The Buddy I Can't Cut Loose

by Johnny
(golfeaser.com)

My brother-in-law is a good golfer and a hard man to enjoy four hours with, and I have never found a clean way to say that out loud to anyone but my wife.

Gary married into the family the same summer I did, and somewhere in the wedding-planning chaos it got decided, without a vote, that the two brothers-in-law would golf together. It made sense on paper. Neither of us had a natural fourth. We were roughly the same age, roughly the same handicap, and stuck at the same Thanksgiving table for the next several decades whether we liked each other or not. Golf seemed like the low-stakes way to find out if we did.

Fifteen years later, I still don't fully know the answer, and I've stopped expecting one.

Gary isn't a bad guy in any way you could write down on a form. He's never cheated, never stiffed a bet, never done anything you could point to and say, there, that's the problem. What he does is smaller and harder to name — a running commentary on my swing that I never asked for, a habit of finishing my sentences with the version of the story where he comes off better, a way of turning "nice shot" into something that still manages to be about him. The small things that make someone a good playing partner are mostly about restraint, and restraint has never been Gary's strongest club.

For a long time I told myself I was imagining it. That's the first stage, I think — deciding the problem is your own attitude rather than admit a family member is genuinely draining to spend an afternoon with. I'd come home from a round with him a little flatter than usual, and my wife would ask how it went, and I'd say fine, it was fine, because "fine" doesn't require an explanation and the explanation is complicated. He's her brother. There's a wedding photo somewhere of the two of us, arms around each other, holding drivers like we were already old friends. Nobody in that photo could have told you it would end up feeling like a chore fifteen years on.

I've thought seriously, more than once, about just stopping. Cutting someone from your regular game is a real option when the person is a friend you found on your own — you drift, you stop texting back, nobody has to say anything ugly out loud. It's a different math entirely when the guy shows up to your kid's birthday party. There's no clean exit from a brother-in-law. He'll be at the table in November whether we played golf together in October or not, and a version of me that stopped inviting him would have to explain that absence to my wife, who loves her brother in a way that has nothing to do with how he behaves on a golf course.

So I've landed somewhere unsatisfying, which is probably the honest ending here rather than the tidy one. I still play with Gary a handful of times a year. I've gotten better at not internalizing the commentary — a hedge phrase and a change of subject does more work than I expected it would. I've also gotten better at scheduling my real golf, the Saturday-morning kind with the guys I actually chose, on different days than the Gary rounds, so the two don't blur into the same category of "golf" in my head. One replenishes something. The other is closer to a family obligation wearing golf clothes.

Personality clashes inside a group usually get written about as something you solve — a conversation, a boundary, a clearing of the air. I don't think every version of this problem has that ending available to it. Some guys you're stuck with the way you're stuck with certain kinds of weather. You dress for it. You stop expecting the round to feel the way it feels with people you'd have picked yourself, and once you stop expecting that, it gets easier to just play the golf and let the rest of it roll off.

I make my foursome better most Saturdays without much effort, because most Saturdays I'm playing with guys who make it easy to be the version of myself I like. Gary's rounds are the ones where I have to actually try at that — where being decent company is a choice I make on purpose instead of something that just happens. I used to think that made those rounds worse. Lately I think it might be the closest thing I have to practice.

He texted last week about a Saturday in three weeks. I said yes before I'd fully thought it through, which is either progress or exactly the same pattern it's always been. Probably both. I'm not sure this one ever resolves clean. I've just gotten better at playing it anyway.