The Buddy Who Melts Down on the Back Nine

by Johnny
(golfeaser.com)

Lou is the funniest guy in our group for nine holes a round, and then something switches off in him right around the turn, and for the back nine you learn to just get out of the way.

It's been true for as long as I've known him, which is going on eight years now. Front nine Lou will do a full impression of the club pro's putting stance, unprompted, mid-round, well enough that you have to back off your own putt because you're laughing too hard to line it up. He'll invent a nickname for a tree that ate somebody's drive and use it for the rest of the round like the tree has always had that name. He is, genuinely, a big part of why Saturdays with this group are worth getting up early for.

Then we make the turn, and somewhere between the ninth green and the tenth tee, a different guy shows up wearing Lou's shirt.

The first time I saw it happen, I thought something specific had set him off — a bad shot, a bad break, a call he'd taken at the turn. I've since watched it happen enough times to know it isn't tied to any one trigger. He can be playing well on the back and still go quiet. He can hit a great tee shot on 10 and still not say a word for the next four holes. Whatever switches, it isn't about the golf, or not only about the golf. Dave has a theory that it's a work-week thing finally catching up with him once the front-nine adrenaline wears off. Could be. None of us have ever actually asked him, which says something about all of us.

What you notice, once you've played enough rounds with someone like this, isn't the silence itself — it's the specific shape of it. Lou doesn't get short with anyone. He doesn't slam clubs or mutter under his breath the way some guys do when the round turns. He just goes still, answers in single words, and starts walking a half-step ahead of the cart instead of riding in it. Reading a genuine meltdown correctly matters here, because Lou's version doesn't look like anger from the outside. It looks like someone quietly leaving the round early while still physically standing in it.

For a while, the group's collective strategy was to try to cheer him up, which I now understand was almost exactly the wrong move. Somebody would crack a joke, reaching for the front-nine version of Lou, and it would land in dead air and make the whole thing more awkward instead of less. Tommy tried once, on a particularly quiet back nine, to directly ask if everything was okay, and got a "yeah, fine, just tired" that closed the conversation as firmly as a door.

What actually works, as far as any of us have figured out, is closer to nothing. We stopped performing for him on the back nine. We let the quiet exist instead of trying to fill it, and somewhere around the 16th or 17th hole, more often than not, Lou comes back on his own — cracks a small joke, asks somebody a normal question, and by the 19th hole he's basically himself again, like nothing happened, which as far as he's concerned, nothing did.

I used to find this frustrating in a way I'm slightly embarrassed by now. I wanted my funny friend back on demand, on my schedule, because his front-nine energy was part of what I showed up for. It took longer than it should have to understand that every group carries this kind of asymmetry somewhere — one guy's good days look different from another guy's, and the whole point of a group that's been together this long is that nobody has to perform a consistent version of themselves for four straight hours to stay welcome in it.

Lou doesn't know I've noticed the pattern this closely, and I've never told him. I'm not sure there's anything to tell. He shows up every Saturday he can, he's never once let the back-nine version of himself sour a bet or snap at anybody, and he's still, hole for hole, the best company in the group. I make my foursome better mostly by noticing what a guy needs on a given Saturday and giving him room to need it — and with Lou, what he needs on the back nine turns out to be exactly nothing at all. Just four guys who don't make him explain the quiet, and a tee time next week that doesn't ask him to be anything other than whatever shows up.