing.” As a kid I worked as a caddy: I taught myself to golf by imitating the players who hired me. My “swing” is therefore a snatch of misperceptions further adulterated by 50 years of compensatory writhing. I am the average golfer, 90 per cent of whom never break 100.

I imagined that rebuilding my swing and watching the pros practise for the Canadian Open would improve my game. I was mistaken. Instead I discovered the thin membrane between doggedness and despair. In a week when the skies filled with bitter smoke and professional golf had a full-blown crisis (the shocking PGA Tour-LIV Golf merger, announced on Tuesday), I experienced the existential dread of the wannabe sportsman: what do you do when you want to improve, but don’t have time to do so? Why keep playing? To my surprise, that question has an answer.

Shawn Aucoin, a professional golf instructor (not the same as a professional golfer) at the David Fritz Golf Academy, showed me into Simulator One at the Paramount Golf Virtual Practice Facility in a crapped-out corner of downtown Toronto and told me to hit a 7-iron into a fairway projected onto a thick black curtain. The simulator was a $30,000 TrackMan radar system that measured 28 data points of my swing: torque, clubface angle, azimuth, many incomprehensible others. The data told Shawn what I was doing wrong.

Shawn was bearded, slim, behatted, 51: he attended college on a golf scholarship, was a club pro for many years, started and sold a golf-apparel company, has been teaching for four years. He was a decent, gentle man and brilliant golfer.

My shots were, shall we say, inconsistent. They were like hundreds of sperm-clinic offspring who had never met, but shared the same father. Once in a rare while I hit my 7-iron straight and 135 yards. The rest of the time I topped it 18.4 yards right or 101 yards left or 69 yards everywhere else. My club speed was 73 miles an hour, not quite half what any pro manages with ease. Club speed equals distance. Did you know that? I did not.

Eventually Shawn stopped me and made a few suggestions. He adjusted my grip and my stance. He suggested I speed up my swing and hit through the ball with my body instead of trying to control the shot with my wrists. He told me the low point of my stroke needed to be five inches past the ball, not at the ball or below the ball. “What you do is the opposite of a pro,” he said. Ow.

There was too much to think about all at once. I was always forgetting something. My new swing felt much freer, but also more temperamental. Before, it was a dweeby little nerd living under tight parental supervision. Now it was a dangerously labile teenaged delinquent. Apparently this was an improvement. “Find out what you’re good at,” Shawn said, “and perfect it.”

Two days later I drove to a golf course to test the results. Carnage ensued. I shot 120 on a course whose par is 70 on which I usually break 100. I zagged back and forth across the fairways, as P.G. Wodehouse’s Oldest Member once put it, “like a liner being chased by submarines.” I began to think of golf as a narcotic of the ruling class. The worse I played, the more of a revolutionary I became.

Because golf is such a difficult and individual and uncontrollable game (multiple moving skills, weather, luck, tee time, you name it), golfers are the most obsessive of professional athletes. They can dip as dark as goalies.

Over there, for instance, playing in a charity foursome with three amateurs: that’s Mike Weir, Canada’s most famous golfer (the Masters, seven other PGA titles, US$28-million in winnings alone). Weir, 53, has already put in 2 1/2 hours at the range. Now he’s traversing the flawless fairways like a human Roomba while he waits for the amateurs to catch up, making notes, constantly chunking extra balls out of the gruelling greenside rough. He never stops practising even when he’s practising.

For this and many other reasons, I will never be as good a golfer as Mike Weir. Why does this make me faintly sad? I pose the question to the spectator beside me, a recently retired chest surgeon named Robert Zeldin. (He’s also a member at Oakdale, which reportedly costs $125,000 in initiation fees and $10,000 a year after that. It was founded in 1928 by Jewish golfers in answer to the anti-Semitism of Toronto’s other golf clubs.)

“I know what you mean about the sadness,” Zeldin, a bogey golfer, replied. “But I tell myself they can’t do chest surgery.”

My third bout with Shawn is outdoors on a range at Bathurst Glen, a public course north of Toronto. There are five-year-old kids taking golf lessons on the practice green behind me.

I explain to Shawn that since we started rebuilding my swing I can no longer trust any part of my game.

The old me knew he could hit a 9-iron 100 yards. Now, with my freer swing, if I hit it well, it goes 125 yards. So should I try to hit the ball well, or make allowances for what will probably happen?

“I always say that the path to progress is your best shot, better than before,” Shawn says, mystically. “Assuming you’re practising.”

That is a big assumption. Still, I am now slavishly following all Shawn’s suggestions. I am especially trying to keep my upper body still and pointed in front of me until my hips rotate forward, a move my torso can’t perform without feeling slightly risqué. Shawn has photographs of Tiger Woods as a young golfer, doing this. He was obviously made of elastic.

I’d settle for what every hacker wants: consistency. “Once you have that level of consistency,” Shawn promises, “then you want to get to the next level.”

I feel encouraged. I decide to play a round that very afternoon.

“Don’t think!” Shawn calls out as I set off. “Feel. On the practice range, you think. In a game of golf, you have to feel.”

I try to feel my way around the course. I lose at least nine balls. But I shoot (scoring generously) 95, which is 25 strokes fewer than my last outing. And when my new-fangled stroke works, which is rarely, it really works. I mark two pars and a birdie. Golf, the gurus say, is all about the present moment. Because you certainly don’t want to think about the past.

I kept going back to the range at the Open, to watch the pros hit. Their drives always had the same precise rocketing arc: up and out fast and high, then falling, the universal human trajectory. The players looked emptied but somehow grateful when they walked off the course after a practice round. Matt Fitzpatrick, tied for second in the Canadian Open at the time of this writing, is the eighth-best golfer in the world. He still misses the qualifying cut in 20 per cent of the tournaments he plays. Humiliation is a given in golf.

On my last visit to the range, I found Sean Foley, the Canadian golf guru, helping the American golfer Michael Kim. Foley’s famous: he has coached some of the best golfers in history, Tiger Woods (for four years) and Justin Rose (the U.S. Open, the AT&T Pro Am, many others, US$61-million in winnings) among them. “I’m still a month away from figuring Michael out,” Foley admitted as we watched the South Korean-born Californian slice his 3-iron. “The cardinal rule is do no harm.” A year ago, Kim lost his PGA Tour card; now he’s back on the Tour, so something must be working.

Foley favours snazzy red-rimmed sunglasses and golf shirts done all the way up at the neck. He’s a cross between the Energizer Bunny and the Dalai Lama. He never stops talking and thinking and talking some more. He might be the most extroverted golfer I have ever met.

“How do you break it to someone who can’t be as good as they want to be?” I finally said to Foley. “How do you deal with their frustration?”

“The genesis of frustration is when what you think should be real is not real,” Foley said. “But no one is unscathed by the difficulty of golf. I mean, think about this wind that’s gusting today. I’ve been measuring it. The gust is pretty much every 8 to 15 seconds. So if I hit a ball at this one moment, I miss the gust. Then I hit again, I hit the gust. I’ve hit both balls well, but one’s come up 10 yards short just because I don’t control what the wind is doing.” He paused, but only briefly. “The thing about golf is, it’s the great microcosm of life. Because you don’t really have much control over the result. So the key is to focus on the things that you do control, and then accept everything that you don’t.”

Doesn’t that sound easy? I headed over to Hole Zero, a 150-yard, par-three exhibition hole Oakdale has opened to ticket holders while the Open is on.

I tried to remember everything Shawn Aucoin told me, and immediately forgot it. I shanked my first drive and almost beaned a bystander. Then I shanked a second drive. People were diving for cover. My third drive skimmed up the meticulously manicured fairway onto the green. I three-putted. That would be an eight, if I am not mistaken, on a par three.

Deride me all you like. I am focused on things I can control. A golf club isn’t yet one of them.