Golf is deceitful above all things. It hovers over your late 20s, shaking its head as terms like “shin splints” and “plantar fasciitis” filter into your vocabulary. When the chubby ex-frat boys who flock to the Y.M.C.A. basketball courts after market close make fun of your “old-man moves,” golf clears its throat and lets loose a short, condescending whistle. And when the litany of bodily ailments has grown long enough but you haven’t quite accepted the inevitable, golf sidles up next to you with a pamphlet fit for a pyramid scheme and a reassuring smile. Life is long, golf says. Forget the body’s betrayals; golf is a game of the mind.

My first sustained encounter with golf came three months ago. I had just started a new job in a new city, where my only friend was a fellow gambler who once took me for $2,500 in Scrabble. This friend plays only golf now, which meant that if I ever wanted to recoup my debt, I had to play golf, too.

Honestly, I assumed I would be a natural. I am not a coordinated man, but I have an unusual tolerance for pain. If there were a sport in which the athlete moved a stack of cinder blocks across a field while listening to a podcast, I might have been able to ride the pine for a minor-league team. I won my college pub’s corned-beef-eating contest. I can stand in freezing-cold water for long periods. I know a few mantras and spent my early 20s stinking of cheap incense, on a doomed path to enlightenment or, at least, something that looked like it. Novelists, whether Wodehouse or Updike, taught me that the best golfer is a contented, quasi-Zen idiot who blissfully ignores the game’s myriad mental anguishes: the shorted putts, the drives that hook into the trees — which, when you watch them, make you feel as if you’ve been kicked in the groin if your groin were in your brain. The model golfer best exemplified by Chevy Chase in “Caddyshack,” in which he walks the course barefoot and talks about Basho, gave me the confidence that, with time, I could at least keep up with my more athletically talented acquaintances.

It didn’t start off so bad. After work and on weekends, my friend and I would drive out to the city’s cheapest courses, where, surrounded by overgrown willow trees and the kindly septuagenarians of the Pacific Northwest, I would hack my way from rough to trap to adjacent fairway. Every time I went out, I noticed some small improvement, however fleeting. On an unusually sunny day in April, I finally had a breakthrough: Every club felt light in my hands, and half of my shots flew straight and true. By the end of the round, I had clawed back $250 of my Scrabble debt from my friend, who accused me of hustling him. The next day, hoping to build success upon success, I drove to the practice range.