On the Chase for Good

The story of how I became a falcon-toting member of Chasing Scratch's cult-following in the podcast's darkest hour.

—1— 

It was 10:30 p.m. on a shadow-swept Michigan highway, and with headlights streaking past me at seventy miles-per-hour, my anxiety was blustering harder than the fallen leaves. The feeling, for anyone lucky enough to be unfamiliar with clinical anxiety, feels something like the panic of being startled—except of course, nothing has startled you, and, thus, there’s no good way to turn the feeling off.  My strongest defense against that feeling, I'd learned over the years, were slow days at home with my wife and two boys. So, why was I racing the opposite direction into an uncertain night?

To explain, I need to go back two years, just before Covid shut down the world, when my old college buddy Joe texted me a simple pitch: “Dude, you gotta check out this golf podcast--these guys are just like us.” Joe had been one of my closest friends in college, the kind of fast friendship that seems to reframe what friendship is. We played a bunch of low-budget college golf together and stayed close for a few years out of school before life sent us in opposite directions. My love for golf had since lain mostly buried under years of parenting, couples hangs, and a time-consuming career, but I didn't take his recommendation lightly. I listened to the first episode and loved it. Within a few months, I'd binged all four seasons of Chasing Scratch on my long, daily commutes.

The conceit of the show was ingeniously simple: its two hosts, best friends Mike Shade and Eli Strait, would do everything in their power, short of shirking their duties as devoted husbands and fathers, to shed the eleven strokes separating them from becoming scratch golfers. Oh, and they wanted to do it in a year. This last part quickly proved impossible, but they did drop nearly five strokes by the end of the show's first season. By the end of year two, they'd shed almost eight. This is the kind of improvement golfers dream of, and droves of listeners, me and Joe included, had relished a front row seat to see what had worked for them and what hadn't. 

It had been in the middle of season five when Joe and I got to witness the enthusiasm for the show in person when the hosts came to my then-hometown of Austin, Texas, and Joe drove in from Houston to join. We, along with 50 listeners from across the country, gathered on Masters Sunday to play a round and then watch golf with Mike and Eli and a smattering of the other characters that featured on the show. 

It was one of those characters I met in Austin—“Dr. J” as he was known on the show, the podcasts’ resident sports psychologist—who had suggested I join him on the trip toward which I was now headed. My family and I had since moved to Michigan, and though my anxiety, an old foe, had remained mostly absent through a cross-country move and my first year in Michigan, it unfortunately chose to resurface on that blustery Michigan night in my truck.

Semi trucks blew past, clutching at my truck. But I was determined to catch my almost redeye first-flight-out of the Detroit airport. By the time I reached the place I was crashing for a few hours of sleep, I felt spent, wrung out like an old rag and wondering whether a golf trip was such a good idea. 

It’s one of the wild things about anxiety, how it can announce itself so unexpectedly, exact so much, and then retreat—all seemingly without explanation. I set my alarm, took a half-pill of the medication I’d been prescribed for when my anxiety sneaks up on me and, mercifully, fell asleep. 

—2—

In my exhaustion, I overslept. My truck whined, again in the dark, and I rushed through the doors of the airport, hoping to find it empty at five in the morning. My flight was wheels-up in a little over half an hour, and I still had to check my clubs. My spirits fell when I saw it: the TSA line snaked from one end of the terminal to the other. 

It looked like I was headed home after all. 

The lady behind the counter reluctantly let me check my clubs, though, and on my way to the back of the TSA line, a woman in a business suit held out a pamphlet and asked if I’d like a free trial of a service to bypass TSA. Three minutes later, with my soul no doubt digitized and stored on some distant server, I was on the other side of security and jogging to my gate.

By the time I fell into seat 23E, my heart rate finally began to descend. Against all odds, I’d made it, and I finally let myself wonder whether that was a good thing. Of course it was, I told myself. I thought of the most recent episode of the podcast, remembering that I wasn't the only one struggling. 

After all the progress toward their goal in seasons one and two of the podcast, Mike and Eli had spent nearly three years pitching wildly between unwarranted optimism and fatalist defeat, with little progress to show for it. And all this, despite some of the biggest names in golf jumping in on their quest. Titleist, now the show's main sponsor, had custom-fit the pair twice in a year. Tom Coyne, one of the best known golf writers on the planet, had thrown the support of the magazine Golfer's Journal behind them. 

And yet, as their handicaps refused to budge for a third consecutive year, there was no hiding Mike and Eli’s exasperation about what was going wrong. In the season’s penultimate episode, released days before I stepped onto the plane, the show had ended with an ominous monologue from Mike about where the show was headed. He said:

That fact is that we are getting older. Our kids are getting older. Life is getting more complicated than it was when we started this thing. And despite all the efforts, all the expert help we’ve gotten, and the increase in playing and practicing, the handicap hasn’t moved in three years. And so the question is, are we out of levers? And if there’s no improvement, what’s this podcast about?

Suddenly, a joke mantra on their website—Two guys. One goal. Zero chance—had become a sobering truth: if that wasn’t really a joke, there wasn’t really a show. 

—3—

My plane touched down in Charlotte ninety minutes before tee time. When I’d booked the flight, I’d known it’d be close, but then again it wasn’t my tee time I was hurrying to catch. For the second year in a row, Mike and Eli had created an event around their “final major”—their annual, 18-hole mano-a-mano showdown which, again this year, would be followed by a gallery of devoted listeners who’d come in from around the country (the world, actually) to watch them battle it out for year-end bragging rights.

The rental car company I’d booked with—the only company within hours with inventory—was moving slow and oversold. Almost an hour later, I was relieved to get the second to last car on the lot, and, without complaining, drove away in a Mitsubishi crossover that smelled eye-wateringly dense with weed. 

By the time I pulled into the parking lot of the rambling YMCA course, famous on the podcast for being the guys’ home course in college, I had the windows rolled down to ward off a contact high, and there was no gallery of listeners to be found. Just outside the pro shop, a utility cart swung around in front of me, its driver motioning for me to hop in. He introduced himself as the course superintendent as he moved a bag of tools to make room for me. 

Twenty minute walk out to where those boys are, he said. I thanked him for the ride, and on the way out between the scraggy pines and well-enough manicured fairways, the clearly proud superintendent filled me in on a morning the course would not soon forget. Not everyday, he said, you see a marching band play a pair of golfers to the first tee.

The show had always been weird. To some, that weirdness was merely tolerated, say, when Eli’s misconceptions about what falconry was left the guys crying with laughter and vacuumed up twenty percent of an episode ostensibly about golf. For thousands of us, though, the show was weird in the most familiar way—it was familiar because it was weird. Because we too had memories of doubling over on a tee, laughing at a buddy’s idiocy, keeping a joke running far after its shelf life. 

But one thing the show’s popularity revealed was that, for far too many of us, those memories were just that: memories. Whether it was anxiety or a career or a pandemic, or any number of factors that had kept us from actually standing on a tee with friends, Chasing Scratch had been wonderful exactly because Mike and Eli’s laughter about some ridiculous joke reminded us to hope we’d be back out there laughing again soon enough. 

And in defense of the show’s zany sidebars, it must be said that not all of them were completely unrelated to golf. Some of the show’s most unique contributions were spawned by the guys’ riffs on pop-culture references. The best known was the show’s most famous slogan, a phrase delivered in the climactic locker room scene of the late-90s football movie Varsity Blues. 

The overbearing Coach Kilmer was attempting to get his team back out onto the field after halftime. He said it loudly first: Let’s go! Let’s go! When no one moved, he rambled on before mumbling it again, let's go…let’s go, his unwarranted confidence carrying him out into the tunnel alone. Let's go! Let's go! he shouted to an empty tunnel.

Late in their first season, Mike and Eli’s laughter about Kilmer’s overconfidence turned into a discussion about what “Kilmering” could apply to in golf. They settled on a familiar sentiment, ubiquitous in golf and a true phenomenon of human psychology: that as a golfer you can chunk and thin and shank your way around a course until, on the final hole, you catch one pure, and you watch in awe at the glory of a perfectly struck ball taking flight towards your target. What is that feeling like? Every golfer knows. The euphoria of total confidence lifts you, if only for a moment, into a state as elevated as that white ball piercing the blue sky. You can’t help feeling—despite all evidence to the contrary—you just might become a great golfer: 

Let’s go, let’s go.

—4— 

The way Mike Shade remembers the beginning of his golf friendship with Eli Strait, they were standing on the first tee box of the very same YMCA course, both college juniors, and Eli had just blasted a drive so far left that it seemed to have a better chance of finding a living room than the fairway. And in golf, there's customarily a mournful silence after a person in the group has just murdered a ball out of bounds, a silence in which the ball-striker is allowed to determine the mood. Are we mad? Can we chuckle? That day, the silence was broken by Eli’s hopeful cry: Fight, honey! 

As Mike recalls, Eli’s command itself was the lightning strike that bonded them forever. Perhaps Mike heard something of the decades to come in it, decades in which they would speak everyday; perhaps he heard something of the friendship that would bond them, their families, and, through a hit podcast, turn that friendship into a beacon for tens of thousands of others. 

But it couldn’t have hurt that the ball somehow listened to Eli—that it began to circle back, and they watched together as it hit the road, twice, that it somehow ricocheted right, crashing through trees and pine needles, perhaps a stump, and came to rest in the middle of the fairway twenty yards short of the green.

Sometimes, in golf as in friendship, the only thing separating destiny and defeat is a little bit of belief. 

—5—

The superintendent’s gas cart quieted as he slowed us to a stop beside the fifth tee.  After Mike stuck an iron close on the par-three fifth and Eli fanned one into the greenside lake, a quiet buzz rippled through the gallery, murmurs about Mike putting the match away early. Mike was about to go up four through five holes, but as the assembled diehards were well aware, Mike had a habit of losing leads in final majors.

Eli ripped a beauty of a tee shot on six, garnering a huge cheer, and we all set off down the fairway, the guys surrounded by an amorphous cloud of supporters. A hundred yards down the fairway, Mike slapped Eli’s shoulder and then pointed—strangely—at me. Those! he said, motioning at my feet. The gallery looked at my recently-purchased pair of Nikes. I looked, too. Mike looked up to see who was wearing them, and a look of recognition passed over his face. Hey! We know you from Austin! 

We exchanged greetings as Mike and Eli debated whether Eli—more of a…Cole Haan guy—could plausibly pull them off. The debate was tabled as Mike received a short iron from his caddy. So glad you could come, man! Mike said to me before a practice swing.  

Their attention brought with it a rush of bewilderment and gratitude—and a much-needed sense of relief that perhaps the trip would not be a lonely disaster. I connected with Dr. J, too, and he and I spent the rest of the front nine catching up with each other and chatting with members of the gallery who wanted his insights about Eli’s inevitable charge on the back. 

Most of the gallery was made up of members of “the Velcren”—subscribers to Mike and Eli’s patreon-supported podcast behind the podcast. The name is a long story, but I recognized in those other Velcren as they talked with Dr. J the same flood of excitement that I had just felt when addressed by Mike and Eli. And I noted, too, that much like Mike and Eli’s conversation with me, Dr. J’s interactions were marked by an uncommon generosity (which is to say, kindness) to all who sought his attention. 

Just like that, I found myself ushered into a narrative I’d spent much of the past year captivated by, and found myself struck all the more by how drastic the loss would be if this became the last ever final major. 

—6—

I wouldn’t say I’m a lonely guy. Billy Baker wouldn’t have either. That is, before he wrote one of the most read stories in the history of the Boston Globe, a story about an epidemic of loneliness in middle-age American men, a story that opened with him bristling against the notion that he might be included in that epidemic. 

Part of the reason for his (and my) incredulity is that both our lives have been filled with deep and meaningful friendships with guys. I cherish the dozen or so in my phone that I could call and pick up where our last conversation left off. But where, again, did those conversations leave off? Those dozen or so guys live in a dozen or so cities, most with kids and careers that keep them as busy as I am.

My buddy Joe, for instance.

The long title of Baker’s article makes its importance clear: “The biggest threat facing middle-age men isn’t smoking or obesity. It’s loneliness.” Baker's article (and subsequent book “We Need to Hang Out”) parades a litany of scientific research that backs up just how unhealthy it is to lack for friendship. Risk factors for virtually every major illness rise sharply when paired with loneliness. Which begs an important question: if it's so cut and dry, why don't we do something about it? 

Perhaps the reason for the epidemic of loneliness isn’t because we lack the guys to make up the other side of a friendship—perhaps it's a price we’re paying for structuring our lives without prioritizing them.

It’d be convenient for this story to say my anxiety is caused by loneliness, or by some singular trauma, or some singular anything. But one of the strange things about mental health is how hard it is to draw straight lines between cause and effect. In practice, nothing between our ears is simple. Just ask golfers. 

—7—

Most golfers tend to hail from either a polished country club crowd or the rowdier, more blue-collar municipal crew. Walking the back nine with the Velcren, it was impossible to miss how atypical this group was. 

Some wore the tell-tale country club gear—swishy slacks and vests; the matching polos and belts. The muny crew sported Chasing Scratch fan gear—a branded t-shirt over baggy shorts and well-loved tennis shoes. But then, there was also a VP from Titleist. Some old guys, some young guys, some athletic guys, some…less. 

But unlike every group of golfers I’d ever been around, there didn’t seem to be any method to who walked with who. Everyone mixed and mingled and joked and laughed, always gravitating back to Mike and Eli who laughed and joked along with the crowd. 

As Eli’s comeback gathered steam—by hole 13, he’d narrowed Mike’s lead to one—the energy in the crowd swelled, too. Guys ran ahead to wait in the trees on each fairway, and a drone that’d been buzzing overhead all day seemed to hover closer and closer. Eli drew even when Mike missed a six-footer on 14, and he took his first lead on 16 after Mike bogeyed another.

On 18, when Mike pured his signature draw from the left rough in a last gasp to try and even the match, the crowd erupted, literally sprinting up the fairway to see the putt he’d left himself. This was the drama we'd all come to see. These were the final hole heroics the podcast desperately needed to gain some momentum. It wasn't to be. The green had refused to hold his approach, his ball trickling into the trap behind. After sloppy short-game displays from both, Eli closed out his best friend with an unconvincing double bogey.

A round of applause went up, and hats came off, and there were hugs all around, and a short speech from Mike and Eli thanking us all for being there. They reminded us about the awards ceremony and open bar that night at a club called Firethorne closer to Charlotte, and then they gave an off-handed apology of just how painfully far they still were from scratch at the end of another year. 

—10— 

The glistening clubhouse of Firethorne Country Club was all oak beams and stone porticos and class. If the Velcren had seemed like a strange group at the YMCA course, at Firethorne we seemed like aliens. In a motley caravan of old Toyota Camrys, rented Yukon Denalis, and everything in between—including, of course, one Mitsubishi hatchback still reeking of second-hand weed—the Velcren pulled into the clubhouse parking lot as a self-described group of “internet strangers” coming to revel in its strangeness.

The gorgeous downstairs bar belonged to the Velcren for the night, and there, served by a wait staff in black and white, began a celebration of another year of the pod. With inside jokes turned up to eleven, the Velcren ate and drank and laughed their way through the next two hours, with no shortage of debate about everything from Eli’s final major win, to the plausibility of a Salmon skewer food truck, to what the next year would hold. 

After dinner, Eli was presented with his winning haul: a handmade golf bag, commissioned by one of the Velcren and fashioned from the flags of courses the pair had played on the show. Mike’s award was a tiny child's trophy that read: "2nd Place, congrats…or whatever”. All were handed out to roaring cheers and laughter, and then a video played in which various Velcren talked about what the show had meant to them. Stories of connection, stories of struggle, stories of hope and improvement. By the time Mike and Eli got back to the mic, they were nearly speechless, and the ongoing cheers of the Velcren only compounded that. 

When Mike finally spoke, it was clear how much the video had meant to them. Eli spoke, too, about what the Velcren meant to them, what the pod meant to them, and how grateful they were to be a part of it. The weight of an announcement hung heavily in the air. 

We know something has to change with the show, Mike said, finally. It has to. We’re not sure what, yet. We wish we had something more to tell you, because we love you guys, but we really don't know ourselves. 

Let’s play some golf tomorrow.

—11—

The next morning was cool, windless and perfect, and Stonebridge Golf Club was buzzing with the unique excitement of 55 grown men certain today was going to be the day it all came together—and simultaneously terrified that today would be the day it all came apart. The format was a one-day, handicapped, stroke-play tournament, and after a range session in which I carved a small gulley down the center of my hitting bay, taking deep divots inches behind the ball, I told myself that those were out of the way and I was ready. The anxiety in my chest felt more like excitement than panic. I mean, I’d made it here, hadn’t I? Playing golf was gravy. I met my playing partners on the practice green, and we followed the starter’s instructions to the first tee, our butterflies unspoken but unmistakable. 

I hit four-iron off the tee, intent on not splashing a monster slice into the lake beside the practice green. An almost on-purpose low draw left me with an eight iron into the short par-four, and after a three putt bogey, I thought, hey, not so bad! Good, actually. My handicap had recently come down from an eleven to a nine, which meant, more or less, that pars were appreciated and bogeys tolerated. Another bogey, a par, a good bogey from the woods and then a run of pars left me on the ninth tee with driver in my hands and a sense that I had a good thing going. One of our other playing partners was updating the live scoring app so I didn’t bother totalling my own. Better not to, anyway, I figured. 

My best drive of the day made the par-5 reachable but risky, and after some debate, I reminded myself how unlikely it was that I’d made it here at all. Why not? I ran a well-struck hybrid ten feet left of the water and up onto the green. Two putts later, I was in for birdie. I didn’t total my score, but knew it had to be under 40, a rarity, and I ate a brat at the turn just in case I needed energy down the stretch for something special.

It wasn’t until I walked off fifteen, after another string of pars, that my willful ignorance was broken. One of my playing partners off-handedly asked if I knew I was six up on the field. On our group? I asked. No, the field, he said. You’d have to really screw this up to lose it now. 

I fanned my first bad drive of the day on the next tee, the slice I’d been protecting against on the first. It stayed in bounds by a foot, and I was lucky to scramble for a bogey. With another driver hole coming up on 17, I marveled at how different my body felt from just two holes before. Tension everywhere, my arms and hands rigid. I breathed deeply, the way I coach my tennis players to, the way I do when anxiety makes my mind race. 

I piped one down the middle, short but straight, and my audible grunt was both cheer and utter relief. I even found the courage to ask about the leaderboard. My lead was down to four. But after another green in regulation (already light years ahead of my round average) and a decent lag putt, my nervy three-footer caught the lip and fell in for yet another par.  

It all would come down to 18. 

—12—

In the show’s first five seasons, a tell-tale sound announced whenever Mike’s narrations would zoom back and forth in time, as he organized the year into a coherent narrative. Imagine that sound here, as I zoom ahead to the release of the show’s last episode of the year. In it, Mike and Eli recalled their pained conversations in their hotel each night in Charlotte, and the challenge they both felt over the following weeks, trying to determine what would come next for the show.

E: Something has to be drastically different. 

M: I agree. I just don't know what it is. 

E: I don’t want [the show] to end but something has to change….We can’t keep just rolling this storyline out where we don’t get [our handicaps] where we wanted to, and we come up with the same plan of getting healthy and practicing more—that storyline is getting old. 

M: Two non-negotiable questions: Do you want to keep doing this and do you think we can? If either answer is no, then we bag it and just hang out with Velcren.

E: I don’t want to quit, but there was a certain point in my athletic career when I realized, I’m probably not gonna make it to the NBA. I can keep practicing as hard as I want…but it’s probably not gonna happen.

M: Every year, other than this year, we’ve ended thinking we’re close, and we end the last episode with the solution...this is the lever we’re gonna pull...And I think for the first time, if I’m being straight up honest with you….I don’t think we can get to [scratch] next year.

Insert the time-shift sound effect again, as Mike zooms back out from recorded audio to his narration. 

M: And there it was.

—13—

From the 18th tee we could hear pops of laughter, and on the breeze was the faintest hint of cigar smoke. The par four was a gentle dogleg with out-of-bounds right, a road left, and a gallery of Velcren relaxing beside the jagged mass of carts parked left of the green. Also, there’d been some confusion on the scoring app, and my lead, it seemed, was actually two. 

Standing over the ball, I told myself the driver in my hands was the right club. I told myself I wasn’t going to fan it OB. I told myself to stop talking about fanning it OB. I swung. The ball took flight, my rigid arms powered by adrenaline, and just in the flight path where it usually puts on the blinker and heads 60 yards right, it wavered a yard or two off target and carried on, falling into the middle of the fairway. I fist-pumped, telling my doubts to shove it, and received the congratulations of my group.

Standing over my ball in the fairway, I could hear one of the greenside cigar-smokers saying yeah, that’s him to another cart. I had a pitching wedge in my hands and a breeze in my face. It was too much club, but I wanted to smooth it, and I’d hit it well all day. I thinned it—lord knows how close I was to blading it—but into the breeze it flew straight at the flag, hopped once, and parked itself eight feet past the flag. 

The greenside group cheered, beers raised, and I felt my nerves change from terror about blowing up to determination to make the eight-footer. I still didn’t know my total score, but I’d only broken 80 once in my life, and I figured this had to be a great chance to do it again. We parked our cart alongside the others, and I fist bumped my way up to the green. Hell of a round you got going, man, one guy said. Go knock that thing in. 

The putt fell into the center of the cup as if there had never been a doubt in the world that I’d shoot 76—the second best round of my life—on a tough course I’d never seen, on a golf trip with people I'd never met, thirty-six hours after fighting off a panic attack. A chorus of cheers went up from the crowd as another involuntary fist pump came from my body. A haze of determination and fatigue parted within me for the first time in hours. I was exhausted. Three more groups finished behind us and then it was official. With two birdies, no doubles, and a net score of 67, I’d won the day’s tournament. 

In the next hour, I shook the hands of nearly all the Velcren (and, naturally, fielded a few quizzical questions about my handicap—questions I’d answer the next day by firing a silky 89). After a cigar, a beer, and a clubhouse meal, I was called up in front of fifty-five internet strangers hooting wildly to lift my trophy: a heavy marble statue, hand-carved in the shape of a falcon.

—14—

Let’s zoom ahead again, a few weeks after Charlotte, to another conversation about what would become of Chasing Scratch. 

Dr. J, Mike, and Eli were on a call comparing notes at the end of another season, but Dr. J wanted to be clear: his suggestion was coming as a friend and listener, and not as their unofficial sports psychologist. His idea was no small reformulation: what if Chasing Scratch wasn’t perpetually a one-year chase for scratch? What if, like the rest of golfers, Mike and Eli were always chasing scratch, without a calendar year hanging over their heads like a shot clock? Wouldn't they be proud of all they’d accomplished (both on the course and off) instead of thinking of their chase as a perennial failure?

Consider Kobe Bryant, Dr. J told Eli. One of the best competitors of all time. His take on failure? It doesn’t exist. According to Kobe, the only way to fail on a Monday is by failing to return on Tuesday, armed with Monday’s lessons. The only real failure, Kobe said, is to quit. 

Their conversion wasn’t instantaneous. Eli, on a call days later with Mike, confessed that it felt a little bit like a gut punch, hearing Dr. J’s counsel as a doubt about their ability to get to scratch. But as they have for so many years, the two friends talked it out. They talked about their feelings of failure and fraudulence, the pain of investing energy and effort only to fail publicly. 

And what they realized, eventually, was that those feelings of failure had come not from anything Dr. J or their listeners had said—those feelings had come from within. 

And then Eli made a connection.

E: if you want to know the purest way to do anything, just think about how you’d teach your kids. I want the lesson, the principal, because they can run on that for 50 years. And I would never tell my kids to quit. I would tell my kids over and over and over: I know you can do it. It is within you to do this. You have to get smarter, and take a different approach, but I know you can do this. 

Mike jumped in: and if Kobe was right and failure is really just failing to learn and come back, then what is all this talk of quitting the show about? 

Eli: We just gotta show up the next day and do the work.

M: Double down? 

E: Double down.

Across the far reaches of the internet, middle-aged men wearing headphones rejoiced. 

—15—

My weekend in Charlotte ended back in the auspicious confines of Firethorne Country Club. The guys hadn't made their breakthrough with Dr. J yet, but after such an incredible weekend, you wouldn’t have known it from the mood. Glass firepits blazed everywhere on the outdoor patio, and the beer and whiskey flowed. Circles of men relaxed around the fires, laughing and regaling each other with tales of balls lost and strokes gained, of improvements and impasses, sharing new strategies and swing changes to be tried out in the year to come. 

Over in a corner of the bar, Dr. J was chatting with Eli, laying a foundation for the Kobe conversation they'd soon have. Mike was on a warpath offering salmon sticks to anyone who'd listen, and I was out in the middle of one of those circles of men, at ease, and trying to wrap my head around how a crowd of strangers at the beginning of the weekend had come so quickly to feel like friends. 

The answer wouldn’t hit me until a few weeks later, hearing Eli on the season’s final episode: I want the lesson, the principle. They can run on a principle for 50 years. 

So what was the principle of Chasing Scratch? 

I’d learned so much about golf, listening to the show; I'd gotten better at it, too. But the true principle of Chasing Scratch—there in abundance that night at Firethorne, and a principle which would eventually save the podcast from itself—had been there from the start. It'd been there in the devotion of the friendship that’d started it, and in their kind inclusion of others in their story.

It’s why so many of us, like Joe and I, had connected with old friends through the show.

Because perhaps the real Kilmering—Let’s go, let’s go—isn’t the audacity to believe that your best golf is just around the corner. Perhaps the real Kilmering is the audacity to believe that, in a world ever more siloed by technology and politics and finances and ideologies and social stigmas, there are more guys than you think ready to join you on the chase for good. 

Perhaps it’s the audacity to devote time and resources to friendships with those who will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with us, when our lives inevitably go a little sideways, yelling:

 Fight, honey!

—end—

Psst! Thanks for reading. If you're interested in hearing more from Luke and Dr. J about their forthcoming book “Storyball: A Story-based Approach to the Inner World of Sports" drop us an email below, and we'd be happy to send you an excerpt!