The First Time I Played as a Random

by Johnny
(golfeaser.com)

The starter looked at my name on the sheet, looked at the two open spots in a threesome teeing off in eleven minutes, and said the word that still makes me a little nervous fifteen years later: "You're a random today."

I'd booked online the night before, alone, because my regular group had a wedding and a work trip and a sick kid between the three of them, and I had a Saturday morning with nothing in it and a golf itch that wasn't going to scratch itself. I hadn't thought hard about what "single golfer, any time" actually meant in practice. It meant this: three strangers, standing on the first tee, about to spend four hours together, and me walking up to introduce myself into a conversation that had clearly already been going for the length of the parking lot.

Two of them were easy — an older guy named Carl and his son-in-law, both immediately friendly in the specific way people are when they're relieved you're not going to be a problem. The third guy shook my hand, said his name, and then didn't say much else for the first three holes. Not rude, exactly. Just closed. I remember standing over my tee shot on the second hole acutely aware that a stranger was watching me swing and had already formed some opinion about it, and having absolutely no idea what that opinion was.

First-tee nerves are one thing when it's your own group watching, guys who've seen you shank one before and will see you shank one again. They're a different animal entirely when the whole foursome is new information to each other. I hit that second tee shot thin, watched it skitter about ninety yards, and braced for a reaction that never came. Carl just said "get the next one" and moved on, and something in my shoulders came down about an inch.

By the turn, the quiet guy had a name — Ron — and a story, which came out sideways over the next few holes the way stories do with strangers: recently divorced, playing more golf than he used to because Saturdays had gone from full to empty and golf was filling some of the emptier hours. He wasn't telling me this to bond. He was just talking, the way you talk to someone you'll probably never see again, with a kind of honesty that's actually easier with a stranger than a friend. I've thought about that a lot since — how getting paired with randoms sometimes gets you closer to the truth of a guy in four hours than you'd get from your own group in four years, precisely because there's no history to protect and no reputation to manage.

Somewhere around the fourteenth hole, Ron made a putt he clearly wasn't expecting to make, some fifteen-footer that curled in from the fringe, and instead of the muted nod he'd been giving good shots all day, he actually yelled. Genuinely yelled, arms up, the kind of reaction you only get from someone who needed that putt for reasons that had nothing to do with the scorecard. Carl and his son-in-law and I all clapped like it was our own putt, because by then it kind of was.

We finished the round, shook hands in the parking lot, and I never saw any of them again. I don't have Ron's last name. I couldn't tell you what car he drove. But I think about that round more than I think about plenty of rounds with guys I've known for a decade, because it taught me something my regular Saturdays never had a reason to teach me: that showing up somewhere new as the unknown quantity is its own kind of golf, one where you're not performing a version of yourself anyone already expects. You're just a guy, on a Tuesday-morning tee sheet or a Saturday-afternoon one, finding out in real time whether four strangers can turn into four holes' worth of company.

I still book as a random every so often, usually on a Saturday when my regular group can't make it and I'd rather play with somebody than play alone. It never quite recreates that first time. But every so often there's another Ron out there, quiet on the first tee and yelling by the fourteenth, and I'm just glad the starter put me in his group instead of sending me out by myself.